Adolescents secretly like feeling eccentric and freakish and alone, hoarding pop arcana and cultivating ever-dweebier erudition
Kurt Cobain once said in an interview that long before he'd heard any actual punk rock music, he studied magazine photos of punk musicians and imagined what the music sounded like. It must have sounded to him -- who knows? -- something like what would later be called grunge.
Adolescents secretly like feeling eccentric and freakish and alone, hoarding pop arcana and cultivating ever-dweebier erudition. They recite lines from cult movies like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," "Repo Man" and "Napoleon Dynamite" as though they were passwords to a speakeasy; wear buttons bearing the names of obscure music groups as if they were campaign ribbons; and list favorite films and books and bands on their Facebook pages as if they were as essential as name and age and gender.
OPINION
In Praise of Not Knowing
By TIM KREIDER
Published: June 18, 2011
Information that we can't find spurs the imagination.