Punk Rock Improves Lives

It was Christmas during my last year of high school, and since my parents had stopped playing "Guess What Our Son Wants for Christmas" by that point, they usually would take me to the bookstore to pick out something I wanted.  And so off we went to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to get a gift for me.

As I'm perusing the store, I wander over to the section in Barnes and Noble where they have the audio-visual merchandise.  I'm perusing through the selections and I turn up London Calling by the Clash.  But not just any ol' copy of London Calling.  No, this was the 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition, complete with not only the original recording but also the "Vanilla Tapes" (demos recorded in the studio during rehearsals which were apocryphally lost) and a DVD which had a documentary of the making of the album, some promo videos, and also raw footage that had been taken in the studio of the Clash.  All of this for about $20.  I totally ask for this as a Christmas present, and my family and I go to the front counter to pay for it.

For the next few weeks into possibly a couple of months, I listened the hell out of that album.  I'd listen to the original studio cut, I'd listen to the raw demos on the "Vanilla Tapes" CD.  I probably watched the documentary a few times.  But listening to it was such an breath of fresh air for me.  Here's something I can latch onto and understand on an intellectual level and comprehend, something that I didn't think much of the music that the good 95% (and that's a conservative estimate) of the cretins that I shared air space with probably couldn't understand.

Now I didn't go completely off the rails and start pushing safety pins through my cheek or dying my hair green and spiking it because it was stupid to do so, I didn't (and still don't) like the idea of shoving sharp metal objects into my cheek, and quite frankly, it wasn't the point of the music.  The point was just to do what you wanted to do, others be damned.  I learned the lesson of being your own individual, something important for someone who always had difficulty forging through interactions with other people.

It's also given me some sort of determination to forge through life's problems.  The sheer raw energy of the music provides a relieving catharsis for whatever is balled up inside of you.  The irony of having something that sounds more or less like, as Craig Ferguson put it when introducing the Damned on his show, a fight being soothing is quite counter-intuitive.  And yet, listening to The Cramps on full blast with your headphones on sometimes is the best way to sort things out.

And we're talking real punk music here, by the way.  We're not talking about the sissy stuff cranked out by Taking Back Sunday or whatever passes off as "edgy" these days.  I mean, for Chrit's sake, saying that stuff is punk music is like saying Johnny Weir is a professional wrestler.  Listening to that stuff probably won't help much other than make you a terrible human being.

Totally not wrestling, but totally punk rock.

So go out and buy your child a punk rock CD of some sort.  They'll be a better person for it and will brag to their friends about having the coolest parents ever.