American culture writing work

Hopper_Accessible.pdf

Home >History homework help >American history homework help >American culture writing work

most tepid, predictable adulteration of Miley's emblem atically p�re

image would be sensational, that it would have the po wer to horrify

us.

Miley's Bangerz-era story is a transformation fantasy built on prox imity to what she was, how we knew her, how fast she went fro':11 supersweet to superfreak, suggesting that, yes, she wa� � aut�ent1c bad girl all along under that darling disguise. Her dnftmg orienta tion from the Mouse mothership is meant to tell us �s much about who she is now as when she cried real tears and writhed nude on a wrecking ball for Richardson's camera. This is her ceremony to show us, whether we want her or not, she belongs to us now.

LOUDER THAN LOVE:

MYTEEN GRUNGE POSERDOM

EMP Conference paper, Spring 2005

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I was not cool. In 1990, I was 14, almost 15, and just entered the ninth grade at the largest high school in Minneapolis and was orbiting somewhere be tween loner dork and amorphous weirdo. My wardrobe consisted of a lot of black clothes, a lot of orange clothes, my mother's busi ness apparel from the '80s; I wore cowboy boots and long, unbelted tunics that made· me look like I was in a cult. I spent a lot of time alone, sewing hats and reading news magazines to keep up on in ternational politics. The music I knew about was from the radio. I had a few tapes I liked: the B -52's Cosmic Thing, Deee-Lite, the first Tracy Chapman album. I mostly listened to the tapes on the week end, when I was delivering my newspaper route, though sometimes I would lay in bed at night and listen to the Tracy Chapman tape over and over and cry a little.

Six weeks after I started high school, I was sitting on the bleachers during freshman gym class, which I was already failing for refusing to dress for class, along with all the other weirdos, who were also refusing gym on principle. Andrew Semans, also of the ninth grade, came and sat next to me and asked, "Are you a punk or a hippie? I can't tell." I told him I liked The Clash, and he started drilling me about a million bands I had never heard. The next day he handed me a cassette tape, a mix made from a very specific subsection of his big brother's record collection. Butthole Surfers, Babes in Toyland, Boredoms, BALL, Big Black, Bongwater on side one; Pussy Galore, Voidoids, Stooges on the flip. By week's end I was a convert and punk-identified.

As punk rock began to ravage and motivate my life, so did my ado lescent hormones. I began to pine for for the attention of punk boys, of which I knew three. One of which was Andrew and we could barely stand one another but were bonded by conversations about Sonic Youth. His friend Ted who wore a Jane's Addiction T-shirt and was on JV bowling; he thought All Shook Down was the best Replacements record-making him a no go. Then there was Andrew

Beccone, who was in the tenth grade, who wasn't so much punk as

he was proactively grunge.

He became my crush by default, by virtue of the fact that he knew my name and he knew who Hüsker Dü was, and at the time that was more than I had going with anyone else. His look was proto grunge,

he wore his hair long and in a middle part, all his jeans were ripped,

he wore a faded Mudhoney Superfuzz BigmuffT-shirt and a flan- nel. He played drums in a cover band of sorts with his college-age brother; they were called Korova Milkbar and their only gigs were

in their basement. Their repertoire read like a best-of Sub Pop sam-

pler: Tad's "Loser," Nirvana's "Lovebuzz" and "Floyd the Barber," a

Soundgarden song, a Screaming Trees song, and they usually closed

their set with a Mudhoney medley that included an infinite version of "In 'n' Out of Grace" that would alternate between the chorus

and long drum solos. Because I "loved" Andrew and wanted him to love me back, and though I was approximately 4 feet tall, had a mouth full of braces and looked as much like a 14-year-old boy as I did a 14-year-old girl, I took the only route available—I became a

grunge devotee.

The process was simple: I made the rounds to every record store

in the ffWin Cities, spending my hard-earned babysitting and pa- per-delivery savings on anything with a Sub Pop logo on it, every re-

lease in multiple formats—Mudhoney, Nirvana, Fluid, Tad, Dwarves, Soundgarden, L7 and Dickless. I saved up $100 for the out-of-print

Sub Pop 100 compilation. I mail-ordered five Mudhoney, two Fluid,

and one Soundgarden shirt and then made my own Nirvana shirt with a Sharpie.

I parted my hair in the middle, ripped holes in the knees of my jeans, scrawled the names of every band I liked on my Chuck Tay- lor high-tops in pen. I am not sure why I thought dressing exactly like Andrew Beccone might lure him to me, but I wanted to show

him we were kindred spirits in the world, toughing out our teenage times with Tad's 8-Way Santa in our Walkmans.

Alas, the pose did not end there. I did things like casually wander

past his classes as they got out, holding nothing but a Mudhoney tape in my hand, as if that was the only supply one needed for ninth grade. I took the same Russian class as him so that I would have

the chance to tell him such things as I was considering getting a tattoo of Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin, "once I got the money to- gether." My project for film class was a documentary on his band, and it was 20 minutes of carefully edited footage of band practices

in his parents' basement, and nothing but (I got a C-). I went to see

Fluid twice that year, despite hating them, in hopes of seeing him at the show. When I saw him that following Monday, as I was artfully lingering outside his AP English class, I said "I figured I would have seen you at the show last night," he told me he was no longer into Fluid. I was crushed. I had spent dozens of hours listening to their

records—which I found to be unbearable—fantasizing and prepping

for conversations about Fluid minutiae that we would one day have.

All soul soon left my pose. My obsession with detail slipped. I was coming to the agonizing conclusion that all of this, my teen-girl masking, was in vain. I'd dedicated several months and several hun-

dred dollars on trying to cultivate a connection that was never going

to be. Still, I wasn't quite ready to give up the masquerade.

At the end of the school year, I managed to get invited to a party

where all three of the school's grunge cover bands were playing. I

would soon have the chance to see my crush-object one last time before the span of summer. I went to the party wearing a Sound-

garden Louder Than Love T-shirt, which I had purchased for the oc-

casion. I slouched up against a wall, peacocking my ennui, sipping a Miller Lite and pretending to be way into that, too. I was stand- ing next to Andrew's best friend, Mike, who was setting up a bass rig. I ventured to ask him what was this awesome record we were listening to? He gawked at me, appalled, "Uh? Louder Than Love?" I scrambled, mortified, and insisted I was too wasted to recognize

Soundgarden, the most distinctive band of the grunge genre.

I then had the torturous experience of then watching Mike walk

over to Andrew and relay this anecdote and then Andrew look to- wards me and snicker. I left the party, walked home and cried my- self to sleep.

Less than a month later, I picked up a compilation called Kill Rock

Stars. While my purchase was initially fueled by the inclusion of Nirvana and Melvins tracks, both potential conversation topics

with Andrew, but something entirely different happened when