"and even intelectual," - The Cheap Thrills Of Pop Kulcha Are Bought With Lives Being Sold Cheap

I AM ACCUSED of not being familiar with the oeuvre of one "Darby Crash" which, now that I've found out who the little jerk was and looked into him a little, I'm glad to say,  no, I wasn't and I hope to not become any more familiar with it.  He was one of the dopey kids who rock used and did nothing for as it helped him destroy himself.

Reading about the punk who committed suicide at the age of 22 by heroin overdose forty two years ago,  I read about his "Legacy and Legend":

Over the years, he has come to be revered as a unique songwriter with his myriad literary, musical and philosophical influences, which varied from Friedrich Nietzsche and David Bowie to Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler . . . 

Uh, huh, so it's obviously high quality and admirable stuff, if you find that kind of thing admirable and mistake it for high quality.   Nietzsche, Bowie, Manson and Hitler.  The Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of pop secular-atheist ("commercial" works just as well) amorality, it would seem.   

. . . resulted in lyrics that were unusually wordy and impressionistic in the realm of punk rock at the time, immediately setting Crash and his band apart from most other Los Angeles punk groups of the era. The Germs were captured famously in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 film “The Decline of Western Civilization”. The film features a characteristically hectic and sloppy live show in which Crash, heavily intoxicated and under the influence of several drugs, calls to the audience for beer, stumbles and crawls on the stage and slurs lyrics while members of the audience write on him with permanent markers, and during an interview in the film, Crash also discusses taking drugs onstage to avoid feeling injuries from fan violence and “creeps out there with grudges”.

Good times for idiots too stupid and drugged to know the difference between that and a good time and the producers and directors who are there to cash in on the wreckage as the idiots keep on a' buyin'.

It says earlier in the article:

He met future bandmate Pat Smear (later of Nirvana and Foo Fighters), while in school. Although Darby was regarded as highly intelligent and even intelectual, [sic.] his behavior stopped him from finishing school . . . 

Intelligence is functional or it is meaningless and his behavior was not intelligent. He was a friggin' mess and whatever "intelligence" he had was wasted on a lack of self control and self indulgence.  Intellectual, well, it's easy to impress the idiots of modern kulcha and when you get to the idiots who talk about the dregs of pop music such as is described in the article in such inflated terms - not atypical of pop kulcha scribblage - they wouldn't know an intellect from an asshole.   Which is why so many of them think they're so, so clever.

I wouldn't judge the brat for not finishing school, I've known some extremely admirable and intelligent people who never finished school, even  some who I'd say were intellectual and many with PhDs who are the opposite.  But this wreck was not "intelligent and even intelectual [sic.]".   I wouldn't fault him for his obvious mental illness, he killed himself at too young an age to hold him entirely to blame for his self destruction.  The music industry and fame and fortune and the nihilistic milieu of pop decadence encouraged it.  I had punk figured out as that the first time I heard any of it and listened to the, . . . um . . . "lyrics."  I didn't reject it just because it was as boring as it was stupid.

If you think I'm taking this personally, I've had several people I care about wreck their lives, suffer and inflict suffering and some destroy their lives in what pop-kulcha vulchas hold up as admirably thrilling spectacle,  behavior which they have no intention of enacting in their own, generally affluent, generally decadent always comfortable, college-credentialed, professional lives.

If I had more time I'd relate that to the idiotic bullshit from the New York Times Editorial Board that got people talking yesterday, I don't think the two are unrelated and for pretty much the same reason in a different cul de sac of modern, materialist nihilism.   Western civilization (as if that's ever been a real thing) took any number of wrong turns, though it wasn't the only civilization that did.  The adoption of materialist amorality and the rejection of Jewish religious morality was the biggest.   I am not big on psychologizing people on so little information but I think if this kid and his family hadn't been deprived of that the idiot thrilling spectacle of violence and tragedy of their lives would probably have not happened and they would have had more of a chance at something like happiness.   

This is the choice that is presented explicitly in Scripture, the way of life and the way of death.   I'm sure that some of those who would hold up this long dead kid as something  (and he is a thing to them)  to be admired by others too stupid to know they've got the choice even as they'd never choose it for themselves.  How are they any different from the guy who sold him the heroine he killed himself with or the Fentanyl someone I loved killed himself with?