When I was young everything revolved around music, especially punk rock. I had to be at every show no matter what. Loud smokey rooms, it was still legal to smoke inside in the 80s and early 90s, sticky sweaty floors, and bands playing as fastand louad as they could.
Back then, I once saw a cartoon called “Evolution of a Scenester”. I remember laughing at it because it felt like it was aimed at the old farts (30 somethings) i’d occasional notice at should. The cartoon showed how people change over time. I was sure that would never be me… (queue flashback fade) and now 40+ years later, I can say that it was right on the money.
The gist of the cartoon is the for phases of a scenesters life. First, going to shows was all about the music and nothing else. You have to get a close to the stage as possible. Then sometime later you dont have to be right up in the stage and it’s about meeting people especially meeting girls at the shows. Then after turning 21, it was about being able to buy at drinks at the bar and drinking at shows and not so much about the bands. And in the final frame life kept moving forward. The scenesters got married, had kids, and priorities shifted and he’s watching the same band on TV that was in frame 1 the girl (assuming is the same girl) is doing house work(it was the 80s) and there’s a “pack and play” with a toddler in it.
I don’t care about the music nearly as much as I once did and the musical tastes have changed from punk to indie to now jazz and hearts of space.
I don’t remember what magazine that cartoon was in, but I think it may have been Alternative Press back when it was a small Cleveland rag, or maybe Flipside or Maximum Rock-n-Roll. So I haven’t been able to find the original cartoon, and it would be really cool if I ever could. Still, thanks to AI, I was able to have ChatGPT come pretty damn close to what I remember the cartoon looking like. Here are a bunch that ChatGPT created… the color comics were done by Nano Banana, and while good, didn’t really capture the essence of what the original was like, or how I remembered it. ChatGPT kept wanting to have two girls meeting each other at the show which there’s no problem with, but wasn’t the original.
