The Break-Up

When you take a minute to think of all the things you take for granted every day, you might find it takes more than a single minute to consider all of them. At night, nobody wonders as they're falling asleep whether or not the road they take to work will continue to exist in the morning. Or if the Starbucks that provides them their coffee will still exist. Or whether or not their parents will stop loving each other. Or whether or not the sun will burn out. These things are just assumed to continue existing. Sure as the sun, as sung by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, with utmost certainty.

You might be certain that the members of your favorite bands are best friends, having impossibly productive and stable relationships, stronger than your own parents because they're bonded by their art. One of those bands might be the most influential rock bands of the last thirty years. Two members of that band, who've been married for 27 years, could be considered the King and Queen of alternative music.

In October, Spin reported that Kim Gordon & Thurston Moore announced the break-up of their marriage since 1984. After learning this a week ago I have been emotionally stewing about the potential demise of one my favorite bands that is still performing (one band on a very short list).

My own parents were married a year earlier, though they divorced in 1995, when I was nine years old. When I discovered Sonic Youth as a teenager it was very easy, having around only one parent who was very left-brained, to consider Kim & Thurston artistic parental figures who took up the same space in my subconscious that my real parents did.

My real parents taught me everything they could about life. "Listening to music that isn't cool is stupid," my father would say to me. "Stop listening to your father," my mother would say to me. But when I was in my car or in my room, Sonic Youth taught me everything they could about art. And noise. Lot's of fuckin' noise.

They taught me things my parents never could. They taught me that you didn't have to tune your guitar the same way everyone else did. They taught me that the best art I create will always come from the subconscious, everything floating around in my mind that I don't yet know or understand. They taught me to create my own meaning.

Sometimes they illuminated the things my real parents couldn't properly communicate. Listening to songs like I Love Her All The Time, Tom Violence, Death To Our Friends, Dirty Boots and Rain King helped me to understand that some things are better understood when you're older.

The Death of the Buzz

After 16 years, WPBZ, The Buzz 103.1 FM is dead.

Let me start by saying this is not an obituary for a highly-acclaimed, local alternative rock station. This is not the end of a beloved mouthpiece by and for the forward-thinking, knuckle-scraping, sonic rebels at the cutting edge of everything angry, bad-ass and loud.

In no way did The Buzz push any envelopes, stick it to any Men or rock anybody's faces off, unless you were the type of person to disagree, thinking these things could be achieved by listening (incessantly, relentlessly, 24 hours-a-day) to songs by

30 Seconds to Mars,

Breaking Benjamin,

Three Days Grace,
Puddle of Mudd,
Rise Against,
Papa Roach,
Shinedown,
Daughtry
and Nickelback.

The Buzz always played the same corporate bullshit you could hear everywhere and anywhere else. They were not great; they were an annoyance, and after sixteen years somebody decided they should peddle their drivel on the Internet, like the rest of us.

For me, the news that came on Monday was welcome, vindication for all the years of listening to moronic songs I was mature enough to despise when I was fourteen, let alone twenty-five. Fitting closure for all those times in the past, driving home from Suncoast High School, when I had to say to myself through gritted teeth, "Oh, I guess we'll just listen to that Finger Eleven song again. OK."

Gently they did go into that good night. Rage they did not against the dying of the light.

But there are some people who want them back, and they are just as entitled to their opinion as I am to mine.

The truly great moments in their broadcast history came only a few times a year when upon me they would bestow a Buzz Recycled Weekend. Those weekends, when for three days I was granted music that brought me back to the days in the passenger seat of my father's car, were great for people like me, who, for just once in a while, wanted to hear songs by

Jimmie's Chicken Shack,

The Butthole Surfers,
Alien Ant Farm,
The Mars Volta,
The Breeders,
The Deftones,
Fiona Apple,
Radiohead,
The Pixies,
Metallica,

Placebo,
Primus,
R.E.M.,
Beck
and 311.

If these weekends were only more frequent (hell, if they only kept the songs in the regular rotation) maybe the Buzz would have kept listeners like me, and in doing so, kept their place on our dials.

Sonnet II

My northern scope, hot glowing local blonde,
Suspending liquid ghosts in shifting globes
With ginger syntax, horrid equipoise,
To bloom anew, in fertile digs beyond.

Sacred mariners serenely breaming
Barges of posterity attrition.
Damage lacks for foreign superstition;
Noble kindling substitutes for dreaming.

Sun through sabel palms, when burning devils,
Shakes the blissful, screaming interference.
Tides eroding stranger incoherence,
Raising dangers soon to fresher levels.

Idiot mouths chasing literal thrills
Brighter than debunking embryo gills.