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| From | Stewart Mason <flamingo@theworld.com> |
| Subject | Re: New Thread topic Cool music epiphany |
| Date | Thu, 26 Jun 2003 14:02:43 -0400 |
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At 04:01 AM 6/26/2003 -0700, Bradlee Beard wrote:
>Another idea for a thread was when did you discover
>that music beside what was "popular" was available out
>there, and you became the fan/geek you are now.
When I was about 8, my eldest sister moved out of the house, which
reshuffled the bedroom so that for the first time my brother and I had our
own rooms. I got a lot of hand-me-down furniture and stuff, including my
parents' old clock radio. The antenna on this thing was terrible, and as a
result, it could only get the local (Boulder) radio stations and not the
Denver stations I spent most of my time listening to, most notably KIMN,
the last great Top 40 AM station. So when I was in my bedroom with the
radio on at night, the only station I could get was KBCO, a pioneering FM
freeform station that around this time ('77-'78) was starting to integrate
a lot of punk and new wave into their playlist, at first Elvis Costello,
Talking Heads and Blondie, but then many more, until by the time we moved
from Boulder in the summer of 1983, they were almost entirely a new wave
station.
Add to that going with my friends down to Pearl Street Mall and rooting
around Rocky Mountain Records, or the slightly scarier Wax Trax on The
Hill, by the time I was 11 or so, and the immortal pre-MTV Boulder public
access show FM/TV and by the time I was in junior high, I was already an
obnoxious little indie snot. It took moving from Boulder to Russell,
Kansas to snap me out of the idea that it was cooler to like the Jam,
Madness and the Beat (my primary obsessions at the time) than Duran Duran
and A Flock of Seagulls, much less, say, Asia or Bruce Springsteen. Moving
from my hip little college town to a central Kansas farm town of about
15,000, where musical tastes were still set around 1975, was something of a
philosophic eye-opener: since I wasn't into Zeppelin and Skynyrd -- and
let's not forget, I already dressed pretty much like I do now: razor-cut
hair, penny loafers or Topsiders with no socks, khakis, unbuttoned
button-down shirts over (usually brightly colored) t-shirts -- then I was
clearly a poncy little faggot, and therefore there were no societal
limitations on what I could or couldn't listen to. There was no
subcultural gulf between Joy Division and Bow Wow Wow, since anyone who
listened to either was in equal danger of getting spit on by a senior in an
AC/DC t-shirt, so I was suddenly free to listen to whatever the hell I
wanted. (Though this is remarkably difficult to believe in these days,
Russell High had a smoking section for students to light up a quick butt
between classes. The first time I quit smoking was when we lived in
Russell, because I was taking my life in my hands by venturing onto the
smoker's patio.)
Luckily, we left Russell after about seven months, but I've always stuck
with that belief: the idea that one style of music is intrinsically somehow
"better" than another is just plain retarded.
S
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