Everything Counts

This is the first blog. The very first blog. I needed to start doing this, basically, because  I want to talk about music and other thing that fall into the category of that which I love, and this is the modern way to do such things. I have a jumbled brain full of media that I have stored up over time like a little chipmunk with its mouth full of food, never knowing when to swallow it. Or spit it out. RockNRollHighSchool is my spitcup.  

Right now I am reading Please Kill Me, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, and it's getting me more excited about things that already happened than I ever thought possible. As an oral history, PKM presents the reader with a range of viewpoints excerpted from interviews done mostly in McNeil's Punk Magazine, as well as other publications. It's brilliantly arranged; chronologically grouped by era, leading you through time and telling the stories of the bands that collectively started punk music in New York and the hows, whys and whos of the scene, told through anecdotes of those involved. It makes my heart all atwitter to add the gems which PKM provides to my encyclopedia of useless knowledge. Nico gave Iggy Pop his first case of the clap. The Sex Pistol's song, Pretty Vacant was copied directly from the New York Doll's Blank Generation, after Malcolm McLaren went back to England after managing the Dolls. And so on and so on. Is it weird that this book is changing my life?

I have always been a fan of nostalgic material. When I was a kid I watched Hair and listened to Jimi Hendrix and romanticized on hippiedom, so sure that I was born in the wrong era. I fell for the whole thing so hard. It took me up until I was about 19 or 20 to realize that though the 60's had it's moments, the whole "free love" and "free your mind" axiom was partly a movement and revolution, but also a big excuse for teenagers to dose themselves silly and bang their privates together without feeling remorse due to society's constructs. Fuck the man!! Anyway, even though I am now aware of the tendency for anything that takes a look back on a moment in time to accessorize with rose-colored shades, I still fall for it over and over again. It's hard being a realist and a lover. Please Kill Me is doing it to me again, and forcing me to imagine my own little pseudo- exciting life being retold as an important moment in time to an audience who reveres it as history. 

I wonder what percentage of people who take part in these magic moments in cultural history know its going to matter later. With today's instant celebritizing and the narcissism provided by the internet, mostly anyone can deem themselves noteworthy the night after their photo was taken at a club and posted for the world to see. I'm not criticizing it; its the result of technology meeting the social universe. It just makes me curious about who and what will qualify in significant discourse later. The romantic reminiscent inside of me longs for the far more innocent days of art when fame wasn't at the layman's fingertips and people didn't receive so much feedback on themselves... but then again, there goes my blog.