2006年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-Looking to Cash In on a Punk Rock Youth

（单词翻译）

That's Sexy Back, a song from this week's top-selling album in America, Justin Timberlake's Future Sex/ Love Sounds. But our contributor Jennifer Sharpe says there is new interest and a new market for music that’s all but forgotten. Here is Jennifer.

Back in 1980,when 16-year-old Spike¹ Priggen played guitar for the band TV Neats, he sent out copies of his demo tape, hoping to get signed. Little did he know he would be 42 years old by the time their album would finally get released.

25 years after the band's breakup, they've come out on a Japanese label that sells their album for 2300 yen². When Priggen explained that there is actually a hot little market for old demo tapes like his, I suddenly felt a twinge of jealousy³, what about my old band's demo tape?

In 1983, when I was a freshman⁴ at Berkeley High, I replaced the bass⁵ player of a fiercely vegetarian⁶ peace punk band called Atrocity⁷.Opening for the Dead Kennedys, Atrocity's two singers 15-year-old Katherine Harris and 13-year-old Sarah Borruso must have looked freakishly precocious⁸ singing songs like "I Pronounce You Dead", an anarchist⁹ commentary on the institution of marriage.

Looking for evidence of the so-called hot market Priggen had mentioned, I started emailing with small reissue labels, secretly hoping to set the stage for an Atrocity pitch. I learned that in fact there are a number of old cassette demos making it into circulation and while some bands have barely sold 500 copies, others are enjoying a posthumous¹⁰ renaissance¹¹。

Like The Speedies whose unreleased material just got put up on iTunes and whose nearly forgotten single "Let Me Take your Photo" recently showed up(out) in a Hewlett-Packard commercial.

Excited by the possibilities, I put up a MySpace page for Atrocity and began pushing it on the labels I've been talking to. I sent them copies of our demo and as I waited for their responses, an unexpected flood of emails came pouring in from old Atrocity fans. One recounted listening to our tape at the reptile¹² store she'd worked at where she played our song Animal Fate for the mice before feeding them to the snakes.

My poverty is my own, this is my flesh and bone, you're killing¹³....

Within a week, all but one of my former band mates had appeared on Atrocity's list of MySpace friends. In some ways, they seem strangely the same, and in other ways, they'd totally changed. Our anti-corporate guitar player Paul Moraga now works at IBM, and our pale red-haired drummer has changed his name from Greg Penn to Aleph Kali, on his profile, he ethnically¹⁴ identifies as East Indian.

When I asked our singer Sara if she's still a vegetarian, she told me she occasionally eats meat now, but only because her doctors keep telling her to eat steaks for her anemia¹⁵. What about you? She asked. I had to tell her that just a year after the band broke up,I went to a McDonald's drive-through, and wolfed down a box of Chicken McNuggets.

The only possible vegetarian left is Katherine, our other singer. But no one has heard from her in years, so Katherine if you're out there listening, get yourself onto MySpace I've got a contract for you to sign, when the labels got back to me, all of them were interested in our demo even the ones I'd hoped would reject it, for the sake of the story.

When I checked back in with Spike Priggen to see how the TV Neats album was doing, he told me he had already sold one copy. I'm hoping Atrocity will do a little better than that. But I don't think we'll be getting any calls from Hewlett-Packard. For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Sharpe.
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twinge
1
a sudden feeling of slight pain
I felt a twinge of pain in my back.
2
a twinge of guilt¹⁶/envy/sadness/jealousy etc
a sudden slight feeling of guilt etc
He felt a sharp twinge of guilt for not taking the trouble to visit her.
punk
1
[uncountable] also punk rock
a type of loud music popular in the late 1970s and 1980s
2
[countable] also punk rocker
someone who likes punk music and wears things that are typical of it, such as torn clothes, metal chains, and coloured hair
punk hairstyles
precocious
a precocious child shows intelligence or skill at a very young age, or behaves in an adult way - sometimes used to show disapproval in British English
a precocious child who walked and talked early
anarchist
someone who believes that governments, laws etc are not necessary
wolf
also wolf down [transitive]
informal to eat something very quickly, swallowing it in big pieces
synonym gobble
nugget
a small, round piece of food
chicken nuggets