social distortions / halloween parade
I went to the first punk / hardcore / whatever people want to argue about on forums and call it or whatever show tonight that I had been to in at least a decade. Going made me realize some things about not only the show and the groups of people there, but also about myself. I will start out by saying that I have been listening to punk music, like many others, since I was a teenager. One day in my algebra class in my freshman year of high school, I borrowed a friend’s iPod nano and she had Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP uploaded. I had been into Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, and had read about how much he liked that band so I listened to the whole thing (it’s only four short songs long), and I was instantly changed. Or at least I thought I was. I was already reading Salinger and Kerouac by this point, rebelling against the tame and seemingly suffocating world that I lived in, made up of endless suburbs, standardized testing, and a Southern Baptist community that I had been in since birth...