This book has been on my shelf for years, but jumped up to the top of the heap with the unexpected passing of David Bowie at the start of this year. That period, musically speaking, has always been pretty interesting. It saw the birth of lots of musical movements. But it’s one I didn’t know a whole lot about aside from the explosion of awesome sounds that came from it. The book covers the early careers of Bowie, Pop and Reed starting in the […]
People who weren’t the homecoming royalty and don’t want to be./Anti-cool is its own cool competition.
An impressionable youth of the 1990s loved Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing. It looked and read differently than most of the other books that he owned. The irony of buying an indie punk book in his suburban Barnes & Noble didn’t escape him, but he still enjoyed the book just the same. Fast forward fifteen years of world travel, NPO work, and growing up. A chance reintroduction at a Half-Price Books reunited said youth and said book, and a glorious reunion was had by […]
We Know the Night
Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins
When I hit my formative years, I believe Rollins was mostly in his spoken word phase. I didn’t know anything about Rollins Band or Black Flag yet – I just saw this shirtless old man on mtv, shredded and screaming and intelligent. Most of my brainy musical icons were not aggressive body builders. I can’t imagine Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Buckley stabbing anyone with broken glass. Rollins intrigued. A few years ago, I started reading and listening to longer-form interviews with guys like Rollins, Patton Oswalt, […]
How can you be a teenage misfit when your parents applaud and encourage rebellion?
Nikolaj moves to a newly constructed house in a suburb in one of the counties surrounding Oslo in the early 1970s. His father is one of the architects who planned the area, and is full of dreams about the social opportunities the new affordable housing will mean for families in the area. As it turns out, most of the families who move in stick to a rigid routine of conformity and normality – their children wear the same thing, cut their hair the same way, […]