A while ago I sat at a bar somewhere in the east village with a friend. The bartender put on some cool ass music and I wanted to know what it was so I asked him. He got all cunty about it and thought I should already who it was (shit was super dry and stripped down, sounded like the band was in the bar and I liked that), so he deferred to my friend and he didn’t know who it was either. After he went through his whole repertoire of shocked and bewildered guffaws he finally relented and told us that it was old Van Morrison. 

This same shit used to happen when I started getting into electronic music. You have to brace yourself for some blowback if someone drops some old Prodigy or Jeff Mills and you just happen to not know what it is but you’re curious cause it’s good, like they are using their “expertise” as a social weapon against someone not cool enough to have heard and retained every record ever made anywhere. 

Indie rock kids are the worst though. Most of the bands are obscure and the whole scene is set up as a pissing contest. If you want to make a million bucks quick make trading cards for indie bands and sell them at SXSW. Just get the yearly lineup, make cards with some sort of bogus stats, put some shit gum in there and make a mint. 

I was on the other end once but this shit is really weird: I was in college briefly and sitting in a dorm room when one of the RAs came by (the one who would later try to have me thrown out for drinking beer in my room - what a bitch). She came in and started saying something about nothing, and before she left she took a look at this HUGE poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall and asked “who is that?” Of course we thought she was joking but she seriously had no idea who Jimi Hendrix was, never heard even one of his songs. Really?? She must have lived in a convent with no radio, tv or cable. I mean, even Amish kids know who Hendrix is before they give it all up after Rumspringa. Crazy.

Tony