He was from the Gambia, in West Africa, a smart and peculiar boy who left his village for the big city, Banjul, and then left Banjul for college and graduate school and a long career in America as a historian of Christianity and Islam. Perhaps the kora reminded him of the village life he had left behind. Especially me, it turned out. Did I like music? Sure I did. In second or third grade, I taped pop songs from the radio. A few years after that, I memorized a small handful of hip-hop cassettes.
A few years after that , I acquired and studied a common-core curriculum of greatest-hits compilations by the Beatles, Bob Marley, and the Rolling Stones. Matt had been watching my progress, and he had noticed a couple of things. From those two data points, Matt deduced that I was getting my musical education from MTV, and that I might be ready for more esoteric teachings.
And so he gave me a punk-rock mixtape, compiled from his own burgeoning collection. I remember pushing aside an old shoebox full of cassettes and thinking, I will never listen to the Rolling Stones again.
Punk taught me to love music by teaching me to hate music, too. It taught me that music could be divisive, could inspire affection or loathing or a desire to figure out which was which. It taught me that music was something people could argue about, and helped me become someone who argued about music for a living, as an all-purpose pop-music critic. I was wrong about the Rolling Stones, of course.
But, for a few formative years, I was gloriously and furiously right. I was a punkβwhatever that meant. Probably I still am. Once upon a time, a punk was a person, and generally a disreputable one. The word connoted impudence or decadence; punks were disrespectful upstarts, petty criminals, male hustlers.
