When I was in sixth grade I was still trying to listen to pop music to fit in, but one day my dead mom let me wear her Doors shirt, a bleach stained black t-shirt with Jim Morrison’s mug shot from Dade County Florida on it, and underneath that the words “charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, profanity, and drunkenness.” I could have shown up to school that day in a disingenuous outfit of Body Glove gear, but instead I chose to celebrate a moment in history when a sexy rockstar got drunk and whipped his dick out. I’d arrived. Within a few months the Guns N’ Roses albums Use Your Illusions I and II hit the shelves of Tower Records and the Wherehouse Music Store and my mom, who was born with the anarchistic aplomb, the witty or sometimes just brutal anger and the frantic creativity with which an outsider (punks, goths, metalheads, angel-headed hipsters ) learns to deal with mainstream society, was right there with me, choosing...