Have you ever been in a band? Not the one that you and some other loser formed in the basement covering Nirvana songs through a beat-up Peavey practice amp your deadbeat uncle traded to your dad for a case of High Life, mind you: but a real, working, functional band? Suffice it to say, most people can say yes to this question now in our culture. However, like many things in life that I am given pause to reflect on, I was walking down the street and saw something that displeased me on Saturday afternoon.

I live in the South Side and have no car, so I have to take my amp on a bus that travels down Carson Street to the block where Pittsburgh Guitars is located. Hey, it’s a heavy amp. Pittsburgh Guitars is your average music store: low-end to high-end guitars and amps, some chord books for garbage like Metallica and Jane’s Addiction songs (which people actually buy?!), guitar lessons, you name it. You can’t really complain about this kind of stuff, because they own the store, they’re the ones who make money off schmucks like BE Taylor, and you can pick up guitar strings at 8 PM because of them. There is no chance that people who slob around a music store all day and spent their lives learning Iron Maiden licks in lieu of playing original music will teach you how to be cool.

But who is going to do that? As I mentioned before, I saw something that extremely displeased me while I was walking by the store. Two kids were standing outside clutching their new axes. Presumably, I’d think they were there for guitar lessons or some other such nonsense. I wouldn’t know, I’m a poor guitar player with three lessons under my belt in twenty-five years, so what can I say? The kids were decked out in your traditional “I-listen-to-blah-blah-blah-mall-horseshit-fake-punk-and-I’m-ready-to-shred” attire, which I’ve come to accept as the death of future children being at all interesting when I hit my 30’s or so. Anyway, these two young men are now somehow on the fast track to rock superstar-dom, for they can start a band, go on “tour”, and get their cashew-sized cocks sucked for the first time, simply by taking advantage of what the music industry has done to itself and the image of DIY that is probably now DIM (Do-It-Myspace).

Gone are the days in which you started a band because there was nothing else to do. Throw into the mix the fact that kids are more bored today with 1,000,000 different stimuli pumping through each and every synapse in their being and you wonder “why do they even want to join a band anyway”? Lord knows I wouldn’t put up with sleeping on some dumb drunk’s cat hair-covered floor for three hours if I’d known any better or excelled in anything when I was 15.

What records will the kids learn to play along to? The Ramones and Black Flag? I don’t think so. Those bands exist for the most part as fashion apparel these days (or more appropriately, fashioning your company’s logo into the Ramones Eagle or the Black Flag bars… if you read the newest issue of Beer Advocate, some 50-year old moron from Seattle has his brewery’s name fashioned into the Flag bars), and kids are learning “My Chem” (shitty ex-landlord broad’s words, not mine) songs in their place.

Once again, I weep for the future. Look for more on this coming soon.