258 candles-days 159-165

It may seem a little difficult, shoehorning this reflection by Brian Feldman into my intent to post positive stories during this stultifyingly divisive election, but bear with me. In noting that it celebrates both the best and the worst of the World Wide Web, Feldman tips into a truth about nearly everything, that no matter what the experience might be, it can be seen both in a positive and negative light (sometimes by the same person nearly simultaneously). While it is obviously a negative for Semisonic, which in this case loses credit, at least for people who fall for this delusion, it is not only a positive for Green Day (or potentially so; as a punk-sympathizer, if I were Billy Joe Armstrong I would be offended at the notion I sang such inoffensive tripe in such a louche way), but for the recognition that this is how history works. It's the way we attribute the writing of the Bible to various individual writers or The Iliad and Odyssey to the fictional blind poet Homer, even the various misattributions of quotes, real and made up, to long-dead speakers. They become the future "truth" for those works. Some future generation might venerate Green Day's seminal crossover hit "Closing Time" as the moment when postpunk and pop were tethered together, forming some future clumped musical form, like the moment in 1973 when DJ Kool Herc spun one of two turntables repeatedly back to the break, initiating the melange that would become hip hop.