Screw You, I Won't Buy What You Sell Me

BY JUSTIN TONEY

For those of you about to rock, take off those ACDC T-shirts, cause we’re not gonna take it any more.

Nobody loves the classics more than we at the Bullet. We all want to be Jukebox Heroes and a Pinball Wizards, but our fathers got there first.

Let’s have our own revolution before we end up like the aged hippy out by the nest, as tan as he is grey, reading Jack Kerouac and reeking of patchouli.

His parade of stereotypes graces our campus in order to sell “nostalgic posters” of Aerosmith covers and Grateful Dead concert material.

These things may be nostalgic for him, but not for us. The generation that The Monkey’s sang about belongs to an era of history grouped into the same pre-birth obscurity as the Civil War and Caesar.

The classic rock generation is one of open rebellion, artistic risk, unashamed secularity and a new sound that has since settled down and found jobs selling all of their memories to suburban kids with too much money and not enough music to call their own.

When did the culture change from revolt to re-sale, from revolution to re-revolution? The music didn’t die in ‘79 the way it did in ‘59. We have no plane crash to demarcate the old regime from today.
Instead, the old gods of rock dance stiffly around with the help of Botox and Viagra like skeletons wearing the leathery skin of Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger.

These guys are great because they have vast historical popularity.

Today’s music is strangled under their Wal Mart monopoly, fleeing to the diverse fringe where audiences are smaller and genre-specific.
Nobody can dispute that the Fab Four did it first and did it right. “Across the Universe” sucked, because no band can be the Beatles better than the Beatles. But so long as today’s youth keep eating up that 50-year-old identity, modern rock can only exist in the shadows of some hyped past.

It’s time for a purge. Fuck the Bee Gees. Iron Maiden isn’t heavy metal anymore. Trivium, Static X and As I Lay Dying makes Poison and Motley Crue sound like the Beach Boys. Why do we need the Eagles when we have the Eagles of Death Metal?

Embrace your inner Wu-Tang Clan. Wear T-shirts like Radiohead, Sublime, Rage Against the Machine or Richard Cheese!

Okay, so that last one didn’t really fit, but that’s the beauty of it. This is the age of many voices. One Rock Nation under nobody, completely divisible, but with soul and sound for all.

You can Rock the Casbah hand have your Cake too. We love Bon Jovi like we love Dad’s family dog, but it’s time to get a new puppy. If you quit giving all your money to feed the toothless music of yesteryear, today’s pups might just grow up to be ferocious rock hellhounds instead of starving Indy runts.

Let’s talk about our own generation for once.