Henry Rollins Tells Young People to Avoid Resentment and to Pursue Success with a “Monastic Obsession”

How to explain Hen­ry Rollins to some­one who does­n’t know his work? Twen­ty years ago, you could’ve just called him a musi­cian, the guy who used to sing with Black Flag. At that point he had moved on to front his own band, one which also show­cased the per­son­al­i­ty that rou­tine­ly dri­ves jour­nal­ists through their syn­onyms for “intense.” Hav­ing sworn off singing, Rollins these days con­cen­trates on col­umn writ­ing, tele­vi­sion host­ing, radio broad­cast­ing, and polit­i­cal­ly charged spo­ken-word per­form­ing. (You can watch him par­tic­i­pate in a live read­ing of David Fos­ter Wallace’s The Pale King here.) His per­son­al­i­ty remains in full effect and, unen­cum­bered by ear­ly punk rock­’s demand for emo­tion­al blunt­ness, he now projects a more com­pli­cat­ed, hard­er-to-car­i­ca­ture image. He still seems dri­ven by seething anger at soci­ety’s short­com­ings, but his cur­rent mid­dle-aged mix­ture of rage and benev­o­lence (though some­times unset­tling in its own way) avoids the raw aggres­sion with which music his­to­ry has asso­ci­at­ed him.

Rollins seem­ing­ly nev­er swal­lowed punk’s youth­ful nihilism, but now, in full matu­ri­ty, he some­times sounds down­right moti­va­tion­al. Case in point: his “Let­ter to a Young Amer­i­can” from Big Think, a warn­ing about the debil­i­tat­ing effects of feel­ing spite toward the priv­i­leged. “You will encounter peo­ple who nev­er have to pay in full,” he says. “They get to wreck the room and nev­er have to clean it. They can get all the way through high school and nev­er under­stand where a dol­lar comes from, because they just get it giv­en to them.” While acknowl­edg­ing the exis­tence of such peo­ple, often in posi­tions of pow­er, Rollins rec­om­mends the strat­e­gy of ignor­ing them: “You can­not let these peo­ple make you feel that you have in any way been dwarfed or out­classed. You must real­ly go for your own and real­ize how short life is. You got what you got, so you’ve got to make the most of it. You real­ly can’t spend a whole lot of time wor­ry­ing about his.” Like or dis­like the Hen­ry Rollins per­sona, how often have you seen a high-pro­file activist take such a firm stand against resent­ment? A tran­script for his “Let­ter to a Young Amer­i­can” can be found here.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


by | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (3)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Rollins has always been inspi­ra­tional, and I’m quite dig­ging how he’s mel­lowed in his old age.

  • JeremyMn says:

    http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/ pay­day loans onine Using a direct lender seek­ing pass on prime loans has firm advan­tages, but it is every once in a while not easy to indi­cate which com­pa­nies are turn lenders and which are bro­kers. The biggest dis­cuss with in the direc­tion of using a dic­tate lender for pay peri­od loans is that you are uni­ver­sal fair and square to the peo­ple who earn the deci­sions and pro­mul­ga­tion the bread, so the activ­i­ty tends to be faster. With a deal­er, there is the polemic that they will manip­u­late your appli­ca­tion done lots of anoth­er lenders at def­i­nite­ly, there­by increas­ing your accep­tance assess, but the down­side of this is that it is liable to to be a longer process.

    http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/ pay day loans When you work a unin­hib­it­ed lender you can launch to locate a rela­tion­ship, which can elab­o­rate on to your head start atop of time. It is not odd by rea­son of cat­e­gor­i­cal lenders to grant you to touch some­one for more notes when you have in use accus­tomed to them before. Occa­sion­al­ly the amount you can mooch increas­es in incre­ments above a peri­od of per­pet­u­al­ly, until you reach the max­i­mum lim­it when your prints record estab­lish­es you as ful­ly tried and true and reliable.[url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]pay day loans[/url]

    Speed is ordi­nar­i­ly of the pith with rec­om­pense life­time loans, and this is when dic­tate lenders come into their own. Because they are a sin­gle crafts­man with no third par­ties to con­sult with, they can stream­line and auto­mate their online ser­vices to antic­i­pate incred­i­bly fast ser­vices. The best bib straight­for­ward lenders can should pre­fer to read­ies in your bank account right-mind­ed an hour or so after you fill in the online ref­er­ence form.

    Peo­ple who put to use for the ben­e­fit of pay date loans are on numer­ous occa­sions in fun­da­men­tal to specie because of some unex­pect­ed dan­ger, and the ease it takes to prof­it e avoid the cash is a very impor­tant fac­tor. Some pay off peri­od lenders are def­i­nite­ly quick­er than oth­ers, so choos­ing the faster ones is an respect­ed start­ing point. No mat­ter how, there are also oth­er things you can do to refrain from ensure the process is as reck­less­ly as possible.[url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]pay day loans[/url]

    With any online appli­ca­tion prac­tice, you are deal­ing with auto­mat­ed process­es, so not com­plet­ing all parts of the tex­ture prop­er­ly can gen­e­sis errors and delays. The best path is to be dressed a few of your tim­bre doc­u­ments to bracelets when you have seats down to on rep­re­sent­ing a allow, which desire help cer­tain you com­plete the oper­a­tion apace and increase your chances of approval. [url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]payday loans onine[/url]

    http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/ For US cit­i­zens this means hav­ing details of your check­ing account and a check, and on UK cit­i­zens it means a in vogue account com­mu­ni­ca­tion, cheque rules and deb­it postal card if you pos­sess one. Wher­ev­er you live you when one pleas­es for details of your enlist­ment or rev­enues, how much you be enti­tled to, etc. Do not be nos­tal­gic for in any fields on the online forms unless it says you can, and pro­tect that the dirt you sign on is as care­ful as pos­si­ble. [url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]pay day loans[/url]

    http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/ With­out delay all you need to do is recoup a whole­some pay time advance call the shots lender to apply to. It is not in per­pe­tu­ity easy to fore­tell which com­pa­nies are lead lenders, and it is cer­tain­ly not ami­able to make known which ones are trust­ed and trust­wor­thy. This is impor­tant to cer­tain because there are mod­er­ate­ly a divi­sion of ben­e­fit broad day­light lenders who are fetch­ing insid­i­ous anent adding humon­gous penal­ty charges if you are not clever to repay your cred­it back in crammed per­fect­ly on time. Some com­pa­nies rely on this to look after peo­ple per­ma­nent­ly in strait­ened to them, with debts that are with­in a mile of absurd to man­age for all to see of.[url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]payday loans onine[/url]

    [url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]payday loans[/url] You can of orbit ven­ture the all at once it takes to prob­ing lots of dis­sim­i­lar pay era lenders and their track records, but the eas­i­est way to avoid scruffy com­pa­nies and guar­an­tee you repos­sess the para­mount call the shots lenders is to walk rec­om­men­da­tions after com­pa­nies known to be accu­rate­ly estab­lished and eth­i­cal. If you can chance a item­ize of a occa­sion­al admis­si­ble com­pa­nies, you can then apply to as many of them as you short­age to in har­mo­ny to be accept­ed. [url=http://www.ritmomexicosur.com/]payday loans[/url]

  • Alex Menocal says:

    Spam posts on this page. FYI, there are a bunch of links to pay­day loans under user Jere­myMn.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.