SONG OF THE DAY: Working Class Man

A lot of my interactions with punk music growing up were interactions with people further up the class scale than me, often times speaking to me condescendingly for not knowing something. That’s always been my problem with punk to be honest. On top of this, in the places I’ve lived, there started to be this pseudo-southern image cultivation on top of that class issue, perhaps best exemplified by the PBR craze among seemingly scummy types in mid-‘90s Richmond. I found that shit untrustable in a lot of cases, and for the most part the folks who tingled my “nah, don’t trust ‘em” intuition have panned out correctly. I will never get the rear view mirror looking back on what you did a long ass time ago thing, because – in my mind – you ought to still be doing things. I don’t believe in that notion that people are wilder when they’re young then get more conservative with age and live more normalized lives, and also thus reflect back on their younger adult years as something special. Why the fuck ain’t you still challenging shit? Ain’t nothing really changed for the larger world. You just settled down and into the channel you already were following. Anyways, I’m open to all people, but tbh I find allegedly “old punks” who are blatant capitalists or entirely stable middle class denizens tiresome af. Growth is a real thing, I know that, so I don’t expect you to be G.G. Allin until you die, but goddamn don’t be sitting there with $2000 worth of visible tattoos drinking an $8 pint of beer trying to talk to me about what’s real and authentic. Because you’re not speaking my language.