Welcome to Before You Were Punk, an interview feature here on Punks in Vegas where we ask your favorite musicians and music biz aficionados one simple question: what made you the music fan you are today?
This installment comes from Felipe Garcia, contributing writer for Punk in Vegas and awesome dude extraordinaire. What made him the music fan he is today? It has a lot to do with cow ass cover-art.
When I was ten, I figured out how to save my lunch money and buy albums from the Best Buy down the street from my house. Walkman in hand and 14 bucks in my pocket, I would walk the few blocks and try to decide which album to buy on the way there. Sometimes I didn’t know what I wanted and told myself to grab the one with the craziest cover art (which is the only way I can explain Papa Roach’s Infest ever coming near my house). I was firm in my belief that rock was the best form of music. If you know me at all, you know I have an active sense of humor, and consequently, the cover art for both Dude Ranch and Enema of the State (the cow ass and Janine Lindemuler, the porn star) left me no choice but to purchase them.
I got really into Blink 182 after listening to “Waggy,” which is still my favorite song of theirs. To some it may seem odd, but listening to Blink got me into bands like Comeback Kid, Bane, The Movielife, and Taking Back Sunday. Rap caught my attention only because it was fun to dance to and as someone who has a lot of rhythm, I always found the beats pretty cool. I like heavier stuff a lot more than I used to, and the same applies to softer/acoustic stuff, but those bands were the ones who opened me up to it all.
There’s a certain amount of passion and angst that goes into this kind of music that leaves me no choice but to gravitate towards it. Pop-punk and hardcore, to me, are as real as it gets. There are no stupid turntables to blame if you suck, every song isn’t about groupies or your new Maybach, and I’d poke fun at country but country pokes fun at itself. To me, punk-rock is about screaming lyrics you’ve lived through at the top of your lungs, diving off the stage and watching kids pit so hard that the floor cracking is a real possibility, and feeling like you belong to something bigger than all of us. It’s about those long nights where the only things that made sense to me were the songs coming through my ear buds.
During one of those nights, lost somewhere in the 21 years I’ve been here, pop-punk and hardcore went from a genre I liked to the best therapy there could ever be. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
-Felipe Garcia
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