I Loved You Well Never Mind

Article over at Grantland on the Big Star doc Nothing Can Hurt me on the curious effect the band has had on culture:

Nothing Can Hurt Me eulogizes an era when it was still possible for great music to be lost, and for self-styled appreciators of the underappreciated to believe they could discover this music, as well as each other. Now we're all experts — or we can fake expertise a little easier, anyway. This has skewed the music-taste-as-personality quiz beyond all usefulness.

In other words, as the writer says earlier in the piece:

...one of the defining documents of pre-Internet "please judge me not by the content of my character but by the contents of my record collection" music geekdom. 

I remember those days:

I had given up finding someone who liked my favorite bands until I was standing in the dining hall and in walked a girl with...a Ramones t-shirt!!! And this was back when wearing a Ramones t-shirt meant you actually loved the band; not like today where you get one in every box of cereal or some such. My eyes lit up, I sprinted (this was 1990 after all) over to her and what do you know, she was as thrilled as I was to finally meet someone there who knew what we both knew to be true.