Just to clarify (because my post was brazenly unclear), I have ALWAYS liked being the guy who told people about something first. I was using "Float On" as an example of something that I could have been bitter about, but was not. I turned it to my own selfish ends. My point about the dog video was that it was not something I felt nearly as strongly about. AND I could live with it on AC 360 (for some reason) but watching Wolf Blitzer stutter his way through an introduction to it made my stomach turn.
And to be perfectly honest I saw it on "The Daily Dish" which may be the most popular and recognized blog on the web. So its not like i was flipping through obscure youtube videos and happened upon something that was big.
To be clear the indie rock sensibility of keeping something to yourself has never made any sense to me. Like my station manager who saw Wolf Parade in somebody's loft and then got upset when "Apologies to Queen Mary" got a 9.3 on Pitchfork. It drove her to listen to music that would never be widely popular, just for the sake of its tiny possibility of popularity. It's not that what she liked was bad, just that her motives for liking it seemed impure to me. I mean I saw The Creeping Nobodies and thought they were alright, I even interviewed them. But it wasn't an interview that was going to get any traffic for our radio station, or even a band that I felt compelled to make other people like.
I wasn't upset that everyone liked "Float On". I liked that I got credit for something that happened completely independently of me, and that I had nothing to do with. It is very much the same thing as receiving congratulatory calls when the Red Sox won the world series. When you identify yourself very closely to something it causes the people you know to associate you with it, and to perfectly frank, there is something nice about the idea that people are thinking about you when you're not around (which makes me sound like a self-centered prick but it would be worse if i wasn't self aware, i think). To this end, I will predict that "People got a lot of Nerve" by Neko Case, is going to be very popular.
Also, if you think I don't have a filter wait till you see what Zach and Kyle have to say (yes this is coming from a guy who is giving a coffee by coffee tally of his lack of winning a stupid donut, 0-10 by the way).
Finally, to give credit where credit is due, I might never have gotten in to Modest Mouse if you hadn't received that CMJ sampler with "The Stars are Projectors" on it. In fact many of the bands I got others into i can link back to you Mike, but that is probably less interesting then the matter at hand.
I just wanted to expand on my point from yesterday briefly (ha). I was writing about the failures of the Baby Boomers, and I wanted also to touch on their successes. I wish that I could cite this because I'm pretty sure it wasn't an original thought of my own, but I've googled away and can find no trace of it, so here goes.
The greatest success of the Baby Boomers is that they raised a generation of children who don't care about the same battles that they did. It's not that the Boomers have done much in the last 30 years to change the status quo (they haven't). It is just that the old battles of 60's seem distant to us now. We're ready to take on different challenges. I was talking to my mother about this the other day and the example we discussed was marijuana. Our parent's generation used marijuana as a way of rebelling against their system. It was considered a radical thing to do. Then they grew older and became terrified of how they would teach their children NOT to smoke pot, since they didn't have any moral ground to stand out. The upshot is that there is little stigma from people of our age regarding the use of marijuana because in many ways it is old news. It is not considered all that big of a deal, and tying in with what I wrote yesterday, this is another issue that is going to to fade as the generational shift continues. If the Michael Phelps saga has exposed anything, it is the utter hypocrisy of having pot be illegal when you can buy cigarettes and alcohol as an 18 or 21 year AND there is nothing to stop anyone from buying a six pack of Redbull and downing it in one go. I think these delineations are clearer to us then they were to our parents (and certainly our grandparents).
So as I said I think we can look back on our parents generation as not being a generation that provided profound change, but rather as the generation that laid the groundwork for us to do the heavy lifting. Whether or not we take that fight is an open question, but it won't be our parents fault and it won't be the system's fault. The opportunity is there.
All of which is to say (as mike does) we have to work to accelerate changes that are already happening.
Alright, World Baseball Classic here I come!
P.S. Having read over this I just want to make something clear. When I say "our parents" I don't mean OUR parents. I mean baby boomers but I didn't want to use the term every other sentence.
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Great post. Yes, it's true, we boomers laid the groundwork for the now times. As for pot, I didn't see it as a rebellion, but more of an inner self thing. Everyone was on the same page and could relate to each other while being stoned. While some of us discouraged pot smoking for our kids, others believed it was better than alcohol and smoked with them as sort of a ritual. The times are not the same as they were back then.
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