After it happened I spent a whole hour of Bio drawing out the Green Day logo, painstakingly true to the cover of Dookie, on the re-purposed brown paper bag that covered my 18-pound textbook. By lunch I was self-conscious and added a heart-shaped Smashing Pumpkins logo, along with Pearl Jam, Nirvana (Unplugged had just been put in circulation as a cassette bootleg, allegedly from Europe, by Mike Harris), Weezer and I’m pretty sure Screaming Trees. Holy shit was I proud of that book. In my heart I was sure that nobody had ever copied logos so exactly, ever before, making me the world’s (or at least the school’s) most authentic grassroots marketer of MTV-brand not-give-a-fuck-ness.

(Oh man, I’m no artist, but I used to draw the logos to most of these bands on my binders. It made me feel so cool.)

Anyway, because of all that run-on above, not only can I not bash the Green Day musical (no matter how hard it begs), but I also can’t for the life of me think of what it is you talk about when you talk about “rock.”

Maybe that is the whole honeypot of being a teenager. Maybe rock ‘n roll is. All that beautiful, blinding, self-serving ignorance where, for a hot zitty crotch-juicing minute, the world is completely yours.

1 year ago · 0 notes