Photo: emdot, Flickr Creative CommonsI have no idea whether I'd dig STP so much if they were only releasing their first album now. I'd like to say that I'm a sucker for that mid-90s guitar sound and I'm going to go ahead and just say that Scott Weiland was actually a pretty versatile vocalist. He's not exactly Mike Patton, a guy who convinced me that Faith No More had two lead singers when I first heard the band in high school, but Weiland was significantly better than most vocalists of the '90s, at least until too much hard living started taking a toll on his voice.
I know a major reason for my interest in the band is nostalgia. I hated high school. Actually, hate is the wrong word, but with the exception of band, tennis, and the group of friends I had then I don't miss anything about high school the slightest bit. I may not miss my teens, but this was the time when my love of music exploded and started to mature from Garth Brooks and Boyz II Men into something I could use to claim superiority over lesser listeners. Stone Temple Pilots (along with For Squirrels and a handful of other bands) was my favorite during that period, so they obviously still hold some cachet for me. I now look back at my CD collection from that time and realize that I no longer care for about half of the stuff I loved back then, but I still get a little happy when Pandora.com decides to throw up a little Weiland and Co. Sometimes I'm even taken back to that younger version of myself wriggling in an impression of good ole Scott as I pantomime the injection of heroin into my veins.
Of course maybe that's part of it too. Just like I've never had the ambition or comfort with risk to become great at anything, I've never had the guts to self-destruct. The closest I could ever get to that grand story was through my musical icons. That life of caricature and descent is beautiful in an artist's definition of beauty. I'm just too afraid of pain to do it myself.
4 comments:
I still listen to a lot of the bands I listened to in high school. I hated being a teenager too, but I remember the feeling when I discovered music that felt like mine for the first time. I still listen to "August & Everything After" by Counting Crows on a regular basis, and I don't care that they're not cool anymore.
Dude, there's no shame in STP. Core is the only album that I had on cassette that I never got on CD (or now MP3), but always meant to. I'm sure I can still sing most of it. It had to be one of the last albums I bought before I made the switch to CDs. Awesome record.
And Mike Patton is incomparable, but you know that. And supposedly doesn't do drugs, which probably explains why he's still making great music.
You may not love all the music for the same reasons any more but surely you can still appreciate it for the entertainment it provided you in high school.
I never liked STP, but that's cause I'm a bit older than you and saw them as derivative try hards. And I don't drive a sports car and will not comment about the size of my penis.
But I get the high school thing. I didn't discover good music until after I left high school, so never had the release that it offered me later in life.
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