Well..Today for the first time in more than 6 years I played Bad Religion’ song 21st Century Digital Boy. God! (…God?!…Here?!) I wake up to the american punk rock music with that song. Even when I was already familiar with the band since I was 15 and I was in love with the albums Suffer and Against the Grain, Stranger than Fiction killed me. It was Perfect! I was born I Spain in 1976 so the same year the dictatorship finally collapsed in Spain and lead to a democratic period until today. Then, as many of us back there, I was politically involved as a very early age. Music, of course, specially all kind of music with politic messages was more intellectually interesting for us that books and school. It was fuel for teens. And of course Bad Religion was part of the menu. BUT What I am about to say bring me a lot of interesting question. Today in the band web, I have for the first time in my life understood what the lyrics means!! I…we… did not speak english! The most interesting part of the story is that I used to feel every single moment of this song under its punk rock notes but I had no idea que they meant, today I realize that those lyrics were exactly what I would have always dreamed it to mean. It could have not been better….These guys did not need the language. My mother was not in Valium ( not that I knew ) but the rest was like if I would have written it myself when I was 17 years old.
“Oh yeah, I’m a 21st century digital boy, I don’t know how to live (or read) But I’ve got a lot of toys, My daddy is a lazy middle class intellectual, My mommy’s on valium, she’s so ineffectual, ain’t life a mystery? “
Anyway ….enough of me…As you all know professor Greg Graffin on top of being the Vocalist of Bad Religion, attended El Camino Real High School then double-majored in Anthropology and Geology as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles. He went on to earn a master’s degree in geology from UCLA and received his Ph D From Cornell University. The Ph.D. dissertation was officially a Zooligy Ph.D. supervised by William B. Provinne at Cornell. The dissertation was entitled “Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist Worldview: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology.” It is described as being essentially an evolutionary biology Ph.D. but having also relevance to history and philosophy of science. Well so the News is tha the has just came up with a new book: “Anarchy Evolution”, and that it was just published by Harper Collins and it is on the street since April 14th. Here is a you_tube presentation of the book by Mr Graffin ( click here ). The Man is just so real.
