Spoon - Small Stakes

Is this a great corner or what?

You know what's really, really odd? How many 16 year old kids are wandering around trying to live in MY teen years. Fuck them! I mean, hey, some of these kids are nice, but how weird is it to see teenyboppers with Robert Smith on their chests and saying how much they love Joy Division and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry? It's really werid and it's really fucked. When I was 16 I certainly wasn't wearing Bob Dylan or Beatles t-shirts. I was into Jam, Clash, XTC, Joy Division, Stranglers, 999, and on and on. Stuff that was new then. I am not a baby boomer, and I am not laying claim to "my generation" stuff like the boomers did. It's just that an integral part of being a teen has historically been an absorption into all that counted as "NOW" and these kids are growing up looking to my teen years rather than looking to themselves. This is Bad. What does that say about the quality of culture today? Funny thing is that there's a lot of great music NOW out there. Shit. How lame can you get? In high school we were mods but we weren't mostly listening to Who and Faces... we were mostly listening to Jam and Specials and Beat,etc... oh, whatever.

Listen, 16 year olds out there! Stop trying to live my teen life! Cut yourself to music that's new and belongs to you. Get your piercings and your tattoos and feel suicidal listening to your own damn tunes! I was there in the 80s! It started good and then it went really bad! It's not worth emulating, let alone worshipping.

It's not like I've been in a funk about gettting older and seeing how a lot of kids have the same tastes in movies and music as I do. It's not like this just brings home how useless it is to try to pin one's identity on one's taste in consumables like food or music or books or movies. It's what we PRODUCE that matters and I haven't produced anything for ages. But that's nothing to do with it, you hear?

The kids today are so fucking lost and so fucking conformist even in their indiscretions. It's fucking sad. Soon the ultimate outsider will be the kid who is content to be happy and do alright in their own skin. Damn, we're all messed up. And I haven't changed since I was 16. Good or sad? Could go either way. Or the answers could be two sides of a razor and I could get split down the middle.