Although my first two loves will always be comics and films, music is a very special part of my life. Lately, I have been marveling at how jingles from my childhood get stuck in my head and will never leave. I think a lot of our musical tastes are predicated on what we are exposed to as children. One of the things that probably shocks people about me is that I really don't give a shit about the Beatles. My parents never listened to them when I was a kid. I have no siblings who could introduce me to them. The radio never really played them (or at least not the stations I heard). My friends never talked about them. They never had videos on MTV. I honestly don't know how I was supposed to find out about them. By the time I got around to hearing them, I had heard tons of music that they had influenced. So guess what? The originators sound like the rip-offs when you grow up listening to the actual rip-offs.
So who did I hear? My father is very, very set in his musical ways. In a lot of ways, my personality has been defined by trying to rebel against my father and his tastes. There are some deep-rooted psychological reasons I won't go into but, whatever he liked, I was determined to hate. This led to me being exposed to country music at a young age. In retrospect, the country he liked was way better than the pap I currently avoid. He would play Hank Williams Jr and Waylon Jennings. He liked Creedance Clearwater Revival, the Allman Brothers and more obscure acts like Hot Tuna. His record collection fascinated me because he had Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and the Who. Pretty much a classic rock, outlaw country and southern rock enthusiast. Occasionally, he would embrace the novelty of a hip-hop song. He loved Tone-loc and Coolio's Fantastic Voyage. To the point, I would have to hear them over and over again.
My mother is probably the source of my love of pop music. She loved Billy Joel and Elton John, causing me to give piano-based rock more credit than it probably deserves. Reading between the lines here you can see I was closer to my mom growing up than my dad and I respected her musical taste more. She probably liked the Beatles a bit but I never heard it. She listened a lot to MY 102.5, the light rock station in my hometown. Her tastes coincided with MTV a lot more than my dad's as well. She was likely to enjoy a new top 40 hit and my dad was likely to shy away from anything made after 1980 (or sung by "fruity loops" as he calls homosexuals).
I was definitely a child of MTV. My own embryonic tastes were informed almost entirely by the videos I saw. While I was still in elementary school, I enjoyed listening to George Michael and INXS. In fact, those were two of the first cassettes I ever bought (Faith and Kick, respectively). The title track from Faith was as catchy as songs get and I got an early start on maudlin crushes when Never Tear Us Apart by INXS reminded me of the first girl I ever had a crush on, Megan (and I have totally forgotten her last name...for shame).
As I transitioned into middle school, my musical tastes were tied completely to my puberty. Prince's music videos had so much salacious content, I was hooked. Duran Duran were good for half-naked women, also. I remember this period of middle school music for a couple of different reasons. I went to Boston for the first time in 7th grade and listened to Weird Al's Off the Deep End tape over and over. I guess Nirvana had to have already come out but I was just as likely to listen to Poison's Unskinny Bop as Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Then, it happened. The forces of the universe aligned in such a way that I had my first full-blown "Holy Shit I love this music!" moment. I remember seeing a video for Mysterious Ways by U2 on MTV and thinking that I had never heard anything quite like it. Of course, I knew about U2 from their Joshua Tree stuff, and I liked it alright but it never grabbed me. I think the key was that I was entering my own irony-heavy period just as they were. My parents bought me the tape and I took it to Myrtle Beach. I listened to it until the tape broke.
I became obsessed with U2. I read books about them, collected all their older albums, looked for bootlegs, anything that could feed the desire to hear more of their sound. Waiting for the release of Zooropa was almost torture. At the time, I didn't have a frame of reference for their theatricality and the various European music they were allowing to influence their rock and roll. Four white guys with a guitar turned into synthesizers, Johnny Cash cameos, letting the guitar player sing, etc. Around this time, my best friend was falling just as madly in love with REM as I was with U2. This was kind of cool because the two groups were close friends as well. I remember, for Clinton's Inauguration in 1993, the rhythm section of U2 teamed up with Michael Stipe and Peter Buck to play as Automatic Baby (since Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People were both reaching heights of popularity).
My peers continued to influence my tastes but none more so than my best friend, Kirbie. Her older brother had really good taste and got to college as we were getting to high school. He was able to pass back his wisdom to us. Also, and I know I have mentioned this, Kirbie spent a year in the UK and brought me back a mix tape of Radiohead, Blur, Manic Street Preachers, Shed 7, Pulp and a ton of other Brit Heavyweights. While I resisted REM for years, I immediately gave in to the British Invasion of the mid-1990s. Pulp's Different Class, Blur's Parklife and Radiohead's The Bends were three of the best albums I ever owned. Oasis (though much maligned later) actually came out strong with Definitely Maybe. Like I said, I didn't really know enough about the Beatles to be offended.
As the high school years chugged on, I found my musical identity. I read Q Magazine religiously because those British reviewers were a little more in tune with me than the reviewers in Rolling Stone. I tried out a lot of the British hits. Some stuck and some didn't. In the US, grunge was really in charge. I dutifully got into Nirvana (although not as much as most of my friends). I never understood the Pearl Jam or Mudhoney obsession. I didn't like Soundgarden until their final album. U2's electronic experimenting, coupled with my examination of British music, led me down some weird paths. I was really into Nine Inch Nails in high school. Of course, back then I had begun struggling with my depression that I still deal with today. The Downward Spiral scared me and thrilled me in a way music hadn't. Of course, MTV still had its claws in me. Green Day and Stone Temple Pilots were among the first CDs I ever purchased. Most of my music is tied up in memories of girls I went out with or wanted to. In high school, especially. When I switched schools my junior year to get away from my first girlfriend, I met another Kirby. He was into just balls out rock and roll. Through our friendship, we discovered acts like Everclear and the Refreshments together. My pop taste and his rock taste found an area to meet in the middle.
My freshman year of college, U2 released Pop and I hosted a radio show at my college station. I have told this story many, many times so forgive me if you know it. In the press materials and interviews leading up to Pop, Bono was defending the incorporation of electronica into U2's rock sound. He talked about wanting to hear new music and a desire to keep pushing the boundaries of pop. Now, for him, that meant adding more effect pedals and making the Edge sound like he was playing inside a videogame. For me, it meant I should never stand still in my pursuit of good music. I should keep trying to find something I have never heard before. Forced to play certain albums in heavy rotation at the college station, I was exposed to more stuff (ska, indie rock, lounge music, etc.). I really embraced that ethos of wanting to hear something new. It didn't matter if it wasn't really new to the world, it just had to be new to me.
This is when I remade a group of friends in college. Eric, Stephen, Michael, Casey, Matty...these guys were essentially my tiny fraternity. We were all friends and we all lived together at different points. To this day, I consider Eric my best friend. All of them brought me various flavors of music I hadn't known before. Stephen and I had identical taste. He got me into Counting Crows, Ben Folds Five and many of the poppier things I still enjoy. Eric and Michael were fans of alt.country and, for the first time since I was a kid, I was open to hearing music with a twang. All of them were into Jump, Little Children. Jump, Little Children and the Dave Matthews Band kind of filled the same void for me. Both used unusual instruments not as some added spice to flavor up a track but as a matter of course. DMB's sax and fiddle combo were very unique to me. JLC used a cello, upright bass and a mult-instrumentalist (usually playing accordion or a tiny guitar or mellotron) to make their pop songs sound like nothing I had heard. In their early days (which I had a chance to experience but stubbornly missed) they incorporated Irish folk customs into their songs and they were beautiful.
I went to see JLC and DMB a lot. For a guy who has never done drugs, I sure was a big Dave Matthews fan. The flame was stoked by my freshman year roommate, Randy, and his obsessive devotion to DMB. As college went on, MTV stopped playing videos but HBO had a show called Reverb that showed live acts. Through that show (and through Eric's guidance) I found the Flaming Lips and Wilco. Both of those led me to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Talk about a revelation! Back in daycare, our teachers would take us to a skating rink once a week in the summer. Since it was a Christian daycare, they could only play two albums: the Dirty Dancing soundtrack and the Beach Boys Greatest Hits. I knew the Beach Boys as Little Deuce Coupe and Surfin' Safari. When I heard Pet Sounds, it blew me away. U2 started me off by asking, "why does rock have to be four white guys with guitars?" and it led me back to the 1960s where Brian Wilson (while going insane, apparently) answered.
There was a parallel development at this point where (perhaps because of the end of the millennium) the past was being pilfered for music. Moby took the field recordings of Alan Lomax and turned them into pop hits. Sampling moved outside of the realm of hip-hop and began to be incorporated into rock. Unfortunately, this devolved into nu-metal where every rock group had to have a DJ. Beyond that, Tarantino's rise as a powerful influence in hollywood created the resurgence of the pop soundtrack. He was able to put his hands on deep album cuts that were super cool and hadn't been popular in years (if ever). He opened doors to acts from the past just as I was trying to track down what song was being sampled here or there.
This period of high school through college was made up of many side trips into little musical niches. I discovered I liked Beethoven and Mozart during this period. I found out I liked the Sex Pistols. Johnny Cash and I became friends. Jurassic 5 and Public Enemy were my favorite rap groups. Try as I might, I never found a metal act that really spoke to me. Fatboy Slim, Squirrel Nut Zippers and other little outliers (from my main diet of rock and alt.country) filled in the gaps.
Towards the end of college, U2 released All That You Can't Leave Behind. Only their third album since I had become a fan and I was psyched to hear it. I remember listening to it and thinking, "What the hell is this?" I felt betrayed. Although, in interviews, Bono insisted that they were not retreating to the safety of their more popular sound; the songs themselves spoke a different truth. Even if the albums I had fallen in love with were watered down versions of more avant garde music, they were at least trying to stretch as artists and embrace a new sound. They had opened my eyes to a whole world of music and, a few short years later, decided to run away from bold experiments to go back to earning more money than god. At that point, I decided there would be no automatic loyalty to bands. They had to keep earning my respect with every album. Even to this day I judge each album on a continuum from each artist. For example, I can't say I love the direction the Strokes have taken but at least they aren't churning out copy after copy of Is This It?
I set out to continue finding bands and albums I enjoy. Living in Boston, I got to see amazing live shows by The Beta Band, Virgil Shaw, Mercury Rev, Ben Folds, Badly Drawn Boy, Flaming Lips, The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Eels, Alabama 3, Jurassic Five, Grandaddy, Spoon and a ton of others I am forgetting. Some groups flame out (like the Beta Band, Grandaddy) and others get bogged down in rewriting the same album over and over (Alabama 3, Mercury Rev, Badly Drawn Boy).
The only group that has continued to grow and stick to its guns, in my opinion, is Radiohead. After Kirbie got me into them with the Bends, they just kept changing. Even though their line-up stayed the same, they weren't comfortable sitting in one place. People keep asking them when they will make another OK Computer and I hope to all the powers in the universe they never do. I want them to keep making music that makes them happy. King of Limbs, maybe their weakest album since their first, still has songs of immense beauty that move me. Wherever they are going, I am going to follow because I know they make music I like to hear even if I don't know it yet.
Wilco was in the running for my favorite band for years and years. The evolution from AM to Being There to Summerteeth to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to A Ghost Is Born is kind of mind-blowing to me. The roots rock of AM, made with some of the remnants of Uncle Tupelo, gave way to a broader sound in Being There that was just barely still alt.country. By letting Jay Bennett take a bigger role in the band, they produced two masterpieces with Summerteeth and YHF. Even after Tweedy kicked Bennett out, A Ghost Is Born kept pushing things in a new direction. Unfortunately, that new direction was a jam band. Sky Blue Sky, Wilco the Album and the Whole Love all sound about the same to me. There doesn't seem to be any stretching. Tweedy has found a group of musicians he is comfortable with and they have given up on being innovative. They just want to make comfortable rock that they are confident in. Which is fine, more power to them, but I don't have to like it.
Q Magazine moved on, getting new reviewers who didn't speak to me. I never got into Pitchfork. Most of my friends (who were my age) weren't getting into anything new. Every now and then, Eric comes through with a discovery that speaks to me (like Okkervil River or the Hold Steady). But he is also likely to continue attempting to get me into Iron and Wine (apparently not going to happen) or Bob Dylan (for sure not going to happen). Our tastes drift a little more every year.
After some "wandering the wilderness" years, I returned to Greenville and began making younger friends. Scott, Kells, Calder, John, Aubrey, Max, Richard and this crew of twenty-somethings who were all plugged into sounds I hadn't given a chance. I dismissed the indie rock of the present as dance pop. The New Wave had come around again and synthesizers were dominating music again. Piano rock now meant shitty bands like the Fray. Alt.country was treading water with no new voices beyond Bright Eyes (who I kind of hate). My new friends, combined with reading reviews from the AV Club, helped me realize there are still new bands making great music. It just doesn't sound like the music I grew up loving. I had almost fallen into the comfort trap of only seeking out things I knew I would like.
The past few years have exposed me to groups like Surfer Blood, Wolf Parade, Foals, Frightened Rabbit, Father John Misty, Generationals, Telekinesis, Titus Andronicus and Jens Lekman. A group I found on my own, The Weakerthans, remains one of my favorites. I have opened up to the sounds of the Decemberists, the Polyphonic Spree and a little project called Girl Talk where one man mashes up rap and rock in ways that always make me giddy.
Anyone who says that there is no good new music doesn't listen to enough new music. There is always someone out there, drawing inspiration from the past in order to pave a route to the future. Today, with no one definitive source of new music, kids are hearing all sorts of stuff I would have never been exposed to until college. They are all going to grow up and some of them will make bands. I can't wait to see what kind of music they make in response to the music my generation made.
Music goes in cycles, tastes (both public and private) change, but I encourage everyone out there to keep your ears open. There are lots of beautiful notes left to be played and heard.
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