Frank Zappa declared that, “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.”

There is more truth in this blind statement than there could ever be in anything I’ll ever write. Rock music is such a relative art form. Some kids love Green Day. Others enjoy Animal Collective. Your cup of tea is just that: YOUR CUP OF TEA. For this reason, I have decided to write about what I want to write about. If you have a problem with that, tear my writing apart with hyper intelligent quips regarding my lack of knowledge on the subjects I am assigned to write about. Do it. That’s what’s so hypnotically attractive about free will! You don’t have to like it. In fact, I encourage you to hate it. Your standards of excellence in rock journalism are obviously far too ambitious for you to dabble any longer with the swill I [Chris De Salvo] insist on concocting on a weekly basis!

They don’t pay us to sling our opinions in your collective direction. That’s fine. I don’t do it for the money. I enjoy it. I may be God awful, but they’ve given me a chance to put that underachievement on display. I’m grateful for this, and will continue to do this. However, if I find myself at a Grand Duchy concert and notice my eye lids are moving over my eyes like the Nazis over Poland in 1939, I’m going to write about it. I don’t care if it’s Frank Black, or Kurt Cobain’s corpse-come-back-to-life. If something entirely sucks, I’m going to use my [very] humble opinion to explain why. This is my “job.” This is why my tickets were comped. I’m not afraid to insist that aging legends are human. I love Frank Black. He seems like a decent enough guy, but not everything he touches turns to gold. In fact, his latest band is about as exciting to experience live as waiting for an amoeba to tap dance with the fervor of one Fred Astaire.

Lester Bangs once said that New Wave music was “shit,” because it was “just too good.” Not everyone reading the Village Voice in February 1981 was going to agree with what Bangs so defiantly proclaimed. Does that mean he shouldn’t have scribbled such a bold statement? Hell, no. He wrote from the heart, and though many of his works were littered with contradictions, most readers eventually fell in love with his oft-odd interpretation of what a “music review” actually consisted of.

Hunter S. Thompson often made shit up. If you’ve done any kind of research on the gonzo-bard, you’d know this. He was rumored to have been able to drink an alcoholic army of wife-beaters under the table, and later insisted most of those decadent stories were insanely embellished. Regardless, he wrote in a stream-of-consciousness manner that revealed the voice of a sensitive mad-man who hardly had a credible grasp on the way the world worked. He simply told his story, based on the loose-outlines his editors provided him. This got him into trouble more often than it filled his perpetually empty pockets, but it made him a memorable scribe in his own right.

Let me get something straight, before I plunge forth with my less-than-mediocre vocabulary, and elementary-level prose: I am not comparing myself to these two brilliant, troubled, deceased journalists. Are you kidding me? That notion makes me chuckle. Not laugh, chuckle. It’s that ridiculous.

The truth is, I’d never aspire to be either of these men because they hardly achieved anything solid. Sure, they amassed meteor-sized bodies of work, respectively. Yes, each were mentioned in songs by respected artists, depicted on the big screen by great actors (Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Johnny Depp), spoken of more as folk-lore than actual human beings, et al… That’s all great. That’s fine, but writing isn’t something that paid off for either of them in the long run. Neither died with much of a net worth, and though money isn’t every thing, it’s certainly been on everyone’s mind since the stock market did a nose dive into a water-less deep end.

Writing is little more than a nice exercise for people (like… me?) who have a difficult time developing a full-length story to produce over a great deal of time. Or, it’s a glorified practice of escapism for relatively young men and woman looking to prolong their looming adulthood well past the college-grad deadline. “True writers” want to produce something that glorifies their voice: A screen play. A novel. A musical. These things take time, and sometimes it’s easier to just bang out a few “concert reviews” for the Hell of it. Why? They don’t mean anything. They are informative dissertations on the events of random evenings during which rock and roll bands attempt to impress those who forked over $8 to see them. That’s all.

It’s often assumed rock “critics” are merely supposed to produce an objective review of the concert in question without an ominous jolt of editorializing, or personal angst. Sorry. Can’t do that. Won’t do that. Why? I don’t write for people who adhere to the “standards” overachieving high school seniors pledge allegiance to as they strive for Valedictorian status. I write for me. That’s the one thing I have in common with the aforementioned journalism-legands. That, and that alone makes me happy. If you’re less-than-happy after reading this column, I don’t care. If you’re rolling your eyes because you think I think I’m better than you, congratulations! You’re not alone.