A thread about music nostalgia! I'm in!by Fussbett 05/12/2009, 11:31pm PDT
Unlike INC I started watching rock music videos immediately and with great interest, so I was scared of a million things before I could understand that grown-ups did a lot of fake stuff: Iron Maiden's stage show, the Thriller video, Black Sabbath t-shirts (they sold their soul for rock and roll?!), and hell even the Grateful Dead logo bothered me a lot (steal my face?!). I could write a book about my childhood fears and devote half of it to music. Here's one chapter:
Venom / Celtic Frost
Once I was nine I figured out that Iron Maiden was silly, and Michael Jackson disowned the Thriller video, so that calmed me down a little bit. However I still thought a handful of metal bands were doing it "for real", because their videos looked like documentary snuff film footage of what is clearly a satanic ritual:
The crowds scared me more than the bands. Why were they so mesmerized? Brainwashed almost! (At 1:22 of the Venom video you can see the singer is wearing a bathing suit). Slayer never scared me because I first saw their album cover in the store and it looked like it was rendered in pencil crayon.
80's Hardcore
By the time I was a teenager I had a PhD in watching music videos, so none of those bands were scary anymore... but how about bands that didn't have videos? When you only see photos, your imagination can really fill in the blanks. Every hardcore live show photograph looked like this:
With flyers like this:
Thank god most of these bands had already broken up because it meant I would never have to make excuses for why I was busy that night, and every night Black Flag played. Hardcore was a mystery to me because it was so hidden, and it had a heavy association with skinheads. Are you too young to remember when skinheads were a thing? Skinheads were the scariest fucking people I could imagine because not only did they look like they wouldn't care about the jail time from beating you to death, but they also were not scared of blacks. Skinheads would wear swastika bomber jackets right on the subway, just waiting for a fight. Worse, one of the mortal skinhead enemies, according to middle school lore, was preppies! That could be any of us! Anyone looked preppy compared to a skinhead for christ's sake! The big urban legend was that skinheads would routinely curbstomp gays downtown... and you could be next! Then 10 years later it shows up in American History X.
...and this leads to GG Allin, who wins the scary contest hands down. You would never want to be within 100 feet of him at any time for fear of bodily harm or being hit with feces or banana covered in feces.
BONUS: The Record Peddler in Toronto.
Everything in this record store was awesomely terrifying, but it culminated in the sales staff. When I was 13 I went there to buy a Lard EP and the clerk demanded I also buy this other 12" single, Down in It, from a brand new band called Nine Inch Nails. It turned out he did me a huge favour, but it was a fear motivated purchase. I was wearing my brightly coloured ski jacket complete with lift ticket on the zipper -- I just wanted to get out before I got curbstomped.
