In which I REMINISCE
Spotlights have the tendency to run together for me. I love* having an excuse to do some research and put something together about events of local interest, but it's not like you can devote your life to studying Subject A when you've got a blurb on Subject B due tomorrow.
However, one from last week kinda jumped out at me. See, this isn't the first thing I've ever written about those Hanson chicks.
1997 was notable for two things: I had more hair, and I was the Editor in Chief of a prestigious local high school paper. My job consisted of telling other people what to do and seeing how much of a jackass I could get away with being in print. Hanson's Middle of Nowhere released that May, and for some reason, the drooling morons that I had to spend eight hours of my day with ate it up.
I hated it. Hated it hated it hated it. Otherwise perfectly functional humans were going absolutely bonkers over this blasphemously simplistic cacophonous non-orgy devoted to all the daywalker fun my cold black heart was incapable of having, and it drove me to distraction just to think about it. In self-defense as much as for any other reason, I wrote a quote-unquote review of that album. It was a juvenile, infantile attack piece written less about the music and more about the phenomenon of fandom, and it blamed "MMMbop" and its ilk for basically every ill of 1990s society.
It was so mean-spirited that I actually got hate mail in response, which according to my Journalism teacher was at the time unprecedented. Like a mutant crossbreed of Starving Hyena and Total Bastard, I singled out the weakest offender and absolutely destroyed his letter in my next column. Trustworthy sources told me that I reduced him to tears, and he apparently had to leave school early that day.
That, by the way, was the highlight of my public school experience.
...don't judge me!
(Thanks to some random knoxblab thread for reminding me about this.)
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* I don't love anything, but you get the idea.
It took me until my last year of college to get hate mail for something I wrote. Bravo.
Hey, I think I remember that. That was from that Beacon column you had, wasn't it?
At least here you'll admit it was a "juvenile, infantile attack." Of course, that's only talking about your review of the album. You still won't accept the fact that your job as an editor was not to make little Hanson-loving boys cry. (I don't think him loving Hanson is any worse than you loving DragonForce.)