NINJA

If you hadn't yet heard, Nine Inch Nails is going on tour this summer with Jane's Addiction; the two together making for the ultimate 90s rock collabo - or so I'm told.

The truth is, I don't really know Jane's Addiction. At all. It's awful that I'm so Trent-obsessed, yet I'm unfamiliar with anything Perry Farrell other than "Jane Says." And yet I find that the two are often paralleled (not compared, but put together, so to speak), perhaps because of their Lollapalooza connection. Farrell founded the show back in the early 90s and Trent played the first one. The two have had a connection that's only grown since then and respect each other greatly. But somehow I never took to JA - not sure why, I just never became a fan. It's one of those things that someone like myself has no excuse for in intellectual music convos, and I've had other such strange aversions within the musical realm. I remember growing up and becoming a massive Tori Amos fan alongside friends who also loved her. But those friends equally loved Ani DiFranco. I had no idea who she was. I do now - no doubt - but at the time I thought, "Who's that, and why does she keep getting lumped in with my Tori?" If you were talking about Tori AND Ani then you obviously were not as big a fan as I was nor did you truly appreciate her genius.

Maybe it's an only-child-ism that forced me to rule out the rest of the "group." It was never this thing AND that thing for me, it was always JUST one; NIN being an example of that. Trent was enough - there was room for no other.

It's funny how we grow out of such patterns. Nowadays, I can't imagine putting one or two bands on a pedestal so high that no one else could begin to touch their greatness. Quite the opposite - I tend to find a new band every month to obsess over; almost as much as I did Tori and Trent back in seventh grade.

But then again, those two still have their pedestals for me and always will. Maybe that means I haven't changed at all - or maybe I have, but SOME things never do.