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I couldn’t get down with crust punk back when I was young and naive enough to potentially join up with a squad of anarcho-vegan Dumpster divers. That was partially because of my aversion to white kids with dreadlocks, partially because I’m too much of a pussy–crust kids don’t fuck with bands like Heavenly, and I do. But I’ve always loved crusties for the same reasons I love Hells Angels hippies and the kids at the gritty raves where sketchy meth dealers hung out–they’ve turned people’s worst nightmare of a fringe socio-musical grouping into their day-to-day existence. There are probably a lot of middle-American moms who imagine that the mall punk their kid’s getting into is the starting point of a descent into hard drugs, petty crime, face tattoos, and nearly illegal personal hygiene. Crusty kids fulfill all of those bad expectations, and probably worse ones.
