Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Since I've been a kid, I've been obsessed with liner notes -- the details that catalog the minutiae in the grooves. My father used to subscribe to the Time Life Classic Country collection, and I used to categorize and memorize the liner notes, storing them for some unknown future. Even then I was a music historian by default. Later, when my mom got the Sounds of the Seventies cds, I would pore over them. As I built my own collection, I still read liner notes. You can learn so much about a record, but also about the scene or situation that it has developed from. Each kernel leads to another. The bands in the acknowledgements section, the producer, the additional musicians -- all tell the story of this record, while leading to other important bands and albums. A voracious music junkie will always find another clue to building a collection, while scraping together a narrative of that record's invention. My continual search through liner notes first became evident when I ...

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...