HIGH SCHOOL NEVER ENDS (or why I like Slayer and Geto Boys over Animal Collective)

By Nedbones
Illustration by Tim Dorsey

What happened? How did I become alienated from a scene that punk rock helped create? I don’t get the fashion, all the bands sound the same, and don’t get me started on the lyrics. (Let’s just say, Bob Dylan would go “I don’t understand these lyrics”) Even though Fat Mike from NOFX wrote “The Separation Between Church and Skate”, about how punk rock was becoming safe, to me it still can be applied to indie-rock and the scene today. What punk stood for-- dissent, anti-authority, anti- conformity, individualism, and thinking for yourself-- has been replaced with noodley guitars, horrible metaphors of emotions, rehashed 70’s and 80’s sound (not to mention fashion and drugs) and worst of all, dance music. Indie music nowadays sounds like that mind numbing modern rock, TRL bullshit that made me like punk to begin with. Every show is the same. First some rip off of a Joy Division riff, then dancey drums, and some chant of “yeah” and finally getting the audience to clap hands in unison.
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