I just finished Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City. Like his five other books, I loved it. Also like all of his other books, he takes a very personal approach to pop culture analysis. In this one, he mounts a defense for 1980s metal music he grew up listening to. Over the course of the book, he examines what exactly it was about this music that appealed to a teenager in a tiny North Dakota town. While your interpretation of his opinions about Poison and Guns n’ Roses will certainly be affected by how much you already like those bands, there is one point in the book that it’s hard to disagree with: the music you loved when you first started really listening to music (no matter how uncool and widely ridiculed it may be now) is the music you will always love.
Klosterman claims that he still loves drinking alone in his apartment and rocking out to Van Halen much the way he did when he was a lot younger. This is an idea that I can relate to completely. I grew up listening to the radio back when the radio played (arguably) decent music. Outside of the Beatles, the first bands I really loved were blink-182, Third Eye Blind, Everclear, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, the Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Weezer, Ben Folds, Better Than Ezra, Goo Goo Dolls, and Dashboard Confessional. While they have released CDs since I’ve been in college, I don’t love those anywhere near as much as I love the ones I listened to in high school. Songs by these bands still clog my iPod and I still listen to them all the way through whenever the shuffle setting chooses one.
Now, I realize that most of these bands are not at all cool to listen to now (or even then, really), but I don’t give a shit. I like a lot of much cooler indie bands now and that’s generally what I listen to now. However, I doubt that many of these new bands will be in rotation anywhere near as long as the ones I’ve mentioned above. I think this is because adolescence is so tumultuous in its very nature and so filled with up and downswings of emotion that music taps into that. I can listen to Jimmy Eat World’s “A Praise Chorus” and immediately be transported back to being 16 with my first real, long term girlfriend. Now that I’m an “adult,” I don’t have those extremes. While I still love discovering new music, I hate to say that all of these new bands will be unable to match the love I have for those first bands. I don’t care how ridiculously emo many of Dashboard Confessional’s songs sound now, I’ll always listen to “Screaming Infidelities,” without skipping to the next song before it’s done.
