Dirty Lenin Hurt My Face
By Justin Quinn Pelegano
I'll be the first to admit, and not without a little pride, that I'm a son of grunge daddies Cobain and Vedder. If you had seen me in high school and college...hand me any music that rang of suffering and "fuck you" and the next second I was blasting it in my headphones at levels hard enough to block out NYC street noise. Or my teachers. Loud enough to block out my parents. And even my unrequited love fixations. Call me a downer, a depressive, cynical, or even completely sane. I can take it. Something about the unadorned and unapologetic "truth" in songs like Nothing Man and Rape Me appealed to my pissed off and super bored soul. Because, after all, I got it. The rest of all y'all were phonies.
Then, well, you know; I grew up and realized that life needn't always revolve around the dark side...or me...comfortable as all that was. And wow! A major side benefit to finding the light (or was that absurdity) in life was a more eclectic music collection. It took me a while to be cool with that. "Um, dudes, is it okay to sing along to The Flaming Lips?" Honestly, it was a watershed moment when I allowed myself to smile at happier musical fare while out in public. Like the time they played Mmm Bop in Tower Records. The moral is that I was easing up in my old age. And good thing too. Because there's no way in hell the younger, baggy pants me would have sat through one riff from Dirty Lenin. And that's a damn shame. It might have changed the course of my life. Or at the very least made people wanna hang with me more. Nobody likes a mope. Anyway, better late than never.
