I am forever a child of the millennium.
I still to this day fear my food processor starting to process me because of a Y2K documentary that young me saw. I have fond memories of the world before omnipresent technology and constant contact took over. Not to get too Boomer but I’ve heard it described like Tolkien’s elves, we were the last to know the light of the trees. Like every generation before me, I know on a deep level that my generations music is where its at.
The early ’00s were my high school days and it was the wild wild west for music. We had “Total Request Live” is those days, a show that would play the highest voted music videos of the week. I think it was the week, my memory is shot from head injuries and heavy drinking. Still, it was a regular occurrence to get home and watch Slipknot duking it out with N’Sync. Wild times that I have a hard time explaining to my kids. Pop was down to a science in those days, distilled to a product that labels knew exactly what they needed in a star. The boy bands of the day didn’t hold much water for me at the time and boy was I wrong -see my article about Backstreet and the Sphere-
What I could fuck with was something that appealed more to a deeply angry teenage boy. I got my first Korn cd in one of those mail away subscriptions that I had talked a parental unit into and “Follow the Leader” was my first step into Nu-Metal. Something that was a direct line from the thrash and softer rock that I knew from the radio. It took the drop D tuning of Metallica, boomer bends and hammer ons from Clapton, added some rapping vocalists, melted them all down to a soup and built it back up wrong. Illegally downloading every song I could get my hands on and playing them on the psychedelic win amp player while reading “Gundam Wing” fan fiction was one of my favorite uses of the family computer in the kitchen. The angst is still palpable through the decades.
So when I hear that Sevendust is coming to town I have to drag my own teenager to his first rock concert. I hear that you are supposed to remember you first concert, I remember WANTING my first concert to be the ninja turtles “Coming out of our shells” and never making it is one of my many great regrets. I don’t really remember what my first concert was but my sons will be Sevendust.
Like all things MidWest the crowd was nicer than I anticipated or even remembered from before I left. The band even had the mosh pit walking in circles. Now is that to prevent fight injuries or because of the middle age fans, its all debatable, but I saw a shirt that read “Heart say pit, knees say sit”. You and me both friend, you and me both.
Still, when the band had everyone hold their phones up I handed my offspring my trusty zippo.
There’s something to be said about angry teens growing up and making less angry teens, and I’m here for that.
After all this, the kids are going to be okay.
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