Krissy and I went out last night and were surrounded for five hours by a variety of adorable little punks. We went to the Offspring concert, a band which we had assumed was enjoyed by folks near our own age. Boy, were we wrong. The average age was below that of a driver’s permit; when we came out of the concert (before the encore—yep, we’re adults), a line of idling minivans filled with parents went past the arena and stretched out the back. You would have thought we were at a Backstreet Boys concert, except for all the Offspring T-Shirts with the words “Stupid Dumbshit Goddamn Motherfucker” on them (it’s a refrain from one of their most popular songs, in case you were wondering).
Which also brought home how young this crowd was: They were so young they didn’t realize it was hopelessly uncool to wear the t-shirt of the band you were there to see. But what are you going to do. There’s no Punk Etiquette Master at the door. I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in here wearing that t-shirt. You can rent a TSOL t-shirt for the evening. Or perhaps something in a Hüsker Dü?
The winsome little punks (what to call them? Punkettes? Mini-punks? Punkies? After much deliberation, Krissy and I decided on “Punklets”) also made for both the largest and most polite punk mob I’d ever seen. The Offspring concert was general admission, and all the kids gravitated towards the floor, thus creating defined strata of age in the seats; the higher up you went, the older the crowd was (until you got to the highest seats, which were populated exclusively by pot smokers of all ages). The mass of youth on the floor was excited and bubbly. Hey, guys, let’s crowd surf!
And up would go all these 14-year-old bodies, long before music would actually start playing. The crowd surfers would eventually get dumped into the Security line at the front of the stage; the Security dudes, confident in their ability to handle 85-pound 7th graders, would simply pluck the surfers from the crowd, right them on their feet, and send them on their merry way. It was cute. When mosh pits formed, the giggly teens just sort of lightly slammed into each others, a bumper car ride without the bumper cars. You can just see some English punk from 1977 viewing the pits, thinking, Right then, time to show them how it’s done, and pinwheeling in there to do actual damage. No one was injured last night. Bruises would clash with their makeup in school the next day.
I’m not running down the punklets. It would be hypocritical for me to do so. It’s not like I was a true punk in my teenage years (When I was 14, I was listening to Journey! And it rocked! Don’t Stop Believin’, man!). While I’d debate the wisdom of having Offspring be a concert for the training wheels set (the woman in front of us brought her four-year-old to the concert, though I don’t know that she could be pictured as representative of parents in general, since she wore a t-shirt that said “Industrial Body Piercings” and had a hoop through her lip), certainly better the Offspring than, say, Matchbox 20 or 98 Degrees.
The kids were all right; in fact they were having a ball. There is a certain amount of irony in having all these dewey-eyed youngsters listening to the music of angst and alienation and then happily trundling back to mom’s SUV for the ride home, though the irony would be lost on this crowd. But then, I suppose there’s irony in the fact I was listening to music of angst and alienation, and I have a mortgage. So the kids and I are even. An ironic time was had by all.