The kids at Borders look exactly like my friends and I did shortly after high school graduation-- old jeans, band t-shirts, dyed black hair, lots of earrings. In a way, it kind of makes me feel like I'm one of them, even though I now rarely wear band shirts outside of the gym. I don't wear jeans anymore either, but that's mostly because Gap jeans rip in the wash after six months and I have yet to find a pair that I like enough to buy. Point being, stylistically, misfit teen fashion has changed very little over the past decade or two.
But, back to the kids at Borders. They inspect my items at the checkout the way my friends and I use to inspect the scrawl on binders every first day of school. If we didn't know you, but liked that you wrote "Bikini Kill" in black marker, you would be our new friend.
For the record, I picked up a copy of Rip it up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds and the Spin 20 book for purposes of my thesis and some music magazines for purposes of wanting to read about Goth conventions in Illinois. There's a photo of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's on the cover of the new issue of Spin, which also features said Goth article. The two clerks looked at me and smiled, almost like they didn't expect that I would pick up such things.
"I really like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs," said the girl.
"Yeah, me too." I answered. "Do you have the first EP?"
"Nah, just Fever to Tell."
"You should look for it. There's this song called 'Art Star' that's the best."
I kid you not, "Art Star" remains my favorite Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. I tell everyone with even a remote interest in the band to get it, just so that they can totally freak out over the grindcore guitars and the kind of-sort of hip-hop beat.
"They remind me of Siouxsie and the Banshees," says the girl.
The guy comes in closer at this point. He's wearing a Radiohead shirt and is obviously totally enthralled by talk about bands whose singers dye their hair.
"Oh, yeah, they were one of my favorites when I was growing up," I agree.
"It would have been totally cool to see them play with Robert Smith."
Oh, no, I thought. She doesn't think I'm old enough to have seen them in 1984, does she?
"Yeah, I was kind of too young to see them then. I saw the tour with the Wonderstuff," I say as if everyone should know who the Wonderstuff are when, in fact, hardly anyone does and most of the Siouxsie fans sitting around us at the show looked bored during the set and clueless when Miles dissed on the Farm. "In 1991, no, 1992. Morrissey was 1991."
The girl and the guy both look at me. "No way."
Now, for my thesis, I have had to read anything and everything that pertains to Los Angeles music, starting with the punk era. During the course of this, I have continuously thought about how much I missed. I was born the year punk broke and, needless to say, I never saw Black Flag or the Minutemen. Never went to the Masque or any of the other clubs mentioned outside of the Whiskey and the Troubadour. I was a huge fan of both the Go-Gos and the Bangles, but that's because both of those bands had topped the Billboard charts by the time I entered elementary school. Even with the bands that I did eventually see, there was always some sense of regret that I never got to be a part of the heydey. I never even heard of Siouxsie and the Banshees until 1986 or 1987 and the first album of theirs that I bought was Peepshow. I saw Morrissey on his first US solo tour, but completely missed the Smiths. So, the whole notion that the kids at the bookstore might look at me like I got to see something they were far too young to catch is just bizarre, like being stuck in the middle of two generations and never feeling sure of where you belong.