Story!
I didn't grow up in a musical household, or at least, my parents didn't play instruments and like everything else relating to me they could never stick with encouraging me to play it. I took piano lessons, for which I rarely practiced. So I never really had hands-on experience with making music. Both my parents, however, loved music. They had different tastes - my mom listened to a lot of outlaw country, as well as more traditional country (her favorite song is
"He Stopped Loving Her Today" by George Jones) and traditional church music, but she was also a die-hard Prince fan ("When Doves Cry" would play whenever she cleaned). She likes listening to the same songs over and over, which is fine. My dad, on the other hand, was always a pretty huge music geek, though he hardly ever talks about it. It's only recently that I've learned about what he listened to growing up - he was really into Bowie, saw Springsteen in NJ clubs before he hit it big, saw Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. So he'd always been drawn to classic rock, I guess.
It took me awhile to "come into my own" with music, I think. There were always songs that I loved that would thrill me every time they came up on the radio. Two that I distinctly remember were
"I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" by Hall & Oates and
"Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak. I remember sitting in the back of my dad's wool-seated VW hatchback driving through the Southwest, very late at night, on the way from Los Angeles to Loveland, where we live now, listening to Chris Isaak on the radio. That's probably my earliest music memory. I was 4 or 5 at the time, around 1990. This phenomenon of tying memories (good and bad) to music has been a constant in my life. All I remember in the period from '90-93 was
"Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm", which I will hear no criticism of. It is a perfect song. Oh, also -
Automatic for the People, which is a perfect desert driving album.
Around '93 or I grew I started to become obsessed with video games, and I really liked their soundtracks, which didn't sound like anything I had ever heard before. Doom, Quake, Streets of Rage 2, Toejam and Earl. They were propulsive and repetitive, and obviously synthetic, and I enjoyed the way they made me feel. I would often play games just to hear the music. But I didn't really start to seriously become attracted to music until around '96 or so, when I started listening to my dad's music. At the time my dad was going through what I guess you could call an "experimental phase". First came Beck's
Loser single, which thrilled me, especially
"Fume", with its scandalous use of the word "fuck". Then came
Odelay, which is probably the first "good" album I ever latched onto. The
Basketball Diaries OST followed soon after that, and while I liked the mood of the soundtrack and the Jim Carroll songs were pretty great, it was clear that I was not a grunge boy. But the turning point, the epoch, was a day I waited outside my dad's hospital office and, bored out of my mind, I found a CD that my dad had in his car and I popped it into my walkman. It was so different - it was like video game music, but it was more
real, it was dark and hard and weird, and weirder still the album was 7 tracks long, which was nothing, and consisted almost entirely of variations on one song. That was Underworld's
Born Slippy. My dad's electronica phase started and ended with that EP, but in a lot of ways it was the start of everything for me. It was a short jump from there to the
Trainspotting Soundtrack, which is perfectly "of its time" and still utterly amazing in the present. I became an Iggy Pop fan almost immediately (as a lot of people did with that soundtrack) but I was also intrigued by the sounds of Brian Eno, Primal Scream, Blur, Leftfield.
Still, it wouldn't be until '97 that I started to break away from rock / pop radio. MTV was the catalyst. I saw Jamiroquai's iconic
"Virtual Insanity" video, which was a cool video, but I liked the song more. I would watch MTV and sit through the randomly selected videos waiting, hoping for it to come on. So my parents let me buy
Travelling Without Moving. It was my first album. And aside from that bit of unfortunate reggae in the middle, it's a solid dance-pop record.
Anyway, I loved
Trainspotting so much that I figured hey - I don't know how to find artists out there to enjoy, soundtracks are essentially compilations of different artists. And they all must be as good as
Trainspotting, right? Well, no. '98 and '99 were the years of ill-advised soundtracks -
Godzilla for '98,
The Matrix and
End of Days for '99. I remember nothing about
Godzilla except Jay Kay and the gang hammered out a b-side for it on their way to Stateside obscurity (and I think there was a Rage track on there too, which I was a bit put off by, being a kid who combed his curly hair until it stayed straight).
The Matrix was marginally better, but I loved it to bits at the time, as it had more of that elusive "electronic" music that I loved so much on it (it also had a few industrial rock tracks which I mostly passed over - that would come in a few years). I also borrowed (and never gave back, natch) Prodigy's
Fat of the Land from a friend and it amazed me that someone made a whole album of stuff like that. The worst was
End of Days soundtrack, which is notable for having the only original Guns'n'Roses material to exist between
Use Your Illusions I & II and
Chinese Democracy, and
almost tempting me into liking the nu-metal phenomenon that was cresting at the time (it also had a
Sonic Youth song). My uptightedness kind of saved me from that one – while I thought “Freak on a Leash” was a good enough song when I heard it, I never dared to ask my parents to shell out for anything like it (understand that I was a kid who heard the name Primus and thought “Oh, they must be a really aggressive metal band”).
That sort of kind of changed when I entered Hell On Earth, or, as it is known in some circles, 8th grade. If you ever wondered “Why did nu metal become so popular?”, you were not in 8th grade in the late 90’s. Granted, I never owned a Korn or Limp Bizkit album, but I did buy Deftones’
White Pony, which a lot of people seem to want to defend, but it was a serviceable angst-sponge album that got so thick and heavy with all the horrid shit I was experiencing that as soon as I left 8th grade, I could no longer listen to it without feeling the echoes of all that terrible feeling.
2001 found me taking my first (very) tentative steps into indie music – I had started watching MTV2 by that time and caught on to the Strokes, and the Hives and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club shortly thereafter. I still love that BRMC debut. MTV (and later, MTV2) were actually big influences for me for a long time. I remember being terribly bored at my grandparents’ house in Tupelo and just watching MTV endlessly, back when they still showed videos. I remember when
Ok Computer came out – “Paranoid Android” was played a lot. I found the video to be disturbing. It feels odd to type out, but it was an MTV2 special hosted by Andrew WK that gave me the final kick into my current trajectory, a late night “uncensored” block of “controversial” videos, which notably included (for me anyway) the unedited versions of Aphex Twin’s
Windowlicker and Nine Inch Nails’
Closer, both of which I realized I really loved, music-wise.
This was during the rise of P2P sharing networks. So naturally I fired up eMule and tried tracking down Aphex Twin and Nine Inch Nails tracks. It’s easy to become nostalgic for this time period – instead of torrenting or hosting an entire artist’s discography at once, you had to pull from a grab bag of songs, which might be unrepresentative of larger oeuvres, intentionally mislabeled, or poorly transcoded. It took several years of labeling
Autumn Acid as an Aphex track, an Autechre track, an Aphex remix of an Autechre track, before I discovered that it was actually a µ-Ziq track. It was exciting time, when new music was doled out piecemeal and you never knew if the next one would be something you loved or hated. It was also around this time that I started investigating artist associations instead of waiting for a music video or soundtrack appearance to give me the initiative. Looking up Aphex Twin, I kept seeing references to Autechre, Boards of Canada, µ-Ziq and Wagon Christ. Looking up Nine Inch Nails, I kept seeing references to Ministry, Coil, and Skinny Puppy. In many cases there were remix albums full of artists worth looking up. P2P was not the best place to look for many of these– their availability was dependent on their popularity, and most had little to none. But I had gained valuable skills in expanding my horizons. I was no longer relegated to TV and radio.
After a few years of this, and a trip to Paris where I bought my first Aphex Twin and Coil albums, I became involved with the internet and internet forums. I got involved with mix exchanges, and while my mixes tended to be same-y in Winter of 2005 or so I received a clutch of mixes that changed my life. They were called “Made in Canada” and “Music You’ll Hate” (I had gotten in arguments over music with the guy), full of mostly Canadian artists (Stars, Memphis, Buck 65, Amy Millan, Raising the Fawn, The Tragically Hip, The Tea Party, Joseph Arthur, Shout Out Out Out, DFA 1979) most of whom I really enjoyed, and for a brief month or two, I shared interests with the wider indie rock world.
This is already too overlong, so I’ll condense the last 5 years or so – At some point I got a USB turntable off of Woot for a steal, realized (via
Planet Mu) that there were labels out there that seemed to consistently align with my tastes, and discovered that there were actually online record stores that catered to my specific electronic whims, and all of a sudden there was a metric ton of music every week that I could sift through, free of association or promo pushing or review site hype. And with web hosting being what it is, accumulate massive amounts of it. My knowledge and tastes expanded exponentially. However it became clear at a certain point that I just felt better paying for my music, which has raised a few issues for me, but I don’t regret any of it. At some point I just said “fuck it, I’m in college, this is the time for me to be spending every cent of disposable cash I earn on art that I’m passionate about”. It’s not wise but it makes me very happy. Every day a shipment comes in is a Christmas.
I went from seeking artist I heard on the radio, to seeking artists from soundtracks and comps, to seeking artists associated with ones I already knew, to what I do now, which is take a lot of chances and then take more, until I’ve got a firm grasp on scenes, labels and genres. It’s gotten to the point where there’s actually very little risk involved in seeking out new music, because I know enough about what I like that the presence of certain signifiers or endorsements is enough to endorse music. And the failures are almost always interesting. Currently I’ve decided that in most cases it’s not worth shelling out money for straight dance records – I’ll probably never be a DJ, or a very good one at least, and my collection is already pretty sizable (working through my third crate at present). And there’s so much dubstep and bass and house and techno every week that it’s hard to get excited about sometimes. So lately my tastes have run towards more “avant garde” synth, folk and drone experiments and modern classical stuff. I’ve been spending a lot of time at
Mimaroglu lately, a record store specializing in fringe music vinyl and cassettes, run entirely by my favorite avant garde composer, Keith Fullerton Whitman.
So, uh… I think that’s everything.