Carrick wrote

The 80's were a decade quite close to my heart. One beautiful thing about it was how easy it was to be different. Button the top button of your shirt you were branded a freak worthy of a serious thrashing. <snip> But as you look through the pages you'd always see a few rather peculiar looking kids with quotes underneath from Jonathan Richman or the Smiths. It was us vs. them.

It was ALWAYS us v them. Us v them is the nature of pop music. Us v them is the nature of growing up and becoming yourself...it's as much a process of exclusion as it is a process of inclusion. It's not necessarily nice, but it is important, to P!O!P! at least. It's petty and it's crass and it's P!O!P!

But American music was thriving in the 80's. It was just not being talked about. Mission of Burma, Pylon, REM, Dream Syndicate, Minutemen, Husker Du, The Replacements. Bands you could believe in.

Funny how whoi is us and who is them become blurry though, isn't it? If you'd have pitched up round my way in the 1980s with your talk of the Dream Syndicate and Husker Du, you'd have been met with howls of derision, asked why you had bought into Classic Rock so soon, and then probably been bought a pint of opaque cider. You would then have tried to justify your musical taste to young men who were utterly unwilling to listen to your point of view, and who had already decided that you were a P!O!P! traitor. It was us v them, you see. Now...who cares? But I'd put my shirt (and today it's my vintage Pharcyde t-shirt, of which I'm very proud, so this is no empty boast) that in schools and underage drinking dens around the world, it's still very much us v them. Of course I might be wrong. But since I'm old, I'm automaticallty THEM anyway. So I'm not supposed to know who is us and who is them. The lines are invisible to me. Oooh, time for my bed bath tim ----------------------------------------------------------------------- . This message was brought to you by the Sinister mailing list. . To send to the list please mail "sinister@majordomo.net". . For subscribing, unsubscribing and other list information please see . http://www.majordomo.net/sinister . For questions about how the list works mail owner-sinister@majordomo.net . Coinini athasach ata muid - ag canuint amhrain na . coinini - nach bhfuilimid? -----------------------------------------------------------------------