red fuzzy jesus

iGrowth

About three years ago I got iTunes on my computer for the first time.  Actually it was first on a loaner computer my friends Dave and Katherine leant me for my move to New York.  I was familiar with the program and seen it on others’ computers for years but never considered having it for myself.  There’s a line in Me, You, and Everyone We Know about not having nice things because we subconsciously think we don’t deserve them.  The reason I had never downloaded iTunes was probably similar to that logic.

The first thing I did with the music store on iTunes was download songs common at Psi Upsilon parties during my college years.  This was music I associated with good times and easier living.  In the following months I continued to download a song here and there that helped me recreate that college experience.  It was liberating finding individual titles and not having to bother with an album’s filler songs. 

Since having iTunes I have downloaded literally hundreds of songs.  However, my music purchasing habits have always been tinged with caution.  I have reoccurring nightmares that some arty snobby friend will snatch my iPod and judge me for having this crappy song or that top forty confection on my iPod and forever lose their respect as a person of taste. 

But, in the past year I’ve slowly gotten over that fear.  The fun and ease of a one-dollar single song has allowed me to purchase stuff that pops into my head whether I’m particularly fond of the artist or genre.  I hear a song at the store and start remembering the time when that song was new and eventually I just own it.  The mind has a way of tricking you into wanting something. 

My initial efforts to recreate good times in college have expanded to fond memories in high school and before.  Even if I didn’t like the song at the time, there are certain songs that flood me with nostalgia and I enjoy hearing them now if for no other reason than their ability to transport me back to a particular setting. 

There was that song that was popular when my sister was fighting so much with my parents and I was the good kid.  There was that song we’d always listen to just before cross-country meets that I hated then but now perfectly places me on running trails with friends in autumn.  And there was that music video that was a little risqué that came out around the time erections were new and exciting to me. 

Each little piece of my personal history gets downloaded with a click of the mouse and then I sit and wallow in them.  I listen to some dumb song on repeat and instantly I’m a freshman in high school.  It’s overwhelming to be reacquainted with myself at various stages.  I realize I kind of liked myself all along in spite of whatever joy or drama is recalled by the music.

With this interest in recreating the past musically I have constructed individual playlists.  There’s the 11th grade playlist and the middle school playlist all with songs from each time period I’m targeting.  Again, it’s not about whether I liked the song at the time or even if I like it now.  It’s about what triggers memories and nostalgia -  what was ubiquitous during all those life experiences.

Lately I’ve had a great idea.  I construct playlists with a song from each year in my life starting with my earliest memories of music.  On each of these nostalgia journey playlists I have a song that makes me feel like 7-year-old Gabriel, then 8-year-old Gabriel, all the way up to those fun college party songs and beyond.  And, lately, these have been my gym soundtracks. 

The combination of these experiences is powerful in a way I can’t describe.  Each time I work my way through one of these playlists in order it’s like I grow up all over again.  I make a little stop and greet myself at every year in life by listening to the songs.  Usually I warm up with some light stretching to some cheesy 80s hit my oldest sister used to blast through the house during her adolescence (my early childhood) and finish on the treadmill around Sophomore year at William & Mary.

There is something emotionally fulfilling about working out.  I’m sure there’s a chemical explanation.  Lifting and running releases the same chemical in my brain I experienced while being nursed by my mother or something.  So the good fluids of exercise combined with the sensory overload of using music to review my upbringing provides a real rush of adrenaline and intense self-awareness.  It’s inadequate to describe this experience in words and I’m leery of pretentious psycho-babble like “rebirth” and “self-actualization” but whatever those terms are supposed to provide, this does. 

I’ve heard so many times that there’s nothing new under the sun.  Supposedly technology doesn’t provide us with wholly new experiences but provides tools to do old tasks in new ways.  But I think being able to use individual songs in chronological order to re-grow-up does provide a unique and new experience.  Before the ease of downloading individual songs, if one wanted to reconstruct their past through music they would have to seek out endless whole albums probably no longer available in stores.  And even then it would be awkward to keep changing the CD song to song, year to year.  A carefully pieced together mix tape in high school was as close as you could get. 

I wonder what song will someday put me back in the skin and chagrin of Gabriel version 2007.  It’s difficult to predict what music now will provide the best lens to the past.  But presently I’m loving this new trick.  I just hope this tinkering with my auditory memory doesn’t unlock some repressed trauma from a creepy uncle while I’m exhausting my lats.  That would just be awkward. 

Panic at the Dixie Chicks

I’m having a bit of a musical identity crisis lately.  There was a time not too long ago when I could rattle off a list of artists I liked with current albums and relevancy.   Even more, I could easily answer what genres I liked with few apologies.  As I round the last base of my twenty-something years tastes are not so easy.  I always worried I would become one of those adults that only liked things released from the time they were 12 to 18.  I’m not… yet.  There are things I like a lot right now but it’s mostly a song here, an album there.  There’s little left of the concrete music preferences that used to be such an identity trait. 

This really became a concern this summer as I found I liked both a Don Henley song and something by Steve Winwood.  I’m surprised the back of my head is still intact after that latter revelation.  A friend of mine introduced me to the Eric Pryde’s cover of Call On Me by Winwood via a You Tube posting on his Vox account (see, I’m not that out of touch).  The video is just an aerobics class… a hot, hot, softcore aerobics class. 

Then there’s Don.  India Arie has a cover of Heart of the Matter that is absolutely haunting.  I heard it somewhere while writing and downloaded it immediately.  I grew up with this song on the soft-rock adult crap radio station but I never paid attention to it before.  If you’ve ever had a prolonged, painful conflict with someone you loved very much this song makes sense.  It never did growing up.  Does that mean it really takes some maturity to appreciate these crappy mid-life crisis anthems?  Oh god, does that mean I’m acting mid-life?

To be fair to myself, I only like the boring men’s songs when the element extracted is the boring man.  Eric Pryde just samples 8 words of Winwood’s voice over a cardio driving baseline; I’m the same boy I used to be.  I’m the same boy I used to be.  India Arie’s voice is so smooth and sweet without being syrupy and she instills tons more emotion than the original.  I love it.   

And then there’s the Dixie Chicks.  They used to epitomize everything I took pride in not being.  They were the heroes of dumb Southern girls who dreamed of growing up and living ordinary Southern lives in ordinary Southern towns.  I decided at a very young age I wouldn’t be Southern and accepted I couldn’t be ordinary.  But this summer I have adored their song Not Ready to Make Nice.  Sure, it’s about their pillorying after daring to say something disparaging of King George the W.  And being a political junkie and fellow Bush basher with far less kind epitaphs I feel a sense of solitude in that song.  But its lyrics are generic enough to apply to anyone who has done you wrong unjustly and for whom you have no intention of sucking up and being sweet.  Again, it relates well in a non-political sense.  (Hint: The person about whom the India Arie song is so moving is the same guy I’d like back over with a Dixie Chick blaring pick-up truck.)

If someone asks me what kind of music I like do I now answer Don Henley and the Dixie Chicks?  Please beat me to death right now - slowly.  If I start developing a taste for Celine Dion I’ll do it myself.  No!  These are exceptios, right!?  They’re mere blips in a long run of relatively good taste.  I did discover Dangerous Muse before they were in all those magazines last spring.  But their tripe gets trite pretty quick.  Sorry fellas.

I still like good stuff… when I hear it.  Earlier this summer at a cookout I kept hearing LCD Sound System and thinking they were someone else.  But my friends, who aren’t suffering from musical disorientation disorder, introduced me to these guys and they’re all over my ipod now.  I’ve even downloaded video content from them - so there. 

The result of my age might not be an inability to find and like new music but rather a lack of capacity to fall in love with it as I once did.  When I was younger certain artists really captured my angsty little life and I adamantly loved, loved, loved them.  I’d argue about them and get really mad.  But nothing affects like that anymore.  By now I’m far more cynical and desensitized to get that crazy about music.  I’m not sure if I should be saddened or grateful for my saner, although less interesting, stability.   Also, when you’re tumbling toward adulthood self-actualization and figuring out your identity is your fulltime job.  The music you’re passionate about is a big part of that.  As you settle into your adult life it becomes less important to vigorously defend why A Perfect Circle can never be as good as Tool.  But it’s still jarring when you like something by the Dixie Chicks.

Maybe it’s not so much that I no longer know what I like it’s that I’ve grown gradually more complex and so have my preferences.  Maybe it’s okay for me to like things that used to be aversive and not love things that used to be worth fighting for.  I cannot easily answer the question ‘What kind of music do I like.’  But I know I like what I like what I like and hope friends will continue to introduce me to stuff or I’ll find it on my own.  And I’ll have to accept that occasionally I will enjoy something Don Henley created.  It doesn’t change the fact that this week I made sure my cable would be installed in time for me to watch the VMA’s and root for Panic at the Disco (…and Madonna!).

I’m the same boy I used to be. 

DEPENDENT ROCK

I can remember the first time I heard the word “indie,” though I don’t remember the name of the band described.  It was during my freshman year of college too many years ago.  I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know what the word meant but the lead singer looked sort of South-Asian so I thought it might be a reference to his ethnicity. 

Flash forward to the present and it’s safe to say the term “indie” has passed its arch.  While once referring to solely undiscovered artists producing music without the backing of major labels and providing an alternative to top 40, it now encompasses mainstream trendiness - tight t-shirts and skinny boys that are the standard, not the alternative.  From first hearing a band described as indie to now seeing middle-schooler hairstyles with the same descriptor, the trend, the style, the meaning of indie has gone from peripheral to pop to passé.  There will always be underground music and music more appealing to the masses.  But “indie” now exists as both and neither.  One sure indicator that a trend has run its course is CNN’s level of awareness. 

Similar to indie, I remember as a sophomore in high school hearing about the drug ecstasy for the first time.  Not till after I graduated college did I see a CNN report on “the new club drug, E or X.”  Needless to say, the Wolfe Blitzer crowd is a little slow on the uptake.  This week CNN.com posted an article about the “new” phenomena of bands producing and publicizing their own music.  Their description of why or how a band does this is accurate enough but I take issue with CNN treating this as novel.  They seem utterly ignorant of the music industry’s current normatives and give credence to a legitimacy gap that closed long ago.    Independent endeavors follow a well worn path.  The corporate construct model for album sales still exists but its informed by (and no longer superior to) non-major label tactics.  The Killers are not representative of what’s forward thinking and new.  They’re the corporate construct version of what’s forward thinking and new.          

The mainstreaming of indie leaves those concerned with credibility stuck in a losing game of indier-than-thou sanctimony.  Criteria for authenticity tighten as taste gives way to snobbery.  If you find a band you like, and dare show interest in it, the self-appointed indie puritans are quick to disparage your discovery as too pop, too normal, not underground or different enough.  All the while their lock step conformity is the ‘normal’ they claim to abhor.  Indie is, of course, an abbreviation of independent (not ‘Indian’, I now know).  But, given the current use of the term I have to ask myself – independent of what?  Music produced independent of financing from a major label?  Maybe.  People independent of popular trends and the need for mass approval?   …probably not.   

Pop Tarts Are High In Sugar!

Last week on Saturday Night Live Ashlee Simpson prepared to perform her second song with her microphone resting at her side. Suddenly a vocal track from her first song began playing. Embarrassed, Ashlee first hopped around like she was on Hee-Haw and then slinked off stage. I saw the incident later and I was not shocked by the misplaced recorded vocals. I was, however, shocked by the level of feigned shock on all the news and entertainment shows the following week.

In a related story, Friday the NBC local news here in Manhattan ran a human interest piece revealing Halloween candy has high amounts of sugar and is not good for your family’s health. Excuse me, Halloween candy is not good for you? What!? Where’s the evidence? Show me the FDA data behind this eye-opener. Has the American Medical Association weighed in?

Acting surprised that a pop star lip-syncs is the same as pretending revelations about the sugar content of candy is news. Pop music long ago dropped all prerequisites for fame having to do with talent or originality. Image and marketability trumps all and technology makes carrying a tune obsolete. That headset mic Britney wears while she strips on stage is just a prop. Even though the post-mouseketeer bubble gum phase of the music industry is gasping to its death the production of record label constructs posing as musicians is flourishing. Nobody ever accused pop princess Ashlee of being a tortured artist with something to say. Is it such a logical leap to assume the sound of the words you hear her sing don’t come from inside her either?

You don’t go get mini Snickers bars for vitamins and minerals and you don’t love top-40 pop for its authenticity. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying yummy chocolaty treats. And there’s nothing wrong with liking hit music. But pretending that either are substantive is just silly. Pop music is fun and despite its drawbacks it’s harder than it looks to gauge the public’s taste and produce a single that appeals to a wide range of people. You can appreciate it on that level regardless of the poetic merits of the entertainers.

Oh my goodness, Ashlee Simpson uses a helper track when she performs live. Next you’ll tell me she doesn’t write her own songs. Well hey, she doesn’t. Normally I would cope with this disappointment by downing a 1lb bag of M&Ms. But thankfully I now know that’s not healthy for my family.

Give me a break. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.