Asking For It

Part 1

Everyone has a band they are embarrassed to love. I have been a Def Leppard fan since about the fifth grade. Def Leppard is a band that a man in his thirties should be embarrassed to love, but I’m not.  I’ve got no problem driving down the City streets with Pyromania at full blast, singing along in my best Joe Elliot. The band I don’t want you to find out about is AFI.

We’re not talking occasionally throwing on “Very Proud of Ya” at a party, or picking a couple songs from “Answer That and Stay Fashionable” off the juke at the bar. I’m talking entire days with their full discography on shuffle. Full discography. As I type these words, I’m listening to “Burials” for the third time today.

To be blunt, AFI is The Cure for a new generation. They are pretentious, whiny, and live painful sad lives as globe-trotting celebrities. That’s not to say I don’t also love the Cure. There is a time and a place for the Cure, in every one of those times, and every one of those places, Slayer does the job more good.

I would never become an AFI fan based on their newer music. The melodramatic sad-teenager thing does nothing for me, especially knowing it comes from a lyricist two years my elder. At the same time, as a long-standing fan, I love their newer moody music more than their original punk rock albums. When I got my hands on “Crash Love,” I listened to almost nothing else for a month. AFI may be unbearably awful, but they’re so good at it.

I hated AFI the first time I heard them. I was in my early 20’s and funk as puck. My garb was almost exclusively black leather and I listened only to the Misfits in between long drives to see the Misfits. I was political enough to hate Hot Topic, but still hung out there all the time. Dr. Filth ran the register and encouraged all his friends to shoplift. I was so brazen I would put items in my pocket while talking to the manager. These weren’t even items I wanted, I usually threw them in the garbage on the way out of the mall.

A magazine came in with an AFI sampler CD in each issue. Dr. Filth had taken out all the CD’s and given them away to his friends when we stopped in to visit. It had three songs from the new “Black Sails on the Sunset.” I don’t remember which three, and the titles on that album are largely unpronouncable anyway. I listened once and threw it in the garbage.

Continued tomorrow