I had to see it.I didn’t want to pay to see it, wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be inside, but I had to at least look at it with my own eyes.
Last year, NOFX frontman Fat Mike opened the Punk Rock Museum, an institution dedicated to the one form of music and culture that, at least theoretically, should resist the entire idea of museums in the first place.It’s in Las Vegas, and its logo is rendered in bright pink, in the Black Flag font.
The weekend that your Stereogum staff got together in Vegas, you could pay $100 for guided tours from the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow or Operation Ivy’s Jesse Michaels.The Michaels tours were all sold out, but you could still get the Yow package in the morning.
The day after Best Friends Forever, I had about a 10-hour window between hotel check-out and the one direct flight back to Richmond.I spent a lot of that time wandering up and down the Strip, gawking, but I also took a Lyft ride out to the Punk Rock Museum for a different kind of gawking.
The museum is on the edge of the Vegas arts district, sitting in the shadow of a giant warehouse-sized strip club on an otherwise desolate block.In the parking lot, there’s a pink limousine with a mohawk made out of giant metal studs.
I made it as far as the gift shop, which looks and feels like a slightly less cluttered Hot Topic, before deciding that no way no how was I going to pay the $39 admission fee to look at some old leather jackets.This is where we’re at.
When I was in 10th grade, NOFX were one of my favorite bands.Now, Fat Mike is trying to sell me overpriced nostalgia for the shit that I loved as a kid.
I am 45 years old, and I am basically a baby boomer, using my consumer dollar to wallow in a precisely curated archive of my own formative memories.That’s the cynical read on Best Friends Forever, one of two emo-centric nostalgia festivals that set up shop in Las Vegas in a two-week span this fall.
Best Friends Forever is by far the smaller of the two ...