Mostly for ButterflyEffect
Alright, god dammit. Yeah, I saw Jawbreaker at the beginning of the week. They still kick-ass live and played all the hits except for Chesterfield King. It was an amazing moment, not as transcendent as when I finally saw Yo La Tengo where I did actually cry, but man, who the fuck am I to have thought I would ever see Jawbreaker, a band who broke up when I was barely starting school?
Music as an emotional carrier, a reminder of who you were. I'm realizing this is true. I was texting kleinbl00 about this show a bit, because I have a really hard time with the punk scene and in general, the music thing. And I think that's because I no longer belong to it. That's a thought that has taken too long to reconcile, but there is an undeniable sensation I haven't felt (certain exceptions, such as the Yo La Tengo show, or finally seeing Belle and Sebastian live) that I don't feel anymore. It's the love of the new band, the new lyric you hadn't caught before, the extension of yourself through somebody else' song. The community all struggling against themselves and trying to make sense of it while arguing over the better punk scene.
It's not me anymore.
It extends beyond that, and tacocat touches upon this...the extreme feelings of the late-teens through early 20's just aren't there anymore (edit: I don't even think they can be called extreme, but they've certainly been dulled. It makes me a bit sad, really). I don't feel the love I felt for the long-term girlfriend I had in college, I don't get the butterflies in the stomach when meeting new people or seeing somebody interesting, or a nervous feeling of going to a concert and knowing all your friends are there. It's almost as if a lot of these things have been numbed, and here I am trying to desensitize through the mountains and ever-greater challenges. But it never truly replicates those feelings, both in good and bad ways. There's a great The Mountain Goats interview that touches on these topics, as well.
- One thing you can do with the stuff you used to be into is to ask yourself, "What was in there for me? What was it about that that called to me then?" Once you have a better view of who you were then — why did you like it?
The view of who I was in the past, and who I am in the current, are amazingly different. There was a thought in my mind during that Jawbreaker set: I Don't Want to be the Sad Guy Anymore. Which, I'm not, in the current, but when all this music, all these much stronger emotions were being felt, I was very much that person.
I almost shaved my beard off the very next day.
- or a nervous feeling of going to a concert and knowing all your friends are there.
I don't think you even understand what a gobsmackingly amazing statement this is to me.
If you were into industrial music in rural America before the advent of the Internet, you were alone. It was you, it was a friend or two, and it was the vast wasteland. You could drive a thousand miles to Dallas and buy a Revolting Cocks shirt and know when you got home, it'd be the only one within a thousand miles. You could go to the music store and leaf through the catalog and order music and know that you might like it if it were on Wax Trax or Nettwerk but you'd never know if it was any good until it got there. True story - we were tormented by a guy named Scott two years older than us. Scott got a really bad haircut his senior year. And it wasn't until I finally tracked down a VHS copy of Skinny Puppy's Ain't It Dead Yet? concert video that I learned Scott had Nivek Ogre's haircut.
We were so alone we didn't even know we were together. Holy fuck what might have changed about my life had our signaling not been so impossibly obscure. I had (still have) a leather jacket with a giant airbrushed Skinny Puppy logo on the back, and a giant airbrushed Sepultura logo on the sleeve... and I had to move to Washington before anybody but my two close friends recognized either one.
Gonna be honest: I relate to exactly zero aspects of this cartoon. I went and saw Severed Heads a couple months ago. First tour since 1992. They were opening for Front 242. They come out about every ten years or so. And despite hating Los Angeles, I was fucking HOME. These were my people. We were all older, we were all grayer, we all knew better, and we didn't give a fuck. None of us were mourning the old days, all of us were celebrating the fact that the fuckin' leather still fits. That the reubinesque chick in too much eyeliner is still eyeing you. That fuckin'A, New Rock Boots are still the shit.
And fuckin' hell if 25-years-ago me heard advice from now-me, he'd be stoked that somebody gave a shit. We were so alone.
And it still brings us together.
Punk? Punk is transitional. You can no more relive Punk Rock than you can reread Catcher in the Rye.
- Trying to signal that I belonged, yet terrified that people would find out how badly I wanted to belong.
It's not often someone sums up one's entire life in a single sentence.
I have paragraphs of things to say to this post but it'll have to wait until I'm at a computer. Thanks for the shout out, bfv. That hit a lot of emotions and thoughts.