Rock!

I used to periodically steal this gray shirt of my brother's that said in simple white block letters, "I [heart] cops."

I liked wearing it because it seemed to mean two different things depending on who I was around. With grumpy kids my own age, it was sarcastic and passively inflammatory-- the kind of thing worn by someone who would answer authoritative questioning with more smart ass questions. Around older folks, I found that the shirt came off as shockingly sincere, like a bold statement of civic responsibility way before the whole nation had a fetishistic crush on beefy firemen.

I was thinking about that shirt last night on the drive home from class where we'd spent four hours discussing a book defending the merits of 80's hair metal bands like Motley Crue (no umlauts for tools, sorry), Poison, Guns 'N Roses, Ratt, Tesla, and White Lion. A big theme in the book was "rocking," which was loosely defined as stickin' it to the man by getting high on whatever was around, having empty sex with feral women, and collecting legal infractions.

What I realized on this drive home was that I don't rock. I never have. I rebelled, certainly, but I never rocked. I'm living in a time when many people my age are copping to their metal roots while holding up the deflector shield of ironic distance. This is fine, I guess, but I can't join in. My musical roots are embarrassing in a far less ironic Gen X way. When I jammed out alone in my room at night, it was to classical music. Seriously. I had no idea at the time why there wasn't an MTV-like channel that put together long, cinematic videos to "The Planets" or "Appalachian Spring." I laid in bed at night and filmed them myself, long thematic serials where I starred in a variety of roles like Viking queen and female cosmonaut, and whose finales nearly always involved explosions of uncertain origin sparking dramatically behind me as I gazed out at the future from a stormy hilltop.

My frustration with pop music wasn't that it was formulaic or one-dimensional-- it just wasn't long enough or dramatic enough, and the troublesome addition of lyrics always excluded me as a viable hero of the music. No one would have sung about me at the time "she's got the look" or "you give love a bad name." My crushes were secret things of pulverizing intensity, and the openness of pop, of actually naming and (God forbid) professing one's feelings to someone else, was too horrifying to imagine.

Luckily I had a little brother who began demanding Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer cassettes loudly and early in his adolescence, and quickly mastered an acidic disgust for my timpani-rolling finales. He took a bravely self-sufficient shotgun approach to music selection, sampling far and wide from the crowded MTV landscape and developing a startling expertise in the metal/rock/punk arena. "You are such a dork," he would say, and last night for the first time I started to realize how important he was in prying me out of a quickly hardening shell of narrow cerebral isolation. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I suspected that he might be mildly retarded and told him so. I suspected he had no class or taste or appreciation for history or high culture. What I didn't realize was that he was taking a critical step towards culture, and towards engaging people our own age in discussion, thereby connecting, which is a vital part of creating new culture. I was huffing the fumes of very, very old conversations.

Connecting isn't impossible to do with classical music. In fact, it's quite easy and satisfying. I had a great long-distance musical dialog going on with two of my uncles who frequently sent me stellar tapes and broadened my classical horizons, but when you're 11 and the people you'd really like to invite to your fifth grade slumber party are in their forties and live across the country, connection becomes a little more difficult.

A completely different reason that I know I don't rock is that I think I genuinely do have a fondness for cops. I have never once been tempted to be anything other than Southern lady "yes, sir, no, sir" polite to them. Something in me gets a little bit thrilled when I need to explain something to a cop, like why I'm wandering drunk and on foot around a neighborhood with a baseball bat on New Year's Eve (sorry, Mom and Dad, for that and for what follows), or dressed like a pregnant hillbilly with a black eye and driving a compact car with nine people in it (sober, though!). There's a bit of the penitent confessor in me whenever I deal with cops. Immediately I know that I'm either (a) completely in the wrong and probably should have been caught earlier, or (b) simply involved in a misunderstanding, which a polite and respectful explanation will rectify.

Luckily, nothing in my experience has ever made me question this approach. I realize here that I also benefit from the handiness of being white and female, and that I'm now in the possession of an even more potent Golden Ticket, the military ID, but I also still genuinely believe that there is a reason for laws, and that one of the shittiest and least respected jobs in the world goes to the people who have to enforce them.

I hated the book we talked about last night, mostly because it was poorly written and pompous and logically flawed in the way only rock critics can be pompous and logically flawed. But it made me think back to the summer in junior high when I put down the Prokoviev and picked up the (gulp) Van Halen. Maybe it was a slippery slope from there, but when I fell in love with flannel, door-slamming, and Nirvana, I finally figured out what my grandmother meant when she said cryptically every now and then, "a little rebellion is good for the soul." I don't think my rebellion was ever really about "rocking," at least not any more than recessions are about presidencies, but the atmospheric influence of simpler, louder, and angrier music certainly helped.