There was a regrettable period of my life where I was a mallrat. We'd take the bus there every Friday after school, and just walk around being obnoxious, which is really all I did for the first 20 years of my life anyway, just in different venues. Before we went, I would always go into our basement where my mom kept the money she held for the school store, and take 20 or 30 bucks. It still kind of amazes me to this day that she never caught on, because I was pretty liberal about how much I took. I used the money for three things: food, bus fare, and CD's. This was at the time where I was the only person I knew into punk, so I was on my own as far as discovering bands. A good way of doing this while staying within my limited budget was buying comps, the first of which I bought was Punk-O-Rama 4. There's a bunch of really good songs on it, and I still listen to it almost 10 years later. Among a bunch of others, it was my first introduction to Bad Religion, with their song Generator.
The same year I stumbled upon this gem, I went to Long Beach Island for a week with my dad and my two brothers. I met a bunch of surfer kids that lived on the street I was staying at who pointed me in the direction of a halfway decent record store. I can't remember what else I bought, but I picked up Generator, the album whose title track I was so fond of. I had only heard one song, but I was not disappointed. The music had a level of sincerity that I had not encountered prior and which still resonates with me now, drunk and bitter.
There was a kid we hung out with in my mallrat days who went to see Blink 182, and Bad Religion opened for them. He came back from the show and said that some band of old dudes played and everyone there hated and heckled them. I look back on him telling me that as the first moment that I started to hate the general population.
Bad Religion - "Generator" (1992)
