Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Angst

I'm not carrying anything from my teen or pre-teen years. I feel I'm a minority in this. I had problems, of course, when I was growing up, since everyone has problems at all times of their lives, but nothing I'm still carrying with me. Basically, when I look back now, it feels that I had no problems at all. I don't feel I had any real problems until I became an adult. And I am still carrying some things from my earlier adult years, but I imagine those will go away before too long to make way for new ones. But, no, I don't really even feel there was anything from my youth to get over. It was all pretty nice.

So maybe that's why I don't like rock music. I do think lots of it is immature. I feel this way about a lot of stuff, though: that few things are adult. Lots of adult moviemakers, for example, seem to be re-treading their teen or college years. I know some of them are made for that audience, but many are not. And even the movies "about" adults are about what I consider immature adults.

So take like The Who (just to make Tommy want to write more): when I listen to it, I think it's trying to get at the "big problems, deep stuff," but that it's not. It's presenting it as if it is, like in the Tommy album. To me, even the stuff that Pete Townshend sings about in his solo career (or at least what I know of it) seems like stuff that people should have figured out and been over by, say, age 17.

But take like The Beatles: I think they were pretty adult. I think they covered deep stuff without blinking, not making a big show of it. George and (less so) John's solo stuff was like this too. Even their early stuff about boys and girls had a certain maturity to it. Once again, The Beatles win.

So the stuff I like is either "adult" or "candy." In the case of Merritt, both. Adult music is mature, and candy music isn't but it knows that it isn't: therefore it's not like immature rock music trying to sound mature while not being mature at all. I like the honesty of candy music. This is why I can like Destiny's Child better than Pink Floyd.

Maybe nothing traumatic happened to me when I was young, and that's all it is. Maybe more people have traumatic childhoods and teen years. I'm a lucky baaaa.

Rusty.

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