I hate punk rock.
Actually, that’s not true; I kind of like punk rock, sometimes. What I hate are people who love punk rock. There has never been a genre of anything that has made more people confused about what art is capable of doing, and they all refuse to shut up about it.
A few years ago, one of my favorite humans of all time died from bone cancer. A few hours after the funeral, I found myself in a conversation with someone who was as depressed as I was and almost as drunk. But—in order to avoid talking about our friend, probably—we started talking about pop music, and this guy kept saying, “Punk rock saved my life.” He said it like four times in ten minutes. “When I was in high school,” he insisted, “punk totally saved my life. If not for that music, I wouldn’t be here today. Punk rock saved my life, man.”
I have heard those exact words said thousands of times by hundreds of people, and none of them are ever joking. They exist in a culture of certainty. They want to believe what they are saying so much. They want to believe that this sentiment is literally true. And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.