a windblown left side

ripping myself off

When I was in NC, I got to expose yet another person (in this case, my girlfriend) to the wonderful and amazing world of punk covers. I love playing punk covers for people. I love watching people slowly figure out what song its supposed to be. For me, it's win/win - either they dig them and I've made someone appreciate punk at least a little, or they hate them, and I get to bask in the glory of the fact that my kind of music can destroy every other kind of music at moment's notice.

This got me thinking a lot about why I like punk covers so much and what makes a good punk cover. Then, randomly, when searching through my old email for an address, I found this exchange, which perfectly captures what I've recently being thinking about. Excuse the profanity, when I wrote this I didn't think I was writing for the public.

AH: "why would a punk band cover faith hill 'breathe'???? thought you might have a clue. "

Me:"Why cover the song 'Breathe?'
Here are your reasons three. . . .

1) Faith hill rocks harder than the most die-hard punk on his best shit-talking, spiky haired day.
2) I can't back that up. Country is pretty fucking lame. But lets admit it, Faith Hill is one pretty woman.
3) I bet they covered because its so lame. It's like, if you can take a song that was pretty good originally and turn it into a good punk song, well ok, thats cool. But if you can turn some candy-ass country western song into a firebreathing punk fest-a-thon of a song, then you are a genius. Maybe this band was just reaching for the stars."

First, I admit that it's pretty lame that I can't think of anything clever for my posts, so I'm recycling old stuff. But I really do think it's interesting that there are things I have said or known and then forgotten that ended up applying to my life. The creepiest example of this happened to me a few years ago. I was in a rough spot of high school, I was pretty low. I don't remember exactly what the issue was. A good freind of mine happened to write me about an unrelated topic (she didn't know about my situation at the time), but she happened to just randomly hit "reply" on a really old email of mine, so my year-message was at the bottom of her unrelated email. Strangely, my message to her was a letter consoling her about some situation, and it completely applied to my own. It was like some weird form of time travel. My past self completely helped fix my current self's problems. How many nuggets of wisdom, belief-changing conversations, and funny stories are hidden away and forgotten in my saved emails?

Posted by Ben at August 8, 2003 06:24 PM