A Journey Through My Musical Touchstones

(Work was slow today. Obviously.)

I've always grown up around music. I remember stealing peeks through my dad's records from the 1960s when I was a kid, liking Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills album because it was filled with cartoon pictures, giggling a little over the panel that said "Janis Joplin on vocals" with an off-panel speech balloon interjecting "And how!" and later chuckling over my dad's red ink peace sign scrawl on the upper right hand corner of some of them. (The idea of my dad being a hippie just didn't jibe with me then, and it still doesn't now.)

True, I grew up on MTV and there were those bands that I loved in the 1980s, like Duran Duran, but when you're 7 years old it takes an age and a day to save up for an album. Plus I was under the belief then that when a band put out an album, it would only be available up until they put out their next one. The idea of a back catalogue that could stretch 10 years into the past never occurred to me.

Whenever we drove somewhere together, the radio would be cranked up to some classic rock station and my dad would have one hand on the steering wheel and drum the other one against my leg against the music. He never was really much for showing signs of affection when I was growing up, so maybe this was his version of the manly-man's hug.

It was through these drives during my almost 11th year on the planet that I was introduced to my first musical love of my life, The Beatles. Not exactly the most ground-breaking, cutting edge introduction to music in retrospect, I mean had it been something like Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, that's be really something for an 11 year old to attach herself to! But I know I could do a lot worse, and I know I did when I wrote in my junior high school journal and saved for maybe not posterity, but memory that my two favorite bands ever were U2 and New Kids on the Block. (That lasted about 3 months.)

Strangely enough, I got into the Beatles about 2 years before it seemed everyone else in my school did, and maybe what started to send me off in another direction was a) They weren't around any more and I wanted to experience what it was like to love a band that was still evolving and creating and b) the most shallow, superficial people were starting to like the Beatles in school and the fact they supposedly appreciated their messages of peace and love while searching out and destroying the lower people on the totem pole (read: me) just smacked of hypocrisy.

So in 1988, I moved on to U2. Christ, Bono was one of those people who could sell ice to Eskimos. He was completely charming and charismatic. I remember having their cassettes of War and The Joshua Tree (copied off my Dad) and playing them over and over. Then I went to see Rattle and Hum with a friend of mine (where I asked her "What's apartheid?" in the middle of the movie, and she said "I'll tell you later.") I hadn't realized this powerful band was also quite political and I have to credit them with being the first band that allowed me to open my eyes to the idea that music could influence change in the world, as well as clue me into the fact that music could also be my church, my bridge to God, whatever that is.

While I still appreciated the Beatles, U2 was the first band where I started buying anything I could that related to them somehow. I joined their fan club and made pen friends from all over the world. I bought books that an Irish magazine published that documented their early days and their rise to the top. I joined Amnesty International. Strangely enough, I think this was the way I decided to rebel against my family. No hard-core drinking, just hard-core letter writing.

U2 are a hugely popular band. I don't know if there is anywhere in the world you could go anymore, say "Bono," and have no one know who you are talking about. But maybe back then, it wasn't enough for me. They were popular but they were still being overshadowed by MC Hammer and Paula Abdul and Color Me Badd. So I believed that MTV was "it" at the time, like it was a complete insult not to have your videos overplayed on MTV. Throw me a bone, I was like 14 at the time!

I was staying up late on Sundays, still trying to hold onto my faith in MTV and watching their 120 Minutes show, a collection of "alternative music" (as in NOT Mariah!) videos. I was searching for a band that I could love from the very beginning and watch them rise and grow and change, and I could say I was there from the start. I guess I was looking for my own Beatles, not really knowing at the time that they, through their many left turns later in their career, had alienated a lot of the fans that swooned and fainted when they were watching them on the *television* playing on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964.

So while I was wallowing in this sludgy wasteland known as the first year of high school, trying to forget the waste of time that was junior high school, another band threw open the windows for me, or as I like to see it, each band that I have fallen for, it's like a lens placed upon a filter placed upon another filter placed upon another lens, something that only adds to the way I saw my life before, and yet changes it in some radical way as well.

The band I'm talking about was Nirvana, and oh my God, they were so exciting to me then, after I lost my suspicions about them as I didn't want to like a band that everyone else did right off the bat (snob, I know!) They turned the musical world on its ear. Kurt Cobain (god bless him) was full of vomit and vinegar, and perfect for me as I was someone who hated the fakery that was going on within my high school career. I loved how he wanted to be respected as a musician but not be popular. How he tried to work the system on his own terms, which meant flipping it the bird more often times than not.

The funny thing was at this time, "grunge" became not just a music style but a fashion statement. It was cool to be a bit ugly. It was cool to express yourself, in any way possible, so long as you just did. And I was exposed to these women, these strong, cool women, that I really wanted to be like. Kim Gordon was the epitome of the perfect woman for me, the one I wanted to grow up to be. She didn't seem to be too concerned about fashion, but still looked good. She had a tough edge about her, fiercely intelligent, just drop-dead cool. And she played bass guitar in a non-fluffy way. She rocked! I think this is the point where I stubbornly took up the idea that I could be whomever I wanted and damn if I didn't find someone to be with. After all, Kim just exuded a confidence in her skin that was what it was all about for me. It didn't matter having the perfect hair or clothes or makeup. Kim still looked pretty glamorous, but she gave off this vibe and I felt that you could get somewhere by being honest and original by being yourself, and that was a pure gold revelation for me in high school.

But when I saw a video around this time of Boyz II Men wearing matching flannel shirts, maybe this was the signal the beast had grown too big for its cage and was starting to bite back. And when Kurt killed himself, the crown was passed to Pearl Jam. Then on the radio everyone supposedly sounded like Pearl Jam. When Pearl Jam itself decided to drop out and stop making videos, it was hard to keep up with their new material and I started to lose interest.

Though I never stopped liking Pearl Jam, listening to Nirvana today sounds almost really dated to me, like they came at the perfect time where I was feeling the vitriolic self-hate that only comes during high school. But that was my moment of realizing what it meant to like popular music, music so popular it becomes part of a fashion trend.

In college, I latched onto Sebadoh, and discovered how it felt to be looked at as not "indie" enough to appreciate their music. At around this time, I was living in a musical bubble, and probably playing a mix of everything I had loved up to that point: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Sonic Youth interspersed with U2, R.E.M. and The Beatles. This where I saw my own high-school smugness bite me in my own ass, and I started to understand that music shouldn't come with a uniform and a code to live by. I started to appreciate music for whatever reason I appreciated it. That would include the industrial metal sounds of Nine Inch Nails, the wispy vocals of Juliana Hatfield and the bombastic fluff known as ABBA.

That's pretty much how I was living my life before I moved to South Korea and during that time too. Let's call this period My Time in the Desert, seeing as it was a bit of a cultural waste land. It was amusing, however, to see Korean hip-hop bands and girl groups trying to emulate The Spice Girls. (Korean pop culture exists in a vacuum I think.) When I arrived in Hong Kong, I was happy to see that there was an HMV near by me, I later discovered (though a bit too late) used CD shops there as well, and by watching the local TV at around 10 p.m. I could see what EMI Asia and Warner Brothers Asia were trying to promote over here to the expats. In a word, Brit-rock. Without my time spent in Asia I would not have discovered for myself Muse or Keane or The Kooks.

It was also at this time I had joined a music tracking site that through my plays of Radiohead and Muse that I would probably really like Jeff Buckley. Now, I know I have already gone on about him well enough in here and I will err on the side of caution here so as to not have my Music blog be confused with a Jeff Buckley blog, but I just found his life to be very inspiring, his voice absolutely beautiful, and the best thing about him was reading about how in his tumultuous childhood, it seemed his guitar and his tapes and records were also a connection to what was real and true in a world that probably made not much sense to him.

For me, for how I now approach appreciating music, it only makes sense to me that he is my fourth and most current touchstone point in my musical journey. He was someone whose album was unable to be categorized because he cast a wide net and recorded whatever sort of music moved him. Like I felt for the first time being a U2 fan, his voice to me is like attending a church service, and I recognize in him what I loved about Nirvana -- he did not want to sacrifice himself and his art for commercial gain. He had this amazing life through which he absorbed so much music, and I totally understand it now, not just through him but through all the artists that somehow came into my life before, that the purpose of music is to be an integral part of life itself. Expression, of yourself and your feelings, is everything. The connections you make, through people or music or through spirituality, are key.