I Don't Want to Barge in on Your Secrecy

 Weird fact of the day:

In high school, I was obsessed with the bands Catch-22 and Streetlight Manifesto, as every teenaged ska fan was. In particular, I was absorbed by the bass playing on Keasbey Nights and Everything Goes Numb and spent hours upon hours practicing the songs to try and get up to the actual speed they were played at (I mostly accomplished that).*

*While I was in my first high school ska band, our trumpet player was weirdly obsessed with playing bass and trying to prove he was better than me. One time, we were talking about Streetlight and I mentioned how hard the bassline to "Everything Went Numb" was (it is very hard and crazy). He shrugged it off and was like "I dunno I just played along to it first try." I didn't really know what to say. No you didn't? It's clearly fast shredding for like four minutes? You definitely don't know how to play that song?

Those two albums featured significant overlap in players and one of them was Josh Ansley playing bass. He offered two drastically different styles on them, fretless sliding on one and frenetic 5-string walking on the other, and he consumed my imagination as a teen. His playing was the gold standard in my mind and accomplishing something similar was my primary goal. For a little bit, meaning until I bought Destruction by Definition, he also definitely got the "idol" label from me.

For more comments on early Streetlight, and a little bit on bass playing, consult my story on seeing Streetlight play the Kathedral in 2005, a revised version of which is in my 2018 zine on ska. ($5! Cheap!)

I tell you this because today I found out that he is now a new age spiritual bro vlogger:

I guess you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, eh? I realize that the odds of someone else reading this and being as shocked as I am are in the thousandths of a percent range, but this discovery had to get somewhere, right?

Jeeze Tim, you write a post about hating how lean on nostalgia and then churn this shit out.

(•_•)
<) )╯I
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\( (> AM
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(•_•)
<) )╯DUMB
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Okay, now back to reading and listening to Animal Liberation Front hardcore.