Month: February 2019

Success

Posted on by "Bad" Billy Pratt @ Kill to Party

“Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline.”

I had this incredible moment of content while kissing Sarah in the backseat of my car. “Heroin” was playing on the radio. She had asked me if her breasts were as big as I was expecting- that perhaps her nudes were deceptively angled, the old MySpace trick. She was so nervous I wouldn’t like her that she needed to hold her wine glass with both hands, to prevent spillage.

This worsened when I told her to cut the shit with the sterile, first date, getting to you know chit-chat- the last bold move I’d ever make. She had to put the glass down entirely.

Once in my car, she sat up straight, arched her back, and asked again- somewhere between seductive and genuinely worried. I told her that I’d need a closer look and took the straps of her dress off her shoulders.

And I had this moment, in the back seat, of true connection. I liked her- dark hair, large breasts. Insecure and she didn’t bother to hide it. A kindred spirit left behind by the dating market, looking for something real. This felt different. This felt special.

The day after Christmas, 2016, was the last time any of this were possible.

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Elizabeth Warren and the Death of MTV

Posted on by "Bad" Billy Pratt @ Kill to Party

You smile like a cartoon, tooth for tooth
You said that irony was the “shackles of youth”

If you’re someone who likes getting the ending up front, I’ll spare you the details: the hero of the story is Bill Berry. I had gotten a copy of R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People” the week of its release- the cassette was yellow- and immediately fell in love with the record. While it would be years before I could appreciate the clever writing of singer Michael Stipe, the album served as a welcome departure from what I understood as music in the early 1990s.

While Axl Rose and Metallica were producing work of equal measure, R.E.M. was my first exposure to the idea that things didn’t always need to rock- R.E.M. wasn’t afraid to give a moment space and allow a song to breath- this gave “Drive” room to brood ominously and “Everybody Hurts” time to emotionally settle. “Nightswimming” is still one of my favorite songs and always manages to make me cry.

As much as I loved the record, at twelve years old, I had this awful hunch that I was being duped. I had thought of myself as a kind of emerging rock critic, a junior Robert Christgau, compiling my own Consumers Guide to Rock; I knew what rocked and what sucked.

But there was something fishy about 1992- everything rocked.

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