Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

"At night, the murmur of traffic sounds just like the wind rushing through the pines up in the Sierra. As white noise goes, it's not bad." -- Timothy Ereneta on living in Oakland Ca., Oatmeal 1, 1992. Place is an important element in shaping lives. The sound of a freight train traveling through night air, the awkward hesitancy of a taxi cab horn in the darkening twilight, a child crying in the corner of the room at recess. All of these instances can shape and define us. The glimmering hope from behind the wall of all too slippery time. Growing up in Northern Wisconsin gave me a particular perspective about place. Shaped by smoke stacks and pine trees, the hum of snowmobiles in the winter months riding past our orange house on 6th avenue, the buzz and creak of bullfrogs of burgeoning summer days, the quiet of the woods and the suggestive sound of cooing mourning doves. All of these altered my thoughts and ideas. I grew up disliking my hometown for all the wrong rea...

The past looms on the back of a record sleeve. Labels, such as, Lookout, Epitaph, even Bomp, cryptically allowing for years of wasted moments. The times that your finger tips traced the edge of an LP or slammed your fist against fragile drywall. You marveled at the pictures on the back of each sleeve, somehow they were more real than your own family members. They spoke through each lyric, each guitar line, each drum fill, each chord change -- so goddamn directly to you. A slipped power pop backbone, a hardcore frustration, a mod moment, a Dischord emo relapse. The emotions bubbled over into a potent stew of remembrance and forget, lost in transition as the records and years slipped quietly away. They were replaced by other records, other ideas. But the intent is the same, a slipping away into the night, a creative outlet or an escape from yourself and the world. The past looms on the back of a record sleeve, as surely as the present looms in the smile lines of your face -- a crow's...

I woke up this morning with the lyrics to Helmet's "Unsung" in my head. At first, I couldn't place it -- images and lyrics are sometimes like a repository for past memories. Listening to a record album can remind you that it once served as a soundtrack for a whole summer, reading a novel can lead to memories of one summer, for example, recalling an afternoon shortly after you turned sixteen, watching an old tv show can dish up old memories of distant relatives you haven't seen for years. Like dreams, sensory experiences often dredge up the past, reminders of forgotten friends or people that were not thought of in a decade, the color of the wallpaper at your grandmother's house, or other small instances lost forever in the memory banks. Song snippets and lyrics are especially prime vehicles of uncommon remembrance, at least for me. Periods of my life are categorized through soundtracks. I sometimes can even tell you what I was listening to during a ...