I feel ya, ya gotta push through

Check out the original New Abrasions, available digital and on cassette tape!

#OnAmpwall

ampwall.com/a/receive/me...

🥰🥰🥰

Maybe if I get the SeatGeek I'll have a web site or a plastic box with a bunch of controls on it, and like e.g. if I turn one of the knobs up all the way then it'll buy 127 XBoxes or jars of pickles or packages of adult diapers from amazon?

But then the first made-up-word-plus-either-plural-noun-or-verb throws the whole thing into fucking chaos. What the fuck is going on. Is there a thing called SeatGeek that has some knobs and dials, which buy a bunch of shit for you or something? Or does SeatGeek exert control over... what? Man...

Damn this is tough. So... "spend like a rock star" seems common enough, maybe we can use that as a starting point.

So then we can read fwd from there: "spend like a rock star with Brex." And we see the made up word on a credit card, so ok. "Get the credit card and use it a lot you fuckin idiot." ✅

Example 2: I will write about having no new favorite albums later because I hafta do some other stuff now. (Spoiler alert, it's my fault, not the music's fault.)

Still, we all want those lightning moments of hearing something and being like "omg THIS! wtf!" But that's a real elusive thing, the same way clicking with someone IRL is rare.

So of course it's no wonder I didn't find it in on some silly corporate phone app. Hearing something in your headphones is not the same as time spent living with that thing.

I realized that in the group chat, the itch I was trying to scratch was for that long-term relationship with music, whether personal or more broadly cultural.

Anyway I was never a crusty kid, but I have a lot of memories attached to Choking Victim. Hearing them with my high school friends as an intro to non-radio punk, learning to play their songs, seeing em on tour. Great memories, and when I say I listen to this band, these memories are what I think of.

Or a friend telling me recently about being at a show and seeing some HC dudes fight with some death metal dudes because of their diff pit etiquette. I see these as real lifestyle & worldview differences coming to a head, not just a narcissism of minor differences (tho maybe there's that too).

This dynamic bears out even today. Just a couple months ago I saw a fight break out at a black metal show when these two crusties showed up and were doing the aggro arm-wavey dances (I know these dances have like five different names, whatever).

We all came to realize that wasn’t true, of course - that memorizing band names didn’t equate to real lived experience in the subcultures to which those bands belonged, that there’s oftentimes a certain tribalism about “listening to” this or that. Especially in the underground.

Later on I thought back to the Napster days, when the boundaries between mainstream and underground music first started bending & shifting. “Instant access to all the music in the world, now everyone’s an expert,” as the narrative went.