“The future’s under fire / The past is gaining ground / A continuous cold war between / My home and my hometown” Which begs the question, was it ever, really?
It rather lies in a fact that resonates, I think, with people of a similar age and background: that most rock music just isn’t revolutionary, or rather, participatory for me anymore. It’s not that I now simply dislike guitar-based music. Regardless of this characterization and identification, my swollen predilection for drum and wire has - crises of identity aside - waned with age, and for a reason. Like all teenagers, I wanted to be different. That is, the supposed agent of an ancient gyration, whose taste and sensibilities exist outside the ordered rigor and craftsmanship of a monolithic “real music.” And so I, disgusted at the stereotype and its applicability or lack thereof, sought refuge in a mastery of an alternate history. I used to be a rockist.Īll this complicated by the fact that I am a biracial African American. That is, a navel-gazing Baby-Boomer retrospective, a hopeless sensibility passed on through the most accessible sources and arbiters of popular music culture, Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All-Time,” etc.
So by the dawn of my adolescence - a time when one is better embroidering a self-concept with all its appropriated and internalized peripherals - I came to imbibe and live through what was readily available outside the nuclear unit: mostly what came in the mail. Beyond the trappings of A/C radio, it was an ocean. Growing up, my family didn’t keep up with music much.
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