By Martin Cizmar   martin@rocktownmail.com

The summer before I started high school, I bought a CD that would come to define my music aesthetic for years to come.
Funny thing was, there wasn’t a single song on the record. Not a note of music, actually.
Henry Rollins’ “Get in the Van,” a Grammy-winning spoken word memoir of the singer’s days in seminal hardcore band Black Flag, was gospel to me.
I fell asleep listening to it the day before I started ninth grade. I repeated the ritual every year up until I started college.
For me, it was what Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was to the beatniks. It seemed to validate, if not inspire, my love of going to shows and hating everything mainstream, not to mention my Mountain Dew-drinking straight-edgy tendencies.
Looking back, it’s not hard to see the attraction. Rollins’ narrative is about a self-consciously upright protagonist beset on all sides by hostile, hypocritical fakes.
He’s always broke. Authorities abuse him. He’s spit on — literally — by people who think they’re cooler than him. He spends hours alone, writing all this down in his journal.
What teenager wouldn’t relate?
It quickly became my gold standard of cool. It’s not that I was totally hardcore — I wasn’t. But I was headed that way.
I had a copy of “Repeater,” I drew a few anarchy symbols on my binders and I spent months laughing at a girl who mispronounced NOFX.
“Poseur” was in my everyday vernacular and I was quick to stamp it on any Chumbawamba-loving classmate who dared wear Docs.
Rollins was a big part of that. Whenever I listened to one of his spoken word albums, or saw him speak live, I was reminded that real rock guys were tough, angry, sober and self-reliant. If a band wouldn’t pass muster then, well, they were worthless.
I might have continued on that way — sneering at every band that sold more than 500,000 records or charged more than $15 for a show — if it weren’t for the Spice Girls.
It’s easy to forget now, in an era where even the hippest hipsters love Justin Timberlake, but when pop music made its late ’90s comeback, it was a major affront to those of us who thought dancing died forever in 1992.
Sure, people had been dancing since the beginning of recorded human history but, we figured, all that ended forever when “Nevermind” bumped “Dangerous” off the top of the charts.
So, when the Spice Girls came out, we who fashioned ourselves music snobs were taken aback.
In fact — and I swear to you I’m not making this up — the first time I saw the video for “Wannabe” I thought it was some obscure group British pop from the late ’80s that somehow slipped under my radar.
“Look at how ridiculously shiny their clothes are,” I said to myself. “Why did everyone used to dress like that?”
Before long, synthed-up, danceable pop music was everywhere.
So, like all the other rock snobs I knew, I recycled the same gay-oriented jokes I’d used against New Turds In The Toilet back in third grade.
The weird thing? I really liked the Spice Girls. It was so fun, so poppy and so honest, in a prefabricated sort of way. It was undeniably great.
Deep down, I knew right then that Henry Rollins, and everyone like him, was a fraud.
One day, I was browsing the mall (one couldn’t do this too often, lest he be considered a poseur) when I came across a Spice Girls T-shirt on sale at Spencer’s.
So I bought it.
Part of the decision was a primitive form of the irony-oriented hiptitude that’s today’s dominant T-shirt aesthetic: I thought it’d be pretty funny to wear, and watch how people reacted.
But another part of it was the fact that I was totally down with those spunky British girls who always seemed to be yelling some ridiculous slogan like “Girl Power!” It was good stuff, no matter what Ian MacKaye would think.
So I wore it.
It was a very unRollins-like thing to do. My boldness was not rewarded by the other teenage tastemakers, or by the high school community at large. I got a few snickers and a lot of weird looks. One girl asked me if I was gay.
Remember, kids, this was before Abercrombie & Fitch mass-marketed irony.
The rock guys, who already thought I was a little gay because I loved Hole’s “Live Through This” (it’s a girl singer, dude) concluded that I’d lost my mind.
Right about the same time, I started listening closely to my Black Flag and Rollins Band albums. They sure were awful.
Seriously, in his 20-odd years as a musician, Henry Rollins has yet to record a single decent song. That’s got to be some kind of world record.
One day, I was in the record shop when I came across a four-disc compilation of obscure British punk from the early ’80s.
Oddly, I recognized a lot of the names on the sleeve — only because I’d heard Rollins tearing them apart on “Get in the Van.” Anyone who’s heard it can recall Rollins’ diatribes about Gene October, singer of the band Chelsea.
Turned out, Chelsea was pretty decent. A lot better than Black Flag, anyway.
Then, it occurred to me: If I’d come to see Chelsea, and had to sit through an hour of Rollins ridiculous chest-thumping, I might have thrown a cup of warm urine on him too.
Rollins, of course, would wear it as a badge of honor. For him, and people like him, it’s never been about the music. It’s all posturing.
I get e-mails from them every now and again: Kids who think the pop music I write about every week is somehow inferior to what’s coming out of Harrisonburg’s sizable hardcore scene.
They’re passionate, they’re sincere — in a deluded sort of way — and they’re as self-righteous as Rollins.
For a while there, I was headed in that direction. That’s why I thank God for Baby, Posh, Ginger, Sporty and Scary.
It’s an easy thing, to be a music snob. I know I’m still regularly guilty of it. Ideally, I’ll be able to move away from that by the time I’m, oh, say about 30.
In the meantime, I’m at least out of the van. If I’m a snob about something, it’s based on the music, not the singer’s commitment to banishing weakness from society.
My opinion now: Any real pop music fan loves good songs, even if Paris Hilton is hawking them.
Furthermore, $5 is way too much to pay to see a Fugazi show.
But, hey, that might just be me being a snob again.