New Posting!!!!

So as all of you know by now I'm back in the US from my journey. I'm living in DC and looking for real work living with friends. Right now I have a job at Philadelphia Water Ice Factory, which sucks, but it allows me to make some money while I live rent-free with my friends. It's an easy job, even though my boss is an ass.

Anyway, this is a posting about my life, about music, about my life as a fan of punk rock music. It was inspired by two things. Number one was seeing a band play at the Red and the Black tonight, the other was watching the DVD of Instrument, the Fugazi documentary.

Seeing the show was a nice, unexpected event tonight. I was working and I sold some ice to a few dudes, one of which complimented my Social Distortion t-shirt. I decided to talk to them, and I saw a bunch of people moving music equipment into the bar a few doors down. Turns out the guys who bought my ice are a band from Boston called the Main Drag, and they were playing at the Red and the Black. They were cool and they put me on the guestlist for the show because they had no one to put on it. We talked about music and whatnot, and I told them I'd check out the show.

So, after my shift I went back to the house, showered and ate, and I went over to the show. They were really good, loud indie rock that actually managed to rock, which is a rarity in the genre these days. I talked to them after the show, all cool guys and whatnot and I came back here.

Then I watched the Fugazi DVD and it was just really inspiring that these four guys in Fugazi have managed to have a career spanning fifteen years, a great deal of influence, a fantastic ethic within their work, and more importantly, an incredible musical legacy.

My point is, I'm a musican and a music fan, and those two things will always define me more than where I am or what my job is or how I vote or my beliefs about religion or politics or anything. But I ask myself a lot of questions regarding my musical taste.

I've been a fan of punk music, I suppose, since I first heard the word and started hearing bands like Nirvana and Green Day. The years went by since those discoveries and I got into a little bit of everything, music-wise, and I started to discover the most important bands in punk rock, from the Clash's London Calling record to my recent days as a vinyl snob, listening to the New Day Rising LP by the great Husker Du. I've been listening to music like this since I was around 8 years old and I'm now 23.

I've noticed something about a lot of people who spent a great deal of time listening to punk rock. A lot of them start to move away from that style of music and start listening to indie rock or indie pop or post rock or something that just sounds pretentious and sounds like they're thinking way too hard about what they're doing. I'm friends with lots of people who were into punk rock but have moved on to Radiohead. And while most people here would say "Nothing against Radiohead but..." I'm going to go right ahead and say that I don't give half a flying shit about Thom Yorke or his crew of douchebags. That music bores me.

Having gone to a prestigious institution of higher learning filled with hyperintelligent people who listen to this seemingly hyperintelligent independent music I feel like I'm supposed to feel inferior for liking something as "base" or "simple" as punk rock, that the music is in some way the music of 16-year-old kids living in the suburbs and they can't possibly be mature or smart enough to understand the deeper meaning behind Sufjan Stevens' compositions. What, because I went to college I automatically have to start listening to some boring overthought crap? Or because I listen to punk rock I am not a thinking, intelligent person? Piss off, go wash your girls' jeans and white belt.

Greg Ginn from Black Flag has a degree in Economics, Greg Graffin from Bad Religion has a Ph.D. and teaches at Cornell (I think), and Dan Yemin from Lifetime/Kid Dynamite/Paint it Black is a child psychologist. This isn't about a pissing contest between the brains of punks vs. indie kids. Actually I'm totally sidetracked now.

The truth is that I'm always going to be into punk rock. For me it's rock and roll stripped down to just writing good songs and playing what you feel in the most direct way possible. Music for me, regardless of how much I think about it individually, is not about thinking. It's about feeling, and connecting to a song based on gut reaction. Rock and roll is a dirty thing, it appeals to the visceral, not the cerebral. Punk rock, more than any subgenre, hits me in the gut, musically and lyrically. There is something about the sound of Bob Mould's guitar playing on "Chartered Trips" that manages to raise me from a negative state of mind, and the singing of Blake Schwarzenbach appeals to me BECAUSE it is imperfect, scratchy and ugly. More importantly, his voice is honest. He is not covering it up with a fake pretty voice or digitally processing it. I hear a vocal line and immediately know that it's Blake.

Lyrically, punk rock is about as direct as it gets. It's storytelling, it's gut-level poetry and there's no ambiguity about the content. This is important to me, because it shows that whoever writes those lyrics knows that life doesn't need to be dressed up in metaphors about floating in space.

Even when it comes to music I'm hearing for the firs time, I almost always find myself shaken by a good punk band than a good post-rock band or a good indie-pop band or a good indie-rock band. I'm always going to be open to hearing new, different music, but I can almost guarantee that punk rock, in any form, is going to be what I go back to. I was never the punk with the tall mohawk or green hair and I never will be, and that's not what's important. I define my life based on the true tenets of punk rock, and that is doing my thing how I see fit and being true to who I am and how I feel. When it comes to music I will not be declared less "punk" because I prefer Fugazi to Minor Threat (related bands) or Jawbreaker to Oxymoron. They can judge me for those beliefs, but I know that the truth is that by sticking to MY ideals as opposed to the ideals of some jackass in a Casualties t-shirt, I will forever be more of a punk than that person. As long as I am still moved to the core by four distorted chords and an honest, unaffected shout, I consider myself a punk rocker, and I have never attempted nor do I plan on forcing myself to listen to any other music to conform to any hipster trend that says that it's cool to put a Moog on a record or write a series of albums named after places and record an overblown symphony fit for overly educated college kids who shop at American Apparel.

A lot of the stuff in question I haven't listened to, and I don't care if I ever do or not. I've listened to the Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Pavement, the Mars Volta, Rilo Kiley, lots of bands like that. Those bands are not the bands I turn to when I'm feeling down, those bands didn't get me through high school and college. I got through my times, good and bad, with bands like Jawbreaker, Husker Du, Hot Water Music, Face to Face and others. They're the bands I listened to years ago, they're the bands I listen to now, and they're the bands I WILL listen to. And there are bands I've recently discovered that are still vital, like the Gaslight Anthem, Against Me! (less recently discovered), Smoke Or Fire, the Lawrence Arms, Dillinger Four, the Loved Ones, Thorns of Life and a whole mess of others, and these bands make me feel the same way that Jawbreaker and Husker Du make me feel.

Call me unhip if you want, but I never said I was hip.