Dunlap Dabbles

I often get caught in these scenarios where I say something about the past in an offhanded way, assuming that my childhood was normal, and receive blank stares in return. My favorite was probably when I found out that kids from other parts of the country (mostly Texas) not only had to spend more time at school, but they didn’t even get an hour lunch, or brunch! We called brunch “nutrition” at my school but in order to help people out I just called it brunch since that’s what a twenty minute food break from 10:00 to 10:20 is.

I plan not to make the same mistake here so I’ll explain that, at my school anyways, there was a clearly established pattern when it came to age and skateboarding. Pretty much every male kid skateboarded at some point in elementary school and maybe dabbled in it a little through middle school. Generally, by mid seventh grade, the herd thinned out considerably either due to frustration or pressure from a coach not to injure one’s self and miss out on part of a real sport’s season because you were messing around on some kid’s toy. This point was absolute bliss and lasted for about three to three and a half years until kids were lured away by friends with cars or their drug habits became too serious to accommodate serious physical activity. During one’s senior year though, with what seemed like the real world pressing from every direction and the prospect of all your friends being scattered across the country in relatively no time at all, a large chunk of that class would say, “Remember skateboarding? Now that was real fun.” Decks would be reclaimed and the familiar clatters, scrapes, and whoops would ring out from the senior parking lot, with the new additions of hoods crunching and then popping back out. Needless to say, people were thrilled.

I’m currently having a similar experience with my music. As I feel compelled to be on a constant search for the new, all I actually want to do is sit down with music that is familiar. I was recently hanging out with a couple of bands that will not be named out of respect for their credibility who had, as part of one of those little tour jokes that tend to seem absolutely idiotic to anyone who wasn’t on that particular tour, procured a number of cheap nu metal cd’s popular during middle school. I’m talking Korn, Limp Bizkit, Deftones etc. Even though they listen to much different and more advanced material now, they couldn’t really knock it. They were enjoying it and recalling facts they thought they’d long forgotten. Absolutely no one experiences music like a teenager. Period. That is a fact. While revisiting some of own old favorites I realized that I still knew pretty much every single word of some of these albums. It made me stop and think about the last album I’d taken the time to learn, not just walked around with on my iPod or played while I cooked dinner or read a magazine. Maybe it’s the fact that I get so much music digitally now that’s partially responsible for this change in behavior, but I seem to recall a decline in lyrical content being included in album packaging before that.

There are some times when progress must march on, for our own good, but this is not one of them. Reclaim the feeling of lying on your floor holding a cover booklet over your head. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn the words to a whole album. Bonus points if it involves unintelligible vocals.

*You can view the video here
**For those who don’t believe that Andrew W.K. doesn’t gives assignments, I have proof in tweet form. Proof in tweet form, if you didn’t know, is the fastest growing type of proof in existence today.