I tried not to think about the election and the eerily consistent weather, which both made it feel as though time had stopped.
I knew it hadn't stopped. The days were ticking by; I saw the numbers change on the calendar app on my iPhone. People were still dying, including Gary Indiana -- the gay critic and novelist -- and Phil Lesh, the bass player for the Grateful Dead. Ferociously smart, acerbic, and uncompromising, Gary Indiana is the kind of gay writer who I suspect most (like 99.98 percent of) non-homosexuals have never heard of but who deserves to be in some kind of hall of fame, just for documenting what life was like for gays during the second half of the twentieth century.
Phil Lesh, on the other hand, is someone 99.98 percent of homosexuals have never heard of, but is someone who is already in a hall of fame for his work with the Grateful Dead. I feel conflicted about the Grateful Dead, in much the way I feel conflicted about the mainstream Boomer generation from which they arose and will always represent. They have songs that I've always liked and which periodically will get stuck in my head: 'Box of Rain,' 'Ripple,' 'Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad' (which I played with a cover band in college), but the Grateful Dead will always feel very aesthetically 'straight' to me, similar to The Beatles (so straight) but in contrast to say, The Kinks (not so straight, and better because of it).
One of the things nice things about growing up in the 1980s is that so many of the biggest rock bands from that era (R.E.M., the Smiths, the Cure, etc.) were not straight, which was a big departure from the boomers, and one that I personally welcomed. As the youngest of five children (and the only Gen Xer), I was indoctrinated into a lot of 1960s-1970s music that was excruciatingly straight. Now that I'm older and less straight, I have no desire to ever hear this music again. For example, I think about the ten thousand times I was subjected to 'Brown-Eyed Girl' at family singalongs, and I feel bereft.
The world of popular music to which I was introduced as a child reinforced my sense that there was one way to be in the world. Which was difficult in some respects but also paved the way for the giddy exhilaration I felt while looking at the back cover of 'Chronic Town' and feeling certain that this band and its music was somehow part of the same world I wanted to belong to.
It's how I still judge art and music, which is more emotional and intuitive than technical or 'critical.'
Does this song say anything about the world I want to live in?
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