Joyful Noise
The Music That Propels My Life
This essay is a companion piece to the
list of books that influenced my life, Damage
Control, and also
The Floyd concert I saw in
1994, on the Division Bell tour. It was
intense. Pink Floyd are that
in general, at least on my favorite albums of theirs. And at the time
I was just starting to confront being an abuse survivor. So a stadium
full of people shouting "Leave those kids alone!" was a validating
experience like no other, which got me thinking about the role of
music in my life, the dozens of "mood mix"
audiotapes I compiled, the thousands of song quotes sprinkled
throughout my diaries, and all that. The MTV series I saw in October 1997; it was a bunch of "Top 10"
shows on various subjects. Top 10 videos featuring
Puff Daddy, Top 10 "Epic" videos, etc. Two of them got me quite
angry -- the Top 10 Hair Band Videos and the Top 10 Cheesiest Videos.
I disagreed with their assessment of what constitutes a "hair band,"
and I was very annoyed that almost all the "cheesy" videos were from
the early 1980s, as if just being out of style made them worse than
all the crap that's come out this decade. So this exploration of my
musical past will point out all the stuff I'm not ashamed of liking,
instead of the repudiation of the past just because the fashions are
different now. My dad loves to tell this story (which is the only way I know it;
I certainly don't remember this far back): I was a toddler, and
happened to be within hearing distance when my parents were trying to
remember the source of a particular song lyric: "Goin' insane/And I'm
laughin' at the frozen rain..." They were flummoxed, and apparently I
toddled up to them and pulled on someone's pant leg to get some
attention and said, "
Steely Dan, Mommy, 'Bad Sneakers.'" My mom was prepared to
ignore me, but my dad says, "Wait a minute, I think she's right!" And
they checked it out, and I was. (I used to find this story very odd
in that I can't remember even liking Steely Dan until I was in
college.) So as that anecdote illustrates, I grew up with my
parents' music playing all around me. The
Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, the
Animals, the
Eagles,
Rod Stewart, Jefferson Airplane, my dad singing
Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" to me as he played his guitar, my
German-descended Catholic mom playing Irish folksongs and Baptist
hymns on the piano. Music almost equals books in the number of
childhood memories it turns up in. Hand-me-down records and tapes
(The Sound of Music
and West Side Story
soundtracks, Tonight I'm Yours by
Rod Stewart, a mix tape of Beatles stuff ranging from their earliest stuff up to Revolver) made up as
much of my personal
collection as the Disney compilations and Strawberry Shortcake story
records that were actually aimed at people my age. In 1987 when I was
14 and all the retrospectives about "20 years since the Summer of
Love" were all over the media, I was surprised to find how many of
the songs being mentioned or played I knew, though they had been
popular six years before I was born.
It
was the time of CDE, I noted then:
Culture Club,
Duran Duran, and
Eurythmics. I was coming in on the tail end of New Wave, I
suppose, and I liked it. The mystery and otherworldliness of
synthesized sounds as they were used then (my brain sings a wonderful
example,
Missing Persons' "Destination Unknown"). The way they dressed, that
Cyndi Lauper freedom to look however the hell you pleased. I
admired it, though I wouldn't get into fashion for several years yet
myself. The first pop album I chose for myself was Culture Club's
Colour By Numbers
(and shortly thereafter, its predecessor Kissing To Be Clever). I had my big
poster of them on the wall, and vehemently defended Boy George when
classmates called him a word I didn't know the meaning of yet, "gay."
I didn't have a crush on him (if anything, that would have been Roy
Hay) but their music and their look was just so fun that I would let
no one say things meant to insult. And then there was Duran
Duran, who I will forever think of as a five-piece containing three
guys named Taylor (though they are now a three-piece containing no
guys named Taylor). My first famous crushes. (That would be John,
Simon, and Roger, specifically). Music with lyrics you could write
down like poetry and analyze. Videos portraying exotic places and
fantasy worlds (no, keeping my feet on the ground has never been a
big preoccupation for me, why?). My first concert was the
Go-Go's, with
INXS as the opening act. I still have mix tapes made in
'85 and '86 from the radio, songs you probably forgot existed, such as
"Valotte" by
Julian Lennon and "A Love Bizarre" by
Sheila E. (I'm thinking of having them put onto CD in case the
tapes break.) Despite all the music I've loved since then, I'll
probably always hold on to the early 80's as the time when the Top 40
was at its most listenable.
In 7th grade, all
that changed. First, MTV started running episodes of
The Monkees. I thought Peter Tork was so adorable, and
the show was so neat and the characters said things like they were
aware of being on TV, so I promptly acquired three hand-me-down
Monkees albums (The Monkees, More of the Monkees, and Headquarters, although later when I got
it Pisces, Aquarius,
Capricorn and Jones, Ltd. would prove to be my all-time favorite.) I don't know
if the Monkees inspired it or maybe the big parade scene in Ferris
Bueller's Day Off, but I also started listening to my mom's Beatles
records -- the later ones, not just the ones from the mop-top era that
I had liked as a kid. Seventh-grade psychedelia, reading
John Lennon's writings and listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows."
The love affair with the sixties continued even while other music
trends caught my attention. In 9th grade I discovered
the Doors and acquired the big black-and-white poster of the
band which has hung on my bedroom wall through four dorm rooms and
three apartments in addition to the bedroom at Mom's. The men don't
know, but the little girls understand...Lennon and Morrison were my
tortured gurus, conveniently dead so they couldn't embarrass me by
turning into sedate old farts. But at least I learned from their
mistakes and didn't bother trying to reach enlightenment via the
chemical path.
It was the year
Bon Jovi's
Slippery When Wet came out. Anyone who
was anyone, and even those like me who weren't, owned that and the
Beastie Boys'
Licensed to Ill. Sure, we listened to
Madonna and
Janet Jackson on the radio, but the cool people at Madeira Beach
Middle went to see
David Lee Roth and
Cinderella in concert, lip-synched to
Poison in the school contests, and had their ear pierced with a
needle during lunch in the school cafeteria. (Me, I just bought the
albums.) The year after that, I went on to high school with only
three people who had been in my middle school class, and concentrated
on the Doors, the Rolling Stones (whom I had rediscovered), and oddly
enough,
Jimmy Buffett, who my dad took me to see in concert a year
before. Not metal, but not exactly teeny-bopper music (at least not in
1987-88). All the while, a few other bands were kind of creeping up on
me. There was this band called
Faster Pussycat who were compared to Poison in Star Hits, my
music bible, and of course there was this song "Welcome to the Jungle"
that showed up on DialMTV, by this other L.A. metal band called
Guns n' Roses. By the start of 10th grade, I had bought both
bands' albums and was rapidly expanding into
Led Zeppelin,
Aerosmith, and scariest of all to my friends at school, this
"thrash-metal" band called
Metallica. At my high school, in my IB and AP classes, it was
substantially more out of the mainstream to listen to heavy
metal than what was still somewhat accurately at the time called
"alternative." The battered copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive
got interested comments from my classmates, but the copy of Rip
magazine with Slash on the cover cuddling one of his huge pet snakes
got much more surprised responses, which I enjoyed. And unlike
many adolescents, I had my mom listening to it all with me. She bought
her own copies of Cinderella, Britny Fox and
Great White albums; we used to joke that she dressed and acted
much more like a teenager than I did. We still fought about me playing
my records too loud, but it was nice to have something to agree on.
(My dad even tolerated it; when I went to visit him in the summers he
took me to see David Lee Roth with Poison opening.) I went through
all my teenage experimentation in my head. Read everything from The
Golden Bough and 1000-page volumes of Nietzsche's collected works
to everything on the local library's science fiction shelves.
Was titillated by song lyrics and the lives reflected in magazine
interviews of the bands. I recall with amusement the review in
Rip which cited
Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking,
Warrior Soul's
Last Decade Dead Century, and Love/Hate's Blackout in the Red Room
as "the premier albums of the drug culture in the late '80's," since I owned and loved
all three of those but at the time had never even drunk alcohol. All
sorts of music so weird but heartfelt that it was its own
mind-altering drug.
But then, in the summer of '91, Alice in Chains
had the much bigger hit "Man in the Box." Mutterings started about all
the other bands, friends of Soundgarden, MLB, or Alice In Chains, and
all from the same place: Seattle. I moved into a dorm room in August,
with a roommate of much more traditionally "alternative" music tastes,
and in her collection of the
Cure,
Siouxsie & the Banshees, and the
Smiths, I discovered
Mudhoney. Promptly acquired two of their albums and went to see
them in September '91 (with
Superchunk and
Gas Huffer as the opening acts). I came home with bruises across
my chest because I had squirmed up to right in front of the stage and
the mosh pit behind the first row or two had pushed me up against the
barrier in front of the stage. But I enjoyed the hell out of myself.
A month or two later, two more songs by Seattle bands started
getting airplay: "Alive" by
Pearl Jam and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by
Nirvana. By the end of the academic year, my 80-person dorm must
have housed at least 50 copies of each of the albums those songs came
from. Heavy metal was still going strong, though -- at first the
Seattle bands had even been promoted as metal. And there were people
in the Honors Program with me who were headbangers too! They joked
about my affection for everything from Seattle (but I pointed out that
Jimi Hendrix and
Queensryche were from the same city). And we went to see
Kiss/Faster Pussycat/Trixter,
Damn Yankees/Jackyl,
Living Colour, Aerosmith/Brother Cane, and others, all in my first three years. I
was being exposed to new (to me) stuff by everyone else in the dorm,
too. Mudhoney and
Mary's Danish and
R.E.M. I listened to because of Carrie, the freshman year
roommate. I got 2Nu from Dylan,
Billy Joel from Karl by way of Chris and Matt,
They Might Be Giants from Brian by way of Crystal,
Eric Clapton and
Creedence Clearwater Revival from Gerry,
Queen from Sean and Chris and Matt (not that anyone could miss
Queen in 1992, the year Wayne's World came out),
Enigma and the
KLF from just Sean,
Rush and quite a lot of jazz from Chris, at the same time as I
was introducing Chris to Led Zeppelin and the other stuff that got
played on the classic rock station. We weren't much for "college
rock," but everyone got a musical education. I felt that Top 40 had
mostly been going downhill since about 1987, but 1994-95, my senior
undergraduate year, was the year that heavy metal as it had been in
the 80's ran out of borrowed time to live on. And grunge had lost its
vitality entirely. The remnants of the two had run together and
produced something too boring to listen to. That was when I switched
radio stations from the rock station that played new stuff to the one
that played nothing released since I was old enough to remember. But
having by then discovered Pink Floyd through the same channels as
Queen, classic rock was quite listenable. Out of the pop songs so
widely played that year as to be unmissable, I only became interested
in
Melissa Etheridge -- a woman singing the true rock'n'roll I
love, like no one since
Janis Joplin. But I retroactively discovered the
Cranberries,
k.d. lang, and most of all,
Tori Amos. Several of my male friends had been Tori freaks for
more than a year, but all I ever heard of her was muted background
noise behind card games, so I figured they just liked her looks.
Especially when Matt sent her flowers when she performed in Tampa. It
took Wednesday quoting her in
a memorable essay on Usenet to make me actually listen to
"Precious Things," and then I was hooked.
So now I know the names of bands but can't
put a song to them, even though I'd probably recognize the snippets
from my friends' car radios if someone told me the titles. Haven't
watched MTV in years. I found, in fact, during my visit to my dad and
step-mom, that I found VH-1 much more palatable -- I'd have been
aghast at that idea five years ago when most of the dorm was angry
that our dorm cable channels were going to waste providing VH-1
instead of MTV. I only caught the Top 10 shows I mentioned earlier by
accident, pausing because they were actually playing something good
for a change. So now, I will be catching up on buying more
replacement CDs. Seeing
Blues Brothers 2000 has got me thinking
that I need to buy more blues than just the
Robert Johnson and
B.B. King I copied from my dad. I'm getting bored with the classic rock station (there's only so much
Fleetwood Mac and
Lynyrd Skynyrd I can take). And it comes full circle --
as I'm writing this, I've switched radio stations so I can hear the
Friday Night 80's show, and am dancing in my chair to "Come On
Eileen." (
Dexy's Midnight Runners, of course.) Waiting for good songs to
come on so that I can tape them off the radio, just as I used to when
I was twelve. (Some songs from 1985 don't even sound right anymore
without the bits of DJ patter and intros to other songs that
accidentally got recorded onto those mix tapes I've been listening to
for thirteen years.) "I'm too young for nostalgia of this magnitude,"
I keep thinking. But well, I'm way too old to think
Hanson are dreamy, and just old enough to have the '80's
disdain for all things '70's deeply ingrained in me. In high
school I cited
Suicidal Tendencies as a band who helped keep my name off a
gravestone. Now, I'm taking anti-depressants -- but still, I can bring
my mood up much faster with the exhilaration of
Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)," or the wry
commiseration of Queen's "I'm Going Slightly Mad," the anger of
Metallica's "Disposable Heroes" or the passion of Melissa Etheridge
singing "Yes I Am," faster than any chemical. Sometimes all it takes
is to know someone else has felt the same way as you do, and music
conveys that knowledge much better than any plain spoken words. So
it will all go out of style someday; my grandkids will feel the same
way I feel about my grandparents'
Mantovani records. That doesn't change the effect it has now. I
don't like things being maligned just because they aren't in style
anymore -- I don't laugh at my grandparents just because their tastes
were formed five or six decades before mine. Just because you don't
like it doesn't mean it isn't deeply meaningful to someone else -- as
long as no one tries too hard to convert me, I'm tolerant. I just
wish MTV wouldn't call my fond memories "cheesy."
Home |
Writing | Bio | Resources & Bibliographies | Links Baby of Boomers
I was born in 1973, to parents
who were both 25 years of age at the time. (That's scary --
I'm 25!) My dad had played bass in a
Jefferson Airplane cover band in college, and my mom plays the
piano, and both are very into music (even more so at that age, before
the other complexities of life started to crowd into listening time).
Child of the 80's: Puberty and Shortly Thereafter
1984, when I was eleven, was when I started seriously caring what
music was new and cool. Or even not quite new -- I pretty much soaked
up the music of the previous few years without trying as well. Born Too Late: A Love Affair with the Sixties
As
I said, I'd always been exposed to music that was older than I am. But
for a few years I was only interested in what was on the radio and MTV
right then, so all I saw was the occasional "Closet Classic" video
with
Blue Cheer or
Donovan performing in black and white. Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution: Heavy Metal
The summer between 7th and 8th grades, we moved from South Carolina to
Florida. Between spending some months in a radio-less efficiency in
Redington Beach (which got me out of touch with popular music) and
changing from a suburban school in the Bible Belt to a much more
cosmopolitan school in St. Petersburg's Gulf Beaches, my music tastes
underwent a sea change. The Great Transition: College Years
I graduated
from high school in June 1991. If you listened to the right rock
stations my senior year, you were already hearing some newish sounds:
Alice In Chains' "We Die Young," possibly even Mother Love Bone's
"Stardog Champion" even though Andrew Wood
had O.D.'ed in March 1990. (I bought the MLB album Apple two
days before my 18th birthday in January '91. First time I ever got
carded buying music, though the saleslady was willing to let me slide,
being so close to the big birthday.)
Soundgarden had gotten some scattered Headbanger's Ball play for
a couple of years. Grad School and After (the year so far)
I didn't
pay much attention to new music in my two years of graduate school. I
developed a taste for
Public Enemy from my one boyfriend during that time, and the
Presidents of the United States of America filtered in from my
roommates, the only one I liked enough to buy an album by instead of
just taping a couple of songs off the radio. I finally acquired a CD
player, but most of what I bought was just replacing dubbed tape
copies of old stuff.
