Rites of Passage

My youngest is on his way towards finishing middle school. He’s weathered it pretty well, with a core group of friends and good grades. Middle school was a culture shock for me. I started the process in North Carolina, where I was suprised to come in contact with professed satanists and kids who were doing things I had never experienced before, even though I went to an inner-city elementary school. We moved to Virginia shortly after middle school started and I ended up in elementary school for one more year, which was a much better fit for me.

When I transitioned to junior high the following year, I was again confronted with a different culture. I remember everyone going over their favorite album as a way to introduce ourselves. Mine was Fore by Huey Lewis. 98% of the other kids named Appetite For Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. I didn’t have MTV at the time, so GNR wasn’t really on my radar. Imagine my surprise to find out this was album of rampant misogyny with a rape scene on the inner cover.

When in Rome, though. Within a year, I had adapted to not only listening to similar bands, but getting really into their music. I even had a Winger t-shirt like the kid everyone made fun of in Beavis & Butthead.¹ I always felt the need to tell people that I didn’t like the bands themselves (they were reprehensible), but I liked the music. It was a blessing to find music that was closer to my values after my passage through junior high/middle school.

Grunge of course obliterated hair metal when it captured the collective consciousness. Like Mo Diggs writes, “Grunge without the context of hair metal that it rebelled against is just brainy Black Sabbath.” When you had the context, though, it landed.

1. A year later, I had moved on, but one fine laundry day, I wore that Winger shirt. A kid in the cafeteria boldly informed me, “Winger sucks.” Never shy with my honesty, I responded with a confident, “I know.” ↩︎