I'm Yossi Salik, and I'm the host of Bansplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists by going deep into their histories and discographies.

We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, the Ringer podcast network, tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pop pioneers to new metal legends and many, many more.

Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify.

To me, he personifies the American dream.

He is America. He is manifest destiny. He is rock and roll incarnate.

When I was nine years old in 1987, living in semi-rural Eureka, Missouri, a half hour out of St. Louis,

I played Little League. I played Transformers.

I played Metroid for the original 8-bit NES.

I collected baseball cards.

I watched MTV.

I chewed Big League chew bubble gum, the giant blatantly tobacco-esque packets of bright pink shredded gum where you put way too much in your

mouth at once.

So I rocked big league chew even when I wasn't playing Little League.

I rode my he man big wheel.

I rode my bike.

I rode shotgun when I got my mom to drive me to Walmart.

I played an arcade game in the

Walmart lobby called Russian Attack, not Russian the ethnicity. Don't be ridiculous. That's rush

apostrophe, lowercase, and attack. Those are two verbs, rush and attack. It's not a video game about

the Cold War called Russian

attack, where you put in a quarter and you get to personally defeat communism by stabbing

like 400 Russian bad guys with a giant knife. And also, sometimes you get a bazooka.

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