Radicalizers
Fugazi Made Me Vegan
Profound life lessons from DC’s finest band
Is there anyone in the world more impressionable — for whom image and identity are more important — than a 14-year-old boy? Maybe there is; I’ve never been a 14-year-old girl, for example. But generally speaking, it’s an age where perhaps the most important thing is deciding who you are, saying it loudly, and building your entire life around it. That’s how we get the cliches in high school dramas about band geeks, goths, jocks, and cheerleaders. So many of us find our friends — and ourselves — by being one thing.
For me, in the early 2000s, that one thing was a constant game of one-upmanship with a few other kids over who knew the most about ’80s punk rock. Who could name every Descendents album? Who could recite tour dates for Black Flag and Hüsker Dü? And above all, who, in our suburban high school a 42-minute train ride from Manhattan’s Grand Central Station and another 20 minutes on the subway from the punk Mecca of St. Mark’s Place, could live that ethos — of authenticity, of rebellion, of saying “fuck you” to everything around us? And maintain that attitude even as our patient and indulgent parents picked us all up from band practice and piled us into the back of their station wagons? My mother even helped me dye my hair before one of my terrible band’s…
