2013-05-07 2:12 a.m.

This is what music sounded and looked like when the world was still analog, nothing was yet perfect, and nobody expected it be. Each day was still confusing, awkward, exciting, and full of fantastic wonder. Answers weren't easy to find. Subcultures actually meant something. And, music was something you had to actually had to work—often quite hard—to discover. Finding a song—a song that felt like your own—meant hours digging through second-hand record shops, listening to dozens and dozens of CDs at listening stations with busted-up headphones. Just like mining, most days were a bust. But, every once in a while you'd find a gem, and it meant something because that two-and-a-half minute song would somehow, against fantastic odds, describe something about you that nobody else understood—sometimes not even yourself.

I wasn't like anybody at school or on my block. And I couldn't have been more unlike my parents, no matter how many times my mom said I was just like my father whenever she was mad at me. When I saw these it was like being shown photographs of myself for the first time. Someone else had succinctly described my life experience and whispered it to me. It was then that I knew what I was shaped like and that there could be a place that would fit that shape. I didn't know where, exactly, but I knew in the marrow of my bones that it could exist. I'm not sure I ever found it, but these are the seeds of faith that started my search.

Take The Skinheads Bowling
Ana Ng
Punk Rock Girl


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