There was a point in my life that I'd be too embarassed to admit what I'm about to admit. Back in my youth, I was way too concerned about losing punker cred if it were to come out that I wasn't exceptionally well versed in the entire catalog of all the bands a serious punker is supposed to be aware of. Partially because when I was a little shithead and first getting into hardcore the internet was still in it's fledgling stages, and for those of us with AOL and a dialup connection, which, in the mid 90's, was most everyone except super geeks, the internet was primarily useful only for experimenting with cybersex and patiently awaiting the reveal of a nipple as you tried to download the free samples off the playboy site. Come to think of it, cybersex, or "cybering", as the kids called it at the time, is something else that I probably would have been too embarassed to admit to at one point. But you know what, if you were like 13 and talking dirty to strangers who may or may not be hot chicks was a new and exciting thing and you didn't AT LEAST check it out, there's something wrong with you.
The point is, it wasn't like it is now where you can get any record ever made in about three mintues of searching. So instead of hearing every awesome record under the sun, I heard a handful which I fell in love with and can pretty much recite word for word to this day (see: Bad Brains-s/t).
A band that I'd heard when I was younger, but only in snippets due to never owning any of their stuff, was Poison Idea. At some point I got a copy of "Feel the Darkness" on CD, and that ended up getting regular rotation for awhile. I don't think anyone is going to try and debate the merits of that record, or at least not anyone with halfway decent taste. But as great as it is, it's a very different record than "Pick Your King", which, in a typically roundabout fashion, is the reason for this post, and the admission which was alluded to earlier.
Here it is: I never REALLY go into "Pick Your King" until the last few months. Yeah, of course I'd heard the record before, and it's not like I disliked it in the slightest, but for whatever reason it never just kicked me in the stomach until recently. I'm now at the point most kids hit at 17 where I just can't stop listening to it. It's such a perfect record I'm honestly dumbfounded that I haven't tried to whittle a larger hole into it and just take it to bed with me. Not a single throwaway song, and it doesn't let up from start to finish.
I'm not going to go on and on about how great it is because a) pretty much everyone knows that already and b) that's not the point of this. The point is, it's totally sweet finally getting to the age where I give less and less of a flying fuck what anyone thinks of me, least of all a bunch of little asshole punkers who want to call me a poseur because I just got into PYK at 25. One of the few things I'm looking forward to about getting older is that the older I get the less of a fuck I give about other people, and it's going to be awesome when I'm 50 and stop bothering with hassles like "pants" just to appease other people.
Hardcore rules, ok?
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