Re-writing that self-intro/artist statement para. Should seriously keep milestone copies of it and do a retrospective when i'm 52, no, 62, no, 72?
On listing my influences as Kurt Vonnegut...? And being tempted to replace him with Sonic Youth, for honestly, the influence of SY on my writing is way more profound than KV's. I have probably spent +/- one year of my life having Washing Machine playing in the background. And I haven't spent anywhere near as much time reading KV? And yes, it's not really all of SY, but just Washing Machine and a Thousand Leaves. Moping around my formative years, listening to stuff like Panty Lies, Diamond Sea, and learning the lyrics by heart... well, there's no way they don't affect the way I look at the world.
“Time takes its crazy toll
And how does your mirror grow
You better watch yourself when you jump into it
’cause the mirror’s gonna steal your soul”
I mean, grammar is really not as important as rhythm, as sense is not as important as ideas.
And the famous SY guitar distortion "noises". I don't know how to explain that, so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Youth#Musical_style_and_influences and here: http://youtu.be/3BZXco773kk. It's a 20 min clip, the singing is pretty much done by the 2:30. Then it's just instrumental until i think like 13:40 for 14:20 then it's instrumental again.
It's about the spirit of experimentation, you know. Not mastery of classics. And that really got into my system, for I was listening to this stuff when I was 14,15? when I was developing my system.
And if not SY, there's at least Black Francis and the Pixies, recommended by Kurt Cobain. I mean, Where is my mind? has been replaying in my head since at least 1999! Before that I didn't even know that people could write songs about things like that! And if you could sing about walking with crustaceans, of course writing about it is not an issue at all! So why do people talk about surrealism or magic realism like it's a new thing?