Originally Posted by swa(y)

people do love sucking thurston's tastes. it annoyed me for a long while, a generation of kids in dinosaur tees bragging about their electic tastes in music (ooooh, magik markers, nirvana, pagoda, awesome color, dna, branca, avant-folk, punk, grunge, noise!..thurstons tastes) then i realized thurston does, indeed, sometimes have good tastes and transports decent artists into the minds of his fans. its interesting.

my friend j. was irritated towards this seemingly "king of the scene" mentality thurston seems to have, from time to time. then one drunken day he realized "well, if ya think about it, he is kinda the king of the scene". haha. maybe not literally...but might as well be in some circles. the kids make em that way. maybe not a bad thing. hes certainly the eyes and ears for some folks search on new sounds.

i dont chase down everything thurston name drops anymore, simple because there is tooooo much of it. and alot of the time, i dont dig (awesome color, pagoda...no need in my mind for such artists when we already have stooges, nirvana, muhoney)...but then again, thanks to thurston i DO dig magik markers, double leopards, wolf eyes (sometimes).

the main thing i learned from thurston was to give every artist a chance, depsite preconcieved notions that may come from genres they classify themselves/are classified by others by. it became cool to check out black metal bands, noise bands, folk artists, whatever...in high school i had little time for anything associated with "metal" (i thought it was all way toooo silly, i still think alot of it is, but nowhere near "all"). i was into some stuff then i'd now id consider "avant garde", but hardley realized it at the time (some of SY's stuff for sure, throbbig gristle, etc) < it was just an arsty brutal attack on most of the tastes my classmates had at the time. i knew i liked it, but wasnt completely sure why yet. course later came sun ra and coltrane and miles, some of the most "punk rock" shit ever. fuck the exploited. haha

kurt may have planted the seeds for that. he certainly got me interested in the youth, a long , long time ago. i still like alot of the bands kurt turned me on to the best (scratch acid, melvins, sonic youth)...

i also like some bands ive turned myself onto through my own research (ghoul detail, red krayola, crass, pere ubu, pharoah sanders, rabbit girls...whatever.)

im ranting, because thats what swa(y) does.


have fun,


-s.