There’s a meme I’ve seen floating around that’s like:
15 years old: “Wow the Dead Kennedys are right about everything!”
25 years old: “Actually there’s a lot more nuance, and the world is a lot more complicated than that.”
35 years old: “The Dead Kennedys were right about everything.”
This is 100% me, but with the Clash. In part because they were more nuanced and humanistic than DK, which is probably why I didn’t really start to appreciate them until my early/mid-20s … but at least now I can affirm that, yup, they were right. Like Craig Finn sings in the Hold Steady’s “Constructive Summer” —
Raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer
I think he might have been our only decent teacher
