Day 290: Radicals

Uhhh. Any words? I mean. No. Not really. What about these? These are words. I feel all gummed up. That’s fine. Be gummed then buddy. You be good and gummed. What’s true is right. What’s right is true.

Sat at the top of this empty house listening to punk rock, Social Distortion, Screeching Weasel, Rancid; all lightly crunching treble-heavy guitar and rigid mohawks, the promise of California. Faded black denim, the rhythmic thunk of skateboard wheels spinning on their bearings. Tattoos old as time. Party piercings. Taco stands and tartan. Snarling masculinity swirling into vulnerable femininity. Docs pointed inwards. Les Pauls slung way low. The unrefined energy, loose, ricocheting off crumbling apartment walls, in those endless summer years before the archetypes were honed, processed, packaged and sold, before people with haircuts who work in advertising and don’t know how to love figured the code to translate the scene into money. Before Tom and Mark. Before New Found Glory. Before I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare. Before the skin was stripped and the meat scooped out and the carcass flung in the bushes to rot. And out came the wolves.

But those riffs spat from the 90s still whisper something beneath their distortion to me, something about freedom and authenticity and joy. On cold nights sat at the top of an empty house sometimes all you want is three chords and the truth.

With the music execution and the talk of revolution, it bleeds in me, and it goes...

......

Music: Roots Radicals, Rancid.