Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 33-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Maybe I got it wrong. I thought the teenage albums list-making exercise on Facebook was designed to create a sense of tactile community through the act of sharing something quintessential about ourselves while considering that others had shared something about their origins and were contemplating ours. That it was based on music from our teenage years was smart because it diversified the input through different eras. Those who were teens a long time ago were confronted with lists made by people who were teens more recently, and that made “us” realize that our formative years were differently lived through in terms of music and the limitations that surrounded getting the actual music and finding more music. Perhaps people with bands like Fugazi, Hole and the Breeders on their lists were struck by something fundamental when they saw the lists of older people. I’m not sure about that. Maybe that part was more obvious.
I thought the list-making exercise intended to point out that the number of hours spent formulating lists could well be applied to future endeavors with other objectives that perhaps had more significant results. I thought that was a clever way to imply and expose a mobilization process and its potential.
“Fight For A Little” from the album Mecca Normal (Smarten UP!, 1986; reissued by K, 1995) (download):
