drunk 90's music videos

(Usually I would edit this blog, but I'm not going to today. What you read is what you get today.)
When I was a kid all I cared about was music videos. Most kids have better interests, they're really good at a sport or they have great grades. I just cared about music videos...and music and playing bass. It was my brother's 19th birthday today so I took him for drinks with his sister in the afternoon and now I'm kind of drunk and it's 3:30 on Saturday afternoon. So what do I do? Continue drinking. Not excessively, but if you stop once you've started you'll feel worse later. So what do you I do when I have to pass time, buzzed and alone for the moment? I pull out the twelve VHS tapes that I filled with music videos in the 90's. I guess the whole point of this blog is nostalgia and there's nothing more nostalgic to me than these tapes. I chose video tape number two which was was fall of grade nine, a great time for me. Green Day "When I Come Around" is the first video on it, I used to have hair just like Tre Cool, bleach blond with an undercut and spiked out to the side. If you didn't understand that description just watch the video on youtube, that was literally what I looked like in high school. The first set of video's on this tape were on the Much Music Countdown which was on every Friday night. This was my life at this point, going to someones house on Friday, hanging out and watching the countdown. I must have been in Collins Bay at Colleen McKracken's house during this because I remember holding hands with Erin Jacobi on a floor watching the Black Crows "Be My Conspiracy." I can't believe how influenced by the 70's the 90's were while I watch these videos The Black Crows and their affinity for psych rock and Skynard and Green Day with their Clash cribbing.
Oh my god Moist is on the screen! I not embarrassed, "Believe Me" was a great song and Moist were popular so I'm not a loser for having taped their video. And Bif Naked is in the video all the west coasters stick together don't they.
And this is where I'll end it because Weezer "Buddy Holly" is on now. One of the greatest videos of all time of course by Spike Jonze. I saw this video, ordered the CD on Columbia House and never looked back.

Things white kids liked in the 90's: Quoting Dazed and Confused

The day after I graduated grade eight, Matt Emigh rented Dazed and Confused. It was newand I hadn't even heard of it but Matt was always current with his films... and the Montreal Canadians. A bunch of the graduating class of R.G. Sinclair went back to my house to watch it in my basement but we were more interested in gossiping and eating pizza than watching the movie. How typical was it for a bunch of suburban kids to be inside on a beautiful June day, sitting in a basement with the tvon but not paying attention to it? Wasted youth. I don't think I actually watched Dazed and Confused until we rented it again with Matt Emigh when I was 17 and I taped it that time. We had also bought beer at Mr. Beer the brew by you that to sold teenagers to compliment our evening while smoking cigarettes in my parents rec room while they were out of town. The dubbing of this film led me to memorizing the entire movie which also led to all of my friends memorizing it. Dazed and Confused became staple viewing within my group of friends, so much that two games were formed out of watching it. The first was a drinking game, where you had to take a drink every time Mitch Kramer touches his face. In the scene outside the Emporium I think he touches his face 19 times inside of two minutes. The other was even simpler, you'd get a punch in the arm if you quoted the movie while watching it with your friends. This obviously stemmed from the fact that all we did was recite the movie while watching it thus ruining the film for everyone else, so we installed a penalty system.
Dazed and Confused connected with us so well because it was about us. Even though Slater, Pink, Donny, Benny, Mitch, Pickford and Wooderson were from 1976 Texas, they were just another bunch of bored white kids living in a small city with nothing to do but drive around and party in the forest. Everyone had a popular athlete at their school who hung out with the stoners, everyone had an older guy who was still clinging onto his youth in high school to stay feeling young and pick up impressionable young girls. I was amazed how a generation with a twenty year separation from mine exactly the same, it showed me how slowly small city life progresses. Technology changed but teen life hadn't, they drove around with 8 tracks, we had CD players, that was about it. We still all smoked pot, drank beers, smoked cigarettes, interacted with the opposite sex and felt bored all the same as the teenagers from the movie. It gave you sense of ease, like you weren't alone, that everyone goes through the same thing, which you don't know until you're in your twenties.
Lastly, if you haven't watched Dazed and Confused in a while, watch it again, in my opinion it is under rated from a film stand point. Richard Linklater wrote and directed an entire film about one solid day with a cast of about twenty characters that you care about. It's difficult to direct and write a film where you care about even one character, but there is not a dull moment in Dazed and Confused and you care about what happens to everyone in that film.

...birthday

It's my birthday today and I'm drinking beer and watching TV in a hotel room outside of Detroit. It's not like I'm Howard Hughes or anything, but I do have a buzz and I just exchanged emails with my best friend Hugh who has a birthday a day apart from me so it was a quick reminisce session. My friend Rebekah who I dated in high school just texted me how we had our first real conversation on my birthday 15 years ago, she reminded me because she knows I love to reminisce (which is what this blog is all about). So here are a whole bunch of suburban, white birthday memories.


Age 13 - May 9, 1993

On this birthday I became a teenager and I had Geoff Fisher, Steve Oakley and Marcus Thomson sleep over at my house. My mom made us coffee so we could stay up all night and watch the Exorcist and play the VHS board game Nightmare.

Age 16 - May 9, 1996

This was a pretty cool birthday, it was the first time I went to New York city. The morning I left for NYC with my mom I handed in a geography paper about nuclear waste disposal in the North West Territories that I completely made up. Then I got in a car and drove to my mother's cousin Georges house. That day I went to Michael Moores office and then that night I smoked expensive cigars with my cousin Alex and read Playboy.

Age 19 - May 9, 1999

This was a monumental birthday for any Canadian teenager living in Ontario, it's the birthday you can legally drink. As most of these birthday's go this one was full of missing scenes. I went to the big club in Kingston, AJ's Hanger at 11:00 but they wouldn't let me in because my birthday wasn't until midnight so I went to The Shot and drank a pitcher to myself. After this I remember only a few things. I remember singing all of This Is How We Do It on a stage, I remember doing about seven Dr. Pepper shots which are something dropped in beer to make it taste like Dr. Pepper. Then I remember laying on Ben Fishers floor back in my neighbourhood with Jessica Castel and Ben playing The End by the Doors on accoustic guitar as per my request. I also requested that the lights be turned off because the room was spinning.
The next day was my actual birthday and I was, understandably, in rough shape. I didn't come out of my room all day and when it came time to pick up my girlfriend Rebekah at 4:00pm, I had to get my dad to drive me because I'm pretty sure I was still drunk.

age 20 - May 9, 2000

On this birthday I drove to Toronto with Jess Flemming and Brian Laplante to Toronto to see Ween for the first time. Ween played for three hours and were amazing. Ween were eating sandwiches on stage and threw one into the crowd hitting Jess in the face, after she had already been pummelled by dreadlocks from sweaty hippies. We stayed awake on the drive back to Kingston by playing a band naming game for two and a half hours.

age 21 - May 9, 2001

On my 21st birthday I was with my best friend Mike Perlin in Ottawa working for the government. We got off work at 4:00 were drinking Absinthe and beers by about 4:20. Then we smoked a joint and hit a patio, Perlin bought me a piece of cake. I barfed up that cake up at around 10:00 and the next day was the worst day of my life. The next night I ran into Harmony, my girlfriend from high school, and made out with her in a park.

Age 25 - May 9, 2005

My friends Dave and Sarah were having the type of office party at their work where you bring your family. I went to drink from the Keg the company had bought and we played frisbee standing on chairs over cubicles. Then I went to the 360, a punk bar on Queen st. that had two dollar beers on Mondays and everyone bought me whiskey shots. I was in bed by 11:00pm. The 360 is now an Ugs store.

These aint your daddy's ticket prices... oh wait, they are.

I think most music fans have a bucket list of bands and artists they want to see. It's taken me about ten years but I'm almost finished my list. I thought I only had one left on the list but I realized that I actually have four (and probably more once someone reminds of something else). The four on the list are Rancid, Fugazi, The Dead Milkmen and Soundgarden, I have resigned to the fact that I'll never see the Beatles or Nirvana so I don't bother adding them. I only had the opportunity to really attend concerts in the 2000's and Fugazi went on "extended hitatus" in 2003 so they're out until they feel like it again. The Dead Milkmen haven't been a band since the 90's, they did reunite for a few shows a couple of years ago but then their bassist Dave Blood committed suicide so I'm probably not going to see them. Rancid I have no excuse for, they've come to Toronto several times since I've lived here and I don't know why I haven't gone, but they'll be back I'm sure. The last band is Soundgarden. They broke up in 1997 and I thought I would never get to see them. But on July 2, 2011 I'm going to be front row. However this wasn't cheap. I bought the tickets on their website the second the pre-sale happened and it was around $169.00 for the pair, $85.00 each! I'm pretty sure that's the most expensive concert ticket I have ever bought. I used to bug my dad about paying $200.00 for an Eagles ticket, now here I am spending $85.00 for a Soundgarden ticket. But although I hate to admit it, the principal behind the Soundgarden ticket and the Eagles ticket is the same . When you're young, you don't have any money and you go see young bands who don't charge a lot for tickets because if they did kids wouldn't show up. However Soundgarden and the Eagles are now both selling to a generation that loved them 15 plus years ago, these fans have grown up gotten jobs, own cars, houses, have kids, cottages, boats and have savings accounts. These people can now afford to spend $85.00 on a concert ticket, and Soundgarden knows this. They know I'm 30 and have a job, they know that there probably won't be a single 15 year old at their show unless their dad is taking them. When I was 15, $85.00 was a million dollars, I could live off that kind of cash for weeks. I could pay my way into an all ages show, split on a gram of weed and some nachos at 7-11 afterwards and still have about $75.00 left. Now $85.00 is one concert ticket, but lets be honest one awesome concert ticket. And lets make something clear, I'm not some Eagles fan hanging onto the past like my dad!

What your favourite alt rock band says about you

I just read McSweeney's: What Your Favourite Classic Rock Band Says About You and then a follow up on flavorwire.com: What Your Favourite PUNK Rock Band Says About You. I have decided (before anyone esle can) to do a What Your Favourite ALTERNATIVE Rock Band Says About You. I realize that some of these bands still exist and are probably referred by another general genre label but they used to be alternative bands. In 1994 EVERY band was an alternative band.

Dinosaur Jr. - You haven't bought any new clothes in years.

Soundgarden - You dyed your hair twice: once blue and once bleached.

Weezer - Your style hasn't changed at all but you picked the one style that hasn't ever really gone out of style.

Alice in Chains - You wear waffle shirts under t-shirts still, but they're from the GAP.

Nirvana - You have lots of pictures of you in the high school smoking section.

Mudhoney - You still have a Sony discman hooked up to an old stereo receiver.

Hole - You scratch nail polish off your fingers.

Cyprus Hill - You won't shut the fuck up about WEED!

Silverchair - You wear collared shirts under vintage sweaters.

Green Day - You still owe money to Columbia House.

Offspring - You never moved away.

Pearl Jam - You wear a hat from your univeristy with an adjustable back and the peak is NATURALLY tattered.

Rage Against the Machine - You play in a cover band.

Smashing Pumpkins - You're sort of tough but sort of girly.



Radiohead - You write for a modern tech blog.

Beastie Boys - You sort of know how to dance.

Beck - You have a bean bag chair in your basement rec room and the artifacts of an elaborate pipe system enabling you to smoke pot in your bedroom and blow it outside masking the odour.

Breeders - You're an English grad student.

Pixies - You lost your virginity in the bathroom at an all ages show.

Built to Spill - Your girlfriend told you to listen to the Pixies but you thought they were fags because of their name.

Candlebox - You don't listen to music anymore.

Spacehog - You know at what point to switch sides on a mix tape to get to the beginning of a good song on side B.

Cake - You like jazz now.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - You love Hollywood and imported beer.

Counting Crows - You were a resident adviser in your college dorm for 3 years of college.

Rollins Band - You watch a lot of documentaries.

Foo Fighters - You've only been to concerts in arenas.

Sonic Youth - You have a mantle with melted candles on it.

Garbage - You're a woman in upper management.

Limlifter - You live in Canada.

Ghadharvas - You live in Ontario.

Helmet - You're an abrasive drunk.

Korn - Your eyebrow ring is now an eyebrow barbell.

Deftones - You love UFC and wear a black windbreaker.

Janes Addiction - You smoke king size Du Maurier cigarettes.



Bikini Kill - You live in a cool loft.

L7 - You've been bruised by a woman.

Ween - You get stoned and eat Nutella.

The Melvins - you can take a punch, you have a beard.

Portishead - You listen to dub step in your car.

Less Than Jake - You hate Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - You hate No Doubt.

No Doubt - You love MXPX.

Sublime - You are undeniably white, you like the X Games.

Nine Inch Nails - You've done a lot of acid, you had an undercut - you are a sound engineer.

White Zombie - You wore green army cargos and combat boots, you write for a horror movie blog.

Pavement - You work on your Mac at a cafe with free Internet and $6 pieces of cake.

Primus - You only like Primus.

Blur - You moved to England for 6 months after you graduated high school and then wouldn't stop talking about London for 2 fucking years.

Bjork - You have a degree in environmental design.

Limp Bizkit - You're a date rapist.

Superchunk - You sell vinyl on Ebay.

They Might Be Giants - You write intellectual satire - you are socially weird.

Tool - You are a line cook who does a lot of meth.

Veruca Salt - You wear cute, knitted mittens.

Bush - You worked at a t-shirt store with ironic slogans, you still have chin legnth hair parted in the middle.

Everyone hates teenagers, except teenagers

I'm a person who can remember everything. Actually a more accurate statement is I have an incredible long term memory and a terrible short term memory. I can remember Danny Hulton's journal entries in grade one but I can't remember to buy bread crumbs to make dinner on my way home from work. When you're in primary school, your life is at it's most current stage. When you're thirteen and under you don't have the ability to reminisce yet, you talk about what happened that day and then you move on. When you enter high school you reminisce about primary school and by grade 11 you're reminiscing about all the times your got drunk at parties and threw stuff off balconies the previous two years. When you enter university you reminisce about dumb shit you did when you were a teenager and amazing stories about Jeremy Gray doing a back flip off a hotel into a boat harbour. Your twenties are a blur and when you hit thirty you reminisce about everything that seemed like it happened a year ago when in actuality it happened five years ago. This makes your start realizing that pictures of parties you were at when you were seventeen were a mind melting thirteen years ago. When I was fourteen, eighteen year olds seemed like they were thirty and the age of twenty-three seemed unfathomable. I had no idea what being twenty three meant at all. Now I'm thirty and I look at twenty year olds like they're thirteen. I wasn't mature when I was twenty, I was mature enough to live on my own but I ate chips, pancakes and drank 950 cans of Steeler beer everyday. Now I've become something I never thought I would be: an ageist. I look down upon 20 year olds and teenagers because I know more than them about life than they do. I can't have a conversation with them because everything they are experiencing I already experienced ten years ago. Everyone hates teenagers except teenagers themselves. When you're in your teens you want respect that you don't deserve and then you grow up you realize why you didn't get it. Looking beyond that I can relate to twenty year olds because I loved being twenty, I had a job with the government, made a lot of money, and drank on patios all summer.

Black Hole Sun

The first time I heard Black Hole Sun was actually the first time I saw the Black Hole Sun video. I didn't watch Much Music, I watched re-runs of the Wonder Years at 4:30pm on CBC, but for some reason in May of 1994 I was watching music videos right before dinner and Soundgarden came on. I was, and still am the type of person who is mesmerized by visuals and colours (even though I'm colour blind)and this video at the time seemed revolutionary, but also I really connected with the song. It just sounded great and that's all I've ever cared about in music is if it sounds good or not, that's the point right? I never usually care what the artist is saying because half of the time it's bullshit. I care about riffs and drum fills and pocketed bass lines. That moment watching Chris Cornell with his new haircut was what got me into music. And what a great time to get into music it was, right when the storm of alternative nation was erupting, indie music was mainstream, under produced bands were being exposed, it was glorious.
After I heard this song I wanted to hear more new songs so I got my friend Jess to make me a mix tape. On this tape was Radiohead - Creep, Soul Asylem - Someone to Shove, Smashing Pumpkins - Rocket, Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun, Hole - Violet, White Zombie - Thunderkiss 65, and Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit. I listened to this tape all summer, at cottage campfires until 3:00am, on road trips to my grandparents house in Rochester and on my walkman that played to fast sitting outside the convenience store all night drinking liter, glass bottles of Coke. The summer of '94 was one of the greatest summers of my life, it would be the last summer with no actual responsibility because I wasn't old enough to be forced to get a real job. I cut lawns all summer and made about a hundred dollars a week which when you were 14 in 1994 was the equivalent to a million dollars. I spent it all on food because I wasn't drinking, smoking pot or buying CDs (because I didn't have a cd player yet). I rode bikes all summer, went swimming and camped in my back yard as an excuse to wander around the neighbourhood all night with my friends. I wanted to have a girlfriend but I didn't get one until the fall when I entered high school, because I didn't want to date any of the 10 girls that I knew at the time.

Dancing part deux

OK so I can't dance, not in any trained or conventional manner. But I did form a style of dancing that is both original and totally ripped off. Obviously I put my own spin on it, but it was a style of dancing pretty indigenous to alternative music listening between 1994 and 1996. I don't have a name for this dancing but its similar to skanking, some may call it freak dancing. I first saw it at an all ages show in a high school gym in 1995, a girl named Becky Weston was dancing in brown cords, a cardigan and combat boots to a band called the Stillborns. She was waving her arms like you would in a skank, arms bent and moving side to side but her feet weren't kicking out and she wasn't spinning around. More and more after that I saw other kids doing this, and at the time I didn't question it but now I wonder who came up with this? Soon after I saw people dancing like this in a 1996 documentary about the north west music explosion "Hype" and also in the crappy film portrait of mid 90's style and music "Empire Records." OK so it was great to see Liv Tyler in a tight sweater, plaid skirt and docs one more time, but that doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't care about any characters in the movie at all.
Anyhow this is the only way I have ever danced. I dance this way all rock music I enjoy and I even danced like this once at a Latin dance club to horrified onlookers. At a local concert when I was 16 (again in the same QECVI high school gym) I danced so hard like this, jumping, flailing, my legs tossing around like limp noodles, I pulled out my groin and couldn't try out for rugby.

From the department of obvious shit: White people are bad dancers

I live in Toronto, and every Saturday you can dance in the large back room of the Clinton's which plays all 60's pop. Mostly stuff like The Beatles, James Brown, Wilson Picket, your basic hits from Motown and Atlantic records. In any case I really like dancing to this music, its pretty much the only music I will dance to. Some people will dance to anything just because they like dancing. This is not me. I can only dance to music I am familiar with, enjoy, and know the lyrics too. Knowing the lyrics to a song I am dancing to is imperative since most of my dancing consists of just singing along. Now this goes for any type of music I enjoy from Michael Jackson to Smashing Pumpkins, however you don't hear Cherub Rock in dance situations very often and you can't really dance to it. This is obviously not a big problem for me specifically going back to my point about just singing along to the music I am dancing to. But this music from the 60's is pretty much the best dance music that has been produced in the past five decades. My formative years in the 90's were dominated by alternative rock, boy bands and pilled up ravers dancing to jungle. So, how was I ever supposed to learn how to dance? I never listened to modern dance music, because it's awful and no one I ever knew was a good dancer.

Why is dancing so inherently easy in other cultures? Its because all their music is based on being danceable. Most music in South America, Spanish culture, Africa, and India are all made so you can listen and dance to it simultaneously. I grew up listening to alternative rock and punk, attached to these are forms of dancing but more accurately forms of jumping, screaming and falling into other people. Even white kids who listened to music with rhythm such as rap and techno, didn't dance to it, they just enjoyed it while playing Sega. Or blasting it out the windows of their Toyota Civic hatch backs at a volume that would rival a nuclear bomb detonation. I always wondered what the fascination was with parking in donut shop parking lots and amplifying Tupac so loudly out of car stereos it would set off car alarms. That's small town,white living for ya.

As I stared out into the crowd at Clinton's on Saturday night I saw a sea of white faces, clenching beer bottles in their hands and bobbing up and down. Their feet didn't move a lot, their arms do most of the dancing as well as their heads keeping time as they nod up and down. Couples awkwardly grope each other not moving in simultaneous rhythm as they keep trying to regain a steady movement they can maintain for a solid minute. I always thought everyone was looking at me, judging as I tried desperately to dance well, copying any move I could from someone who looked like they knew what they were doing. But then I realized no one knew what they were doing.

Nothing has changed since I was 14. Maybe I never learned to dance because I went to school dances for only one year in high school: grade 9. And what did I do at them? What everyone other 14 year old boy did, I waited until they played a slow dance song (Don't Cry by Guns and Roses) so you I could try and make out with a girl. So at least I learned how to do that. Thank you Jen Beck and Rebecca Campbell for those private lessons.

1st semester of grade 10 - One Hot Minute

In grade 10 I left the suburbs and went to school downtown. This isn't exactly like comparing moving from the burbs to Manhattan, but at the time for me, it kind of was. I was now at a school where expression was encouraged so I died my hair black, got a wallet chain and started wearing my dad's old green khakis and his beat up old blue zip up hoodie from the 70's. I was at a school where I didn't know anyone but pretty soon I had made a few friends. My first friend was Hrag, we both wanted to start a band but we didn't know how to play our instruments yet so we just listened to a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I had never really listened to the Chili's much but when I was 15 One Hot Minute came out and got into them through that record. Of course I knew Under The Bridge but I had never really listened to Blood Sugar Sex Magic which is the album you should get into the Chili's with. A friend of mine who's favourite band is Van Halen once told me that he got into VH through the album 5150 their first record Sammy Hagar after the departure of David Lee Roth. Not exactly the record you should fall in love with Van Halen with. This was the same with One Hot Minute, the first and only record with Dave Navaro on guitar after the departure of guitarist John Frusciante. A lot of Chili's fans dismiss this record but it has some really great songs on it, mainly the singles Warped, Aeroplane and My Friends. Sure it's nothing compared to the Frusciante albums but Navarro does a great job, he fit in well with the band and their sound, he was a little heavier but he was still funky. After that I went backwards and got really into the Chili's back catalogue mainly Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Uplift Mofo party plan but I still think that Warped is one of the best album openers I have ever heard. I also think Aeroplane is one of the best video's of the 90's.

Gossip Column 1995

I have a friend who still believes every ridiculous piece of popular gossip he hears. Example: When I was in university in 2003 he told me that Damon Albarn had AIDS and that he got it from Blur drummer, Dave Rowntree. This of course is untrue and the rumour probably formulated via broken telephone from Oasis' Noel Galligher saying of Blur in around 1995 "I wish they would catch AIDS and die." The point I'm getting at is that my friend is now 30 and he stills introduces these rumours as actual topics of conversation. I'm pretty skeptical of these types of rumours but like most people I believed a lot of this crap when I was a teenager. I believed that Da Brat and Lil Kim had a gallon of semen pumped from there stomachs. I believed Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself, however I never believed that he was Paul from the Wonder Years or the kid from Mr. Belvedere.



My favourite false claim from when I was 15 was that the Nirvana song Sliver was about Kurt getting molested by his grandfather. I don't remember who the girl was who told me this, but she was the kind of girl who was intent on grieving over Kurt Cobain's death for as long as she could. She was also the type of person intent on co-opting other peoples sadness to in turn be depressed herself, and fit in with the popularized, morose generation of the mid 90's. Anyways, she told me that the song Sliver was about Cobain getting molested by his grandfather. At the time I didn't really care about Nirvana, I cared about Weezer, so I was slanted towards debating this claim instead of excepting it as a fan. I asked her why she thought that and her basis for the argument was that in the song Cobain sang over and over "grandma take me home." This seemed pretty weak and I never believed this claim.Nowhere in this song could I find evidence that Kurt was claiming to have been raped by his grandfather. Kurt was most certainly depressed and wrote a lot of dismal poetry but he also wrote a lot of dumb punk rock too. Sliver sounds like, quite literally, the story of a kid having a shitty time at his grandparent's house while his parents were at the movies.

Buying Pot

I recently had a conversation about buying pot. I would like to make clear that I don’t buy pot (not for a very long time at least) but never the less this is what the conversation was about and the person I was conversing with casually told me that they only buy weed online. ONLINE? Apparently you can send cash in the mail to an online “dealer” in British Columbia and they send you weed via Canada Post. He said despite how sketchy this transaction sounds that this site has the best customer service he has dealt with online buying, “Better than Ebay and Amazon” he said to me. I was amazed. This was the last of the things that the Internet could not sell I thought, but I was apparently wrong. We don’t need stores anymore; we can cut out the middleman, now it can be just manufacturers and your house.
The whole thing just got me to think how much has changed in the way we live our lives in such a short time.
In the 20th century the world gave birth to the car, the television, films, the radio, and the computer all things that revolutionized society. Since 1994 we have launched so many things that never thought we would ever need to rely on but we completely do.

When I was 14 the Internet existed but nobody had it (I didn’t physically use it until I was 15 and I still didn’t really get what it did).

Cell phones also existed but again nobody had them except doctors and coke dealers. If you worked on Friday night and didn’t call people at dinner time to make plans you were screwed because at 9:00pm no one was home and there was no way to get a hold of them.
Now we text our friends all day while at work and never pick up our phones to talk EVER!

Much Music only played music videos and every show they played had to do with playing music videos.

You couldn’t download any music; you had to buy an album even if you only liked one song on it.

You don’t have to wait in line for concert tickets anymore. Now you can just wait until the second they are available online and then have some scalper buy all of them (the second after they are available online) and you buy them off of him on Craigslist for double the price. Thank God for that convenience huh?
But at least now people line up at high-end shoe stores to buy designer sneakers. This I don’t understand.

There were no email lists; everything came in the mail (today’s is much more efficient, although I liked getting newsletters in the mail from the Green Day idiot club).

Reality television didn’t exist (except COPS and The Real World).

CD burners didn’t exist, until I was 17 and no one had them for another 2 or 3 years after that. I can’t remember the first CD I ever burned, but I remember going to someone else’s house when I was 20 to download all the music I wanted for a keg party and burn it onto a CD. That took 4 hours.

Digital camera’s existed but they cost thousands of dollars. The first time I ever used one was 1999 and it was 3 mega pixels and was the size of a brick.

DVD’s didn’t exist until 1997 and no one started buying them until I was 21 (2001).

When I was 14 you had to buy everything at a store. Very few times in my young life did I order something from a catalogue other than albums or t-shirts or skateboards. Now you can buy a house on Ebay. You don’t have to interact with anyone anymore when making a purchase you just have to order it. This is not to say that retail stores aren’t still thriving but even stores are becoming more condensed. They will eventually condense into websites.

It was hard to get porn when you were under 18 and if you scored a Playboy underage you kept it forever. Now porn is a bigger than the music industry and we can view porn 24 hours a day for free at any age. I kind of wish this was around when I was 15.

Basically if you’re dedicated you can stay in your house and live your entire life electronically without any human interaction. In 20 more years you won’t even have to be dedicated that’s just the way it will be and if we don’t learn to live with it we’ll be struggling to catch up.

Oh and of course you don’t have to go to a paranoid guy’s dark apartment to get weed anymore you just have to order it online and have it delivered in the mail along with the birthday card from your grandma.

The biography of my grade 5 class

Public school gym class sucks if you're not a jock. If you're fat or shitty in nets you’re totally fucked. This is a bio of my grade five class (starting top left and going right) and I reserve the right to spell everyone’s last name incorrectly.

Bobbie Joe Reese
Bobby Joe got a lot of flack for being over weight and most jokes consisted of her eating incredible large things like buildings and planets. The brilliance of grade 5 students is astounding isn’t it?

Robbie Hopkins
Robbie was one of my best friends and he used to wear rubber boots all the time because he was too lazy to lace up shoes. We once sold an old skateboard to his younger next-door neighbour for 50 bucks and then hired this older, mentally delayed kid named Mike to buy us a Playboy with our industrious earnings.

Christa Balkasoon
I had a big crush on Christa and I ended up dating her in grade eight but I was afraid to kiss her. She had hearing aids and I used to endearingly tease her that she had AIDS in her ears.

Jess Fleming
Jess was my best friend and still is to this day. Jess has always been the same, a little beyond her years and little removed from popular thought and humorously cynical. I could have easily pictured Jess in grade 5 with a smoke in her hand bitching about pop culture and explaining the genius of Mike Patton and John Waters.

Jay Verney
Jay was the tough guy and didn’t care if he got in trouble. One day he just moved away and no one ever saw him again. Cleverly the week before he moved, he borrowed as many Nintendo games as he could off of everyone and then got the fuck out of Dodge.

Graham Weston
Graham lived behind me and I was good friends with him. We actually got into stamp collecting this year.

Matt Milligan
Matt was a powerhouse who had moved to my city from Oshawa. He always had tons of money and would take us to the candy store at lunch. He was the strongest kid in school and excelled at sports. I saw him beat up Todd Adam and Matt Emigh at the same time once, no one jumped in to save them because at the time we thought he would literally kill us.

Marlena Szpunar
Marlena wasn’t especially popular but wasn’t un-popular either she was just kind of around, at least that how I perceived her existence. I never knew her that well even though she lived about 10 houses away from me my entire life. Marlena was an excellent student and her family was also a bunch of geniuses her brother was an engineer and her mother was a physics professor. In high school Marlena would become the hottest girl in school and become a model. Some grade twelve guy scooped her up about a month into her high school career.

Nikki Rust
Niki was a girl from Texas and I’m pretty sure I was afraid of for some reason. I was good friends with her brother Bart. Bart was a great baseball player because in Texas they take that sort of thing seriously. He thought our baseball leagues were a joke when he was 10 and used to pitch balls right at kids heads on purpose.


Matt Emigh
Matt (nick named Will) was one of my best friends but he got picked on a lot. His claim to fame was that his dad drove a Hostess chip truck and Matt bartered with everyone using chips. Of course Matt very rarely produced these chips but when he did everyone knew exactly how much they owed them for example, “Hey Will you owe me 5 big bags and 7 little bags.” The thing is even though Matt hardly ever produced chips no one ever stopped bartering with him for chocolate bars or baseball cards. I guess everyone always had an illusion of a grand pay off one day.

Me
I don’t remember myself from grade 5 but I do remember doing poorly in school and I remember where I sat in class. Actually, maybe I don’t.

Robert Williams
Robert was the bad kid. Robert was always getting into trouble and thus you could blame anything bad you did on Robert and the teacher would believe you. Robert was an amazing artist and if he had gotten to go to an arts program he would have been fine. Sadly though Robert was pushed through the system with no guidance and then got really into acid.

Luke King
Luke had a vibrating chair in his rec room. I spent the better part of a summer playing the card game Asshole in his basement.

Claire Dixon
Claire was the girl from England. Claire was a really cool girl who was always a little strange but in an interesting and artistic way. She was at a young age an intellectual and a fantastic writer and poet with thoughts way above her age. She gave me the treat out her lunch every day because every day my lunch sucked without fail.

Jessica Ross
I gave this girl a hard time and I have no idea why. I think I had a crush on her when I was in grade two and this other girl Analise made fun of me about it so I started disliking Jessica to prove this other girl wrong. I guess that just stuck.

Todd Adam
Todd was the kid with two first names, which is kind of like an omen for evil. The fact was that Todd was a pretty nice kid but he had a wild streak. Todd also had an uncontrollable oral fixation; he chewed on everything like a hamster. All his sleeves had been chewed apart and he ate all his pens and pencils. At least once every two days Todd would have a pen explode in his mouth and he’d be covered in ink leaving him looking like some sort of cannibalistic murderer with a bowl cut.

Geoff Fisher
Geoff was the cool guy and another best friend of mine. Geoff was a really confident guy who was good at just about everything but he wasn’t a jerk at all. He never took any criticism about his interests or what how he chose to dress seriously because whether he knew it or not Geoff was a trend setter. Everyone would make fun of something he was wearing and within a week everyone would have purchased what Geoff was wearing (baggy pants or a hat with a metal plate on it.) Geoff also started the No Fear shirt revolution at my school.
Back when things were pure I spent my entire grade 8 summer hanging out with Geoff, riding bikes, hanging out at my cottage and watching Stand By Me. That was the best summer of my life. Other than the summer after 1st year university when I got shit faced everyday.

Doug Sibley
Doug wasn’t a bad guy but he was nerdy. His family were all the same way too, they were like a Saturday Night Live sketch of a stereotypical family of nerds. At a school charity auction his family auctioned off a night with them in their hot tub. And the other nerdy family the Toppings bid on it and won. I would give a million dollars to have a videotape of that spectacular evening. I also changed a sign on his front gate from BEWARE OF DOG to BEWARE OF DUG.

Matt Bonaparte
I hung out with Matt quite a bit. His best friend was Tyler Dungy and they had their own little clique of girls that they hung out with. And if you haven’t already assumed this I will confirm it for you...yes, his nickname was Boner.

Tyler Dungy
Tyler’s nickname was Spike and I have no idea why. In our grade one yearbook under desired profession he wrote cement plant worker. I guess everyone just wrote down what his or her dad did though, except me. I wrote down that I wanted to be a comedian. Billy Bevens wrote down that his favourite food was side pork.

Mike Rochon
Mike was another wild child from the burbs, I think this is the only picture in Mike’s public school career he wasn’t crossing his eyes in. There are many great stories about Mike but I like the one where he built a gas bomb out a slim fast container. When it exploded on to the side of his house covering it in gas fueled flames he tried to extinguish the fire by smothering it with pieces of chopped wood.

Steve Oakley
Steve was like the mascot of our school, he was a short, doughy little character who was a great artist and he was hysterically funny. Steve was the obsessed with the concept of “gay” not homosexuality but gay. We didn’t really know what gay was but making light of anything gay was hysterical when we were 11. It basically went as far as referring to everything as gay i.e. “You’re gay”, “that’s gay” “stop being so gay.” Steve’s life also revolved around three stuffed frogs he owned who he named the Doses. There was the leader Steve Dose, the middle Dose Matt Dose and Sean Dose was the gay Dose. Steve lived in a fantasy land of comic strips he drew of the Doses. The Doses all had tuxedos and remote control Jeeps and they all listened to Gangsta Rap.

Mike Coles
Mike was the third wild child in class. Mike was a very nice kid who did well in school but was really reckless. He also never got caught for any of the damage he caused on a daily basis. Mike always got us into trouble though and we were always getting hurt somehow by involving ourselves in his schemes. But the one time when I accidentally hit him in the face with a brick his parents lost their fucking minds on me as though I had destroyed his life by giving him a bruise. They forbid me from hanging out with Mike citing me as a bad influence never knowing that Mike would convince us to do things like ride our BMX bikes off a cliff and onto a rock beach.

Danny Hulton
Danny was a good friend of mine and at the time I never saw the writing on the wall for him to be a possible nerd candidate. However right around the time this picture was taken Danny was just discovering Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons and computers. But Danny would have made a great indie rocker, he had the hair (and later on the glasses) and he was into the Doors.

Nicole Steglich
Nicole was very vibrant and creative. I used to play Mario Kart on Super Nintendo with her at her house all the time.

Jenna Ray Leader
I surprisingly remember this girl's name but I couldn’t tell you a thing about her or what ever happened to her. I don’t even remember if she was in that class for the whole year.

Tracy Shales
This is my one story about Tracy Shales. One time her cat had kittens and some crawled under her bed and died. Then when a bad odor began growing in her disastrous room she cleaned out the junk pile from under her bed and found rotting, half de-composed kittens.

Tara McMun
Tara was the smallest person I ever knew except for her sister who must have weighed about 12 pounds when she was 10 years old.

The time I sort of met Notorious B.I.G.

The time I sort of met Notorious B.I.G.

On my 16th birthday I got to visit NYC. I tagged along on a road trip with my mom who was taking one of her students to interview for a summer internship with Michael Moore. This was in 1996 and at the time Michael Moore wasn't as big a deal as he is today. He had a cult following but wasn't a national celebrity yet. Anyways, I got to go to his office and although he wasn't there I looked through his CD's and thought it was cool that he listened to Rage Against the Machine. Looking back though, this was a pretty obvious listening choice for him.
We stayed at my mom's cousin George's house. George is a very straight laced, corporate business man with little interest in popular culture or anything artsy for that matter. Needless to say he wasn't very impressed that his attached neighbour in his New Jersey gated community was a loud, partying, gangsta rapper named Notorious BIG. Biggie like Michael Moore was also not a huge household name yet because A) he had only been around a few years B) rap hadn't yet exploded into the monster that it is today and C) he wasn't famous for being dead yet. So, I didn't really know him because of all of these reasons and the fact that I had absolutely no interest in rap at all.
Even though George hated Biggie (mostly because of the noise that he made) he managed to keep newspaper clippings of all the violent crimes Biggie had been involved in. I guess George did in some way think it was mildly amusing or "cool" that was living next door to a famous rapper.
So, while I was visiting two things happened involving Biggie that I like to tell people (especially teenagers who love Biggie Smalls, which makes me look cool.) The first thing is that the night I stayed at George's, Biggie not surprisingly had a loud party. When the party was in full force my mom yelled at Little Kim and Faith Evens telling them to shut up when they were talking loudly on a balcony outside my mom's room when she was trying to sleep.
The second thing is that the next day when I was leaving the house to go to NYC I ran into Biggie and his even larger bodyguards/entourage and he said to me "Party loud enough for ya'll?" to which I responded "No."
That was my meeting with Biggie Smalls.
A few months later Biggie got killed and everyone knew who he was. I told my friends at that point that I had a chance meeting with him and everyone actually believed me because they new I was clueless when it came to rap.

Dating in high school

Dating in high school. It's the same 10 years later except sex is probably more common and people aren't as awkward and ugly as they were in high school.
Falling in love for the first time is lot like smoking pot for the first time. You're wondering if it worked. Is what I'm feeling love? How do I know I love them? I guess you just know. I remember the first time I knew I was in love... not surprisingly I was 17 and drunk and I told my girlfriend I was in love with her. I meant it but like many more times I would need alcohol to boost my confidence to express myself. Later that night I had a dream that I pissed myself, but when I woke up luckily it was a dream and I was dry. Another magical night at John's place.

Things you believed in high school

-If the bus is even 5 minutes late that means you don't have to go to school. It's the law you know?
-If the teacher is even 5 minutes late showing up for class that means you can leave and class is cancelled. It's the law you know?
-If you press your temples hard enough you'll die.
-Anyone who could do any sort of half assed Metallica solo was the best guitarist you knew.
-They changed the name of Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they couldn't legally call it chicken anymore.
-Someone in a grade ahead of you put acid in a teachers cup of coffee and the teacher freaked out and had to go to the hospital.
-Someone in a grade ahead of you wrote a phiosphy exam and the only question on the exam was: Why? And the student wrote: Why not? And they got 100%
-Someone in a grade ahead of you wrote an exam on acid and wrote the entire essay on one line of the page
-Drug dealers laced their weed with cocaine. Anytime you got really stoned you'd claim that it was laced with something. But why would a drug dealer add a really expensive drug to their weed at no extra cost?
-If you go to Jane and Finch corner in Toronto you'll get shot guaranteed.
-Cyprus Hill smoked six pounds of pot in one day.
-Dean is wearing a gas mask on the album cover of Ween's the Pod because the band members were huffing aerosol through the entire recording.
-A guy tried to cross the border with sheets of acid taped to his chest and he got nervous and started to sweat and all the acid entered his skin through osmosis. He freaked out and now he's in Kingston's metal hospital because he thinks he's a peach tree and the nurses have to water him.
-You know a guy who knows a guy who owns a bait shop that sells worms to McDonald's to make burgers out of.
-You know a guy who knows a guy who owns a lumber yard that sells saw dust to McDonald's to make burgers out of.
-Hoverboards are real but the government has made them illegal.
-Rob Zombie was on tour and stopped in Kingston to go trick or treating.
-A family in your neighbourhood went on vacation and when they came back all their stuff had been stolen except for their toothbrushes and their camera. They keep using their toothbrushes and when they get their film developed it's pictures of the burglars sticking their toothbrushes up their asses.
-If you eat Mr. Noodles raw you'll get cancer.
-If you eat raw hotdogs you'll die.
-There is a park in your neighbourhood where: you'll get stabbed, raped, pregnant, people worship Satan and sacrifice animals, older kids get drunk and beat the shit out of younger kids that come in.
-When you get your license there will be something to do.

Remember the radio?

Remember the radio? Remember when you couldn't just download anything you wanted exactly when you wanted it? There was a time when you had to wait to hear a song and it was special when you heard it. Everything is constantly evolving. My grade seven teacher used to call my generation the "microwave" generation meaning everything had to be instant. This was of course true, we had Nintendo and microwaves and always wanted things to be done that instant however, we still had a few things you had to wait for. You had to wait for a movie to come out on video, you had to wait for a music video to come on Much Music and you had wait to hear a song on the radio. You couldn't just download it and if you wanted that song you had to spend $18.00 and buy the whole CD. I had a lot of CDs when I was young for the soul function song.
The same went for discovering music, you had to subscribe to fan zines, research record labels and belong to fan and CD of the month clubs to find new music. Now you can find and preview anything instantly on the net.
There was a station called Z ROCK that was syndicated out of Austin Texas in Watertown NY and we could receive it an hour away in Kingston. This station would serve as a pre-Internet source for new music. Music like Weezer, Beck, Hole, Bush, Silverchair, Bad Religion, Korn, Type O Negative, Hum, The Nixons, The Toadies, Rage Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson and many more. Basically the entire DGC Records roster which housed the most popular bands of the moment. Every once in while you could even hear Love Buzz by Nirvana. But, just as soon as we had got a taste for new alternative rock it was taken away from us and the station was replaced by a country station. This was Christmas of grade 11.
Hearing a gem on the radio is still as rewarding as getting a letter in the mail. Everyone still loves getting mail and everyone still likes it when Eruption and You Really Got Me by Van Halen are played back to back on the radio. Or failing that Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed. And if it's a parallel universe you may catch Black Number One by Type O Negative.

Grade 10

In grade 10 I switched high schools and left the suburbs to go to a school downtown. Here is a little background about Kingston: The first fact is that it takes about 15 minutes to drive from one extreme end of the city to the other, 18 if you hit traffic. Traffic lasts for about 20 minutes at 5:00 when everyone gets off of work. Consequently looking back there was a lot of great divisions culturally in Kingston squeezed into a very small amount of space. Everything seemed so far apart and every part of town had it's own feel and it's own population yet dividing the wealthiest most well manicured part of town and the poorest most dangerous part of town was separted by about 5 minutes of driving.
Driving about 7 minutes from my neighbourhood to where my high school was located made a big difference. Everyone in my neighbourhood really strived to be the same and everyone was into hockey, tapered jeans, no fear shirts and grades. Downtown everyone was into haircuts, punk rock, all ages shows, pot, acid and mescaline. Drugs didn't interest me too much but new music did so I liked all these new alternateens immediately and was soon wearing ripped oversized work pants, shirts and ties and dying my hair blue.
The other fact that I want to make known is that every area in Kingston is not referred to in a north, south, east, west fashion it is referred to by name. The west was the "township" which is where I lived and basically everything else east of that was downtown even though it wasn't all downtown. My area, the township, was divided into 3 parts. My immediate neighbourhood was Reddendale, the middle was Henderson Place, and north of that was Bayridge or more affectionately known as the Ridge. The Ridge also had Cataraqui Woods which was inhabited solely by skids.
Downtown could be easily broken up into 3 main parts north and south of Princess (street) and Rideau Heights. North and south of Princess has always been a phenomenon and as easily as I can put it the south side is rich and well kept and the north side is considerably crappier and shadier. By phenomenon I mean that literally either side of Princess st which is a two lane street that spans the city is divided into these two extremes. Not to say that north of Princess or N.O.P. was horribly bad it was just a little undesirable. I spent a better part of my youth on this end of town and most of my friends and my girlfriend lived there. My high school was south of Princess and that neighbourhood was almost exclusively inhabited by doctors, lawyers, business and property owners and Queens University professors and all their long haired, burnout kids. It was downtown and much more open minded than my neighborhood but still sheltered by money. Rideau Heights was the force in town not to be reckoned with.
Rideau Heights was the northwest corner of the city which was out of everyone's way. We didn't go to their neighbourhood and they didn't come to ours, it was a different world. It was the projects of Kingston and compared to Rexdale it probably looks like Beverly Hills but lets face it this was a sheltered, small city and this neighbourhood of criminals and bikers was scary shit where I was from. For one semester of grade 11 I went to the feeder school for Rideau Heights, Queen Elizabeth Collegiate or QE for short. A lot of QE kids families had generations of family in prison, people had dirt floors, drug addictions and parents offering you bong hits while trying to sell you stolen stereo equipment. Everyone was doing B&E's, everyone had a child of their own in grade 10 and they were feeding their infants fries and Coke. There was a fight every period, the cops came at every break to make sure everything was ok and the fire alarm got pulled almost every other day. It was the best time every had in high school. I was at QE in a special theatre program with no homework and kids attending from all over the city, I was dating a 19 year old when I was 16 and we partied every night. I got a 90% in the program and I almost got to have sex.

Grade 9

Grade 9 was a great year... For a while. I am only going to talk about the good aspects of it though, mainly about getting more and more immersed with alternative rock and punk. My friend Robbie and I had been listening to a lot of Green Day and Offspring and we had at this point now bought their back catalogue and I had also bought the Dead Milkmen's first record Big Lizard In My Backyard. We knew that what we were listening to was mainstream but it was also new and we had never heard music that was fast and aggressive like this basically we didn't know what punk was and we didn't know we were listening to it. All I knew was that punks had Mohawks but I didn't know what they listened to. So we started finding other punk bands like Bad Religion and Rancid to listen to but at the same time I was listening to new bands like Blur, Oasis, Bush, Nine Inch Nails and Eric's Trip. Then one day I got a big order from Columbia House and a band called Weezer came in the box with a bunch of assorted junk. I wore this record out. I started with the single Buddy Holly and then listened to the back half of the record over and over again for about a week, then I decided to listen to the first four songs and they were incredible too. Once I started listening to the record in a linear entirety I was completely sold. Never had I heard such a well built album that mixed a sort of alternative pop punk with the feedback of Sonic Youth (even though I didn't know Sonic Youth at the time but I had to describe the record using them) and perfect three part harmonies. But it rocked too, the songs had a fantastic pop sensibility and were fun and big, there were great hooks and it was new. Although I have listened to thousands of bands since then and have had great loves in music for some reason that band has followed me through my entire life since then I have never gotten tired of their music and especially their eponymous debut record. I listened to the entire record everyday for years afterward occasionally finding unreleased tracks to keep me occupied until the new record was released which I kept praying for. In the meantime I found other interesting bands to listen to like Ween which would also stay in my interest through out my highschool years and even until now. I was dating a girl named Jenna Robins who lived in a big house on the edge of my neighbourhood. I can't remember how I met her but I do remember she liked the Beastie Boys a lot and so did I so we became friends and eventually started dating. Before the end of our month or so long relationship she showed me an album her sister had bought called Chocolate and Cheese by a band called Ween. This was different stuff, I didn't even know what genre it was because every song was different on the album, songs about HIV, spinal meningitis, a sick pony, lots of songs about food. I went out right away and bought it and I remember having fights at Jess' going away party about whether we should listen to "Baby Bitch" or "Mr. Would You Please Help My Pony" first. Next up grade 11 and Steve Webster's punk collection and I buy hear Weezer Pinkerton.

Why don't black kids like punk?

Why don't black kids like punk and alternative rock? I don't know. Maybe it's because they have been excluded from so much in white society that they just want to connect more with the music that speaks to their culture ie. rap. Why did I connect so well with alternative rock and punk? One explanation was that it was the immediate voice of my generation. I was always more interested in the melody and the song structure more than the lyrics though. That's not to say that I don't know or was not interested in the lyrics of songs I just paid more attention to the music itself. Anyhow, I connected well with aggressive and faster music like NOFX, Nirvana and Weezer because I was a hyper kid with lots of energy. Also, I identified well with more experimental rock like Pavement, Ween and Erics Trip because I was also interested in more artistically slanted composition. However, I was never interested in rap. A lot of my friends were interested in rap when we were younger but I just never identified with it at all and I hadn't ever liked anything I heard. I thought it was repetitive and boring and slow. I identified with a bigger and faster sound. However I can see now why a lot of kids in Kingston were interested in it: Because we had no black culture to learn from or connect with at all. Rap was distant and strange and new and white suburban kids were interested in that. A lot of kids loved to mimic the identity of rappers because they seemed dangerous and different and although everyone wants to fit in when they're young they also want to be different and unique. To be honest it was a very hard line to balance on and I always sucked at trying to be different and comfortable with myself. This was because I was different than most kids I knew when I was young and I didn't know how to fit in because I didn't know what I was interested in. And I wasn't interested in sports which is what EVERYONE was interested in. When I found music I realized what I was interested in finally and I started feeling more comfortable and confident. But I'm getting off topic.
Now as I have mentioned before their were very little visible minorities in Kingston. The minorities who were present wanted to fit in or just grew up with white music like everyone else and were obviously going to be interested in it. My friend Ali Kadeer was a Muslim who was into hardcore music so loud and fast it was incomprehensible. Johnny Manicat a Pilipino kid from the burbs who was the leader of a skate punk band. Mike Butler was a jazz saxophone player and although he tried he was still the whitest black kid I have ever met. So, instead of having actual black people in our city white kids created their own division of ethnic diversity through music. Punk kids who would skate out front of the church on Princess st. would have to endure white kids who thought they were black cruising by in Honda Civic's with obnoxious sound systems and blasting Puff Daddy so loud out of their subs they would set off parked car alarms. It's kind of like in Jurassic Park when their are only female dinosaurs and they spontaneously changed sexes in order to breed, such was a really white town lacking black culture. Some kids had to take it upon themselves to listen to rap and call each other "niggaz" and wear big white jeans from Stitches. God Bless Styles and Flo aka Chris Stebans and Andrew Wagger the original gangsters of Bayridge.