Perfect From Now On by John Sellers

Author:John Sellers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Gold Soundz

“So drunk in the August sun.”

In April 1992, I graduated from college in the worst possible way: as a possessor of a bachelor’s degree in business administration. That’s right. A guy who liked the literate music of the Smiths and Joy Division, who rocked out to decidely uncorporate bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Replacements, and who had an intense lack of interest in supply-side theory and the behavior of organizations somehow emerged from the fog of college holding a diploma as if it were someone else’s soiled underwear. And suits! I’m mystified that I had failed to consider at the onset of those two years of torture by Excel spreadsheet that business school could only end with the beginning of a very long life of suit wearing. I didn’t like how I looked in suits, felt like a liar, wriggled through weddings and interviews in them, had to have my roommate tie my tie because it didn’t interest me to learn how to do so myself. Near the end of that two-year sentence, I was telling anyone who couldn’t have known otherwise that my major was comparative literature. I stuck it out in business school so as not to feel like a failure—which, of course, was its own sad failure. I should have bailed after that first Finance 101 lecture during which my Israeli professor repeatedly mangled the pronunciation of the words “zero coupon bond.” What I did instead was use any elective space to figure out what I was missing: Italian, creative writing, Shakespeare, poetry. A few months before graduation, with only a single interview lined up and no interest in angling for more, my only option was to start over.

I didn’t know it when I made the decision to return to school as an English major, but my life was also in need of a new soundtrack. I’d gotten a lot of mileage out of the songs that had ushered me through high school and the first four years of college—and look where they’d got me. As previously mentioned, the lyrics of Morrissey had ceased to have their former impact. I still winced or nodded when I heard him singing, “I wear black on the outside/Because black is how I feel on the inside.” But I no longer wore black on the outside because I felt black on the inside; I wore the color because a new wardrobe was too expensive. Listening to the Smiths, Joy Division, the Cure, New Order, and U2 was like trying to get one more wash out of a favorite concert T-shirt.

I tried and failed to latch on to grunge. The bands that made up the genre—particularly Pearl Jam, but also its other heavy hitters Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Nirvana—seemed to be the province of backward-hat wearers. While they brought an acceptable amount of guitar noise, the music itself seemed almost cliché, mere rehashes of Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or the Sex Pistols. I’d already done hard time with those seminal bands, so it seemed okay to tune the newcomers out.

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