U2 "Bad"

I read two books in the early Spring, Tina Fey's "Bossypants" and Chuck Klosterman's "Fargo Rock City."

Both books spend quite a bit of time in awkward adolescence, and both books stirred up a bunch of musical memories.  I would write down a note every time some anecdote popped in my.  I've got a good 15 to 20 upcoming posts that stroll down awkward avenue.

"Fargo Rock City" in particular made me think a lot about the music I listened to during high school, as it's part autobiography, part treatise on listening to Heavy Metal in the 1980s.

I was not a Heavy Metal kid.

But Metal, or at least Hard Rock, seemed to be the default position for popular kids in my high school.

Basically, you either liked Van Halen, or you were a fag.

That was the dividing line.  Which side were you going to be on?

(I'll say, that I think this was only really a necessary choice for boys.  Girls could like a much wider range of music and still be cool.)

So I came down on the side of "Yeah, Van Halen is cool."

But I have to admit, that I didn't really get it at all.

"Running With The Devil"?

Guys would go on and on about how great that song was.

I mean, I liked it as much as I liked any dumb rock song.  And I understood why my guitar playing friends were so crazy about "Eruption."  But I just wasn't there, otherwise.

I was a Sophomore in 1984, and while I could fake really liking certain things, to fly under the radar, I was really more interested in all the new music I was ingesting on MTV.

There was this up-and-coming band from Ireland that I and a few of my friends were excited about.  But it wasn't terribly cool to say you liked them.

I can remember being in homeroom, getting ragged on by kids were were cooler (and let's face it, tougher) than we were, for liking U2.  "The Unforgettable Fire" had just come out, and it was starting to get some attention, which, in retrospect, I think rattled these kids and their worldview a bit.

The band was gay.  We were fags for liking them.  It was stupid, fad music that would have no staying power.  It wasn't real Rock N Roll.

It's one of those moments where I wish time travel existed, so someone from the future could have popped into my 1984 homeroom to pass on the information that U2 turned out to be one of the biggest, most popular, most successful, most enduring Rock N Roll bands of the last 30 years.



See the video on Youtube.