iPods, Iron Men, and Matchboxes

My first iPod was terrible. And I don’t mean the device itself, my little light blue iPod Mini was one of the greatest things I’d ever owned and one of my prized possessions throughout middle school. No, I mean the contents of my first iPod were absolutely, undeniably, testical-shatteringly horrible. The first CD that I ever burned to iTunes was Matchbox 20’s debut album Yourself or Someone Like You. Ugh. The second thing that I put onto my iPod was a burned CD of random Weird Al tracks given to me by a friend. Slightly less judgmental ugh. Now I don’t mean to shit on either of these two artists, they’re technically fine in the grand scheme of things, but these two were literally it. 40-some tracks consisting solely of Matchbox 20 and Weird Al. I cannot think of a more hellish combination. I’ve read about musical torture in which someone is forced to listen to the same songs at a deafening level for days on end… but my iPod in 2005 would have given those playlists a run for their money. My iTunes library would have been enough to make even the most steadfast soldier spill their guts. But I was happy. Mainly because I didn’t know better, but also because I was amazed I could listen to more than one CD at a time.

In 2005, the same friend who cursed me with the Matchbox 20 CD and the Weird Al mix gave me a new burned disc simply titled “Matt’s Mix.” I had to rely on him as my sole source of new music because he unabashedly used Limewire, and I was too scared of getting a virus or being arrested to use it myself. “This is pretty cool” he told me ahead of time “you’re gonna love it.” Because he hadn’t steered me wrong yet, I tossed the disc in my computer excited to see what it contained. This was a time before anyone knew (or had the ability) to label tracks on burned CDs, so within iTunes everything came up as “Track 01”, “Track 02”, “Track 03”, etc. Intrigued by the mystery (as well as Matt’s ringing endorsement of its contents, I loaded the unknown files into my iPod and hit play.

What I heard was the first destructive, resonant chord of AC/DC’s “TNT”. I didn’t know what to make of it. This didn’t sound like Rob Thomas at all. And the lyrics didn’t discuss Yoda, food, or the lifestyle of the Amish. It was like hearing music for the first time.

The tracks that followed were essentially a greatest hits of the Australian band’s first nine albums. From High Voltage to For Those About to Rock I had been turned onto something that I genuinely connected with. Because I was at the musical whim of my friend, I ended up listening to these tracks dozens of times, replaying them until I knew every word and every beat. Later that same year I realized that my Dad had thousands of CDs just sitting on a bookshelf in his office, and as it turns out, most of them were classic rock. Maybe he wasn’t as lame as I thought. Within the thousands of albums my dad owned were the first eight AC/DC albums, all of which I promptly ripped to my iPod and enjoyed endlessly.

When my dad noticed that I was listening to his music he asked me if I’d ever heard of Black Sabbath before and recommended that I listen to his copy of Paranoid. If I can point to a single moment that led me to love heavy metal it was that album.

Back in 2005 there was one moment late in a cold fall school night. My family had just finished eating dinner, my two brothers had retreated upstairs to their rooms and my parents were out on their nightly walk. I stayed in the living room and snuck that copy of Paranoid into my family’s stereo. I skipped directly to track 4 “Iron Man” and cranked the stereo up almost as loud as it could go. I put my head between the speakers and pressed play.

The sound seemed to reverberate through my body. I could feel it in my core. The ominous drum beat gave me goosebumps. The powerful fuzzed-out chords made my brain contort. Ozzy’s first distorted cry “I AM IRON MAN” made my hair stand on end. It put me in a trance-like state and it was the first time I had ever heard something so heavy so loud. I saw it all when I closed my eyes, I felt it shake the structure around me. It was beautiful. It was metal.

Most importantly, Paranoid paved the way for heavier music that I’d go onto enjoy for the rest of my life. They opened the gates to metal, stoner rock, psychedelic music, and so much more. I can trace it all back to that one night that I spent shaking with joy that something like this existed. The journey that I went on to arrive at that point was definitely a weird one, the jump from Matchbox 20 to AC/DC to Sabbath isn’t a progression I think many other people have made. It’s a cliché, but sometimes the journey really is more important than the destination. In this case it’s a journey without a destination. Music and personal taste has no end point, I’m always discovering new music, and my life wouldn’t be the same without it. I appreciate “the journey” in retrospect, but more than anything, I’m glad it went somewhere quickly. If it wasn’t for that terrible first collection of music I’d have nowhere to go to. Nothing to run from, and no reason to look for anything better. The blandness of Matchbox 20 sent me on a musical journey that’s still ongoing to this day. Thank you Rob Thomas.

Traditions and Nostalgia

If nothing else, I’m a nostalgic person. I played through the entire Mass Effect series over the course of several whirlwind months a few years back, and one of the things that stuck with me the most, out of the hundreds of hours of gameplay, was a single conversation with one of the characters. The character, Thane, was a member of an alien race who had the ability to relive any moment of his life with perfect clarity. I remember watching this scene and genuinely thinking ‘that would be pretty cool’ until the character continued talking and convinced me otherwise. I find it worrying that “cool!” was my initial reaction to what is ultimately a curse.

I catch myself waxing poetic things that happened mere months ago. And it’s not a ‘aw, wasn’t that nice?’ kind of feeling, it’s more of a crippling ‘I WANT TO GO BACK’ kind of feeling. I’m 23, and I don’t feel like I should be that nostalgic over something that happened a couple months ago. To make things worse, this nostalgia compounds on itself and becomes more powerful as the events become further and further away. The plus side to this is that I am often the centerpiece of my own nostalgic tendencies. That sounds incredibly absorbed and self-centered, but it’s actually just a side-effect of how much I love to be alone.

Because the feeling can be so overpowering, I prefer to think of my nostalgia trips as self-imposed traditions. Whether you like it or not, everyone has tradition forced upon them. Every Christmas we collectively experience the same traditions as a society. The same music is being played in the stores, the same specials are being aired on TV, and even the fronts of buildings change to reflect the candy cane color scheme. Hell, we spend time, money, and natural resources wrapping our trees in little lights just because it’s a specific month. Christmas is the only time we collectively change our environment, and more importantly, these changes are all completely out of our control. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Wiccan, or a Scientologist, you’re gonna hear those tunes over the course of those two months whether you like it or not. And this isn’t some “war on Christmas” rant, the point is sometimes seasons carry traditions which overpower everything else around them.

Sometimes traditions don’t make sense, but we do them because they make us feel good. As Community pointed out in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” Christmas isn’t about presents, or food, or even Jesus: Christmas is about family. Christmas is about literally and figuratively getting closer to your family and using them as support to get through the coldest, darkest, harshest time of the year. Christmas isn’t for Christians, Christmas is symbolic: it’s is about what your family does. Now, what your family does may entail presents, food, or Jesus, but in the end, it’s human connection that carries us through what would otherwise be the most unforgiving season of the year.

Because I spend so much time alone, music is often the key element to my own nostalgia. My iTunes contains a worrying number of playlists tied to specific years, seasons, and even days. As a 23-year-old I’m accustomed to viewing life in school-like quarters (I guess normal people call them seasons?), and the changing of the seasons always comes with a new rotation of music on my iPhone. I feel like that’s relatively normal, but the problem is that I often reinforce my own nostalgia by recreating the circumstances the following year.

I’ll waste dozens of hours listening to a specific podcast, revisiting a specific album, or even playing through an entire video game just because it brings back a fraction of what I had felt at a previous time. Why am I so obsessed with recreating the past? It’s not like I have any regrets. I’m not trying to make things better, or take back what I’ve done… It just feels good.

I don’t think nostalgia trips are necessarily a bad thing, but I worry that this zealot-like commitment to recreating the past may be holding me back from missing opportunities in the present. 2016 has been the best year of my life, and I owe that entirely to the new experiences I’ve had this year. The people I’ve meet, the things I’ve done, all the amazing things I never thought I’d be a part of… See? I’m already getting nostalgic about a year that’s not even over yet. The point is I’ve had a great year, and I owe it all to trying something new. There’s something to be said from learning from the past, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with revisiting your personal history, but I suppose it’s all a matter of not falling into it completely.

Over the next several months I’m sure I’ll make specific posts dedicated to individual pieces of my nostalgia, and I’m starting to realize that’s the point of this blog. I think if I can document this all somewhere I’ll be able to get these nostalgic demons off my chest and move on to bigger, better, and newer things. There’s so much beauty in the world, and I just want to share some of what I’ve found. Sometimes it’s as simple as a week over winter break that I spent shut in with a video game. Sometimes it’s an album whose opening chords are so powerful that I can’t help but be transported back to a specific time and place. Even if no one is reading this, I think it will be a great exercise to document my personal traditions and show how these things far in the past still impact me to this very day.

I feel like these personal traditions, the things you do by yourself, aren’t something people talk about openly a lot. But they’re important. I believe personal traditions are some of the most unadulterated experiences we have as humans, something that shows who we are and what we find important. We’re all a collection of favorite albums, this is just mine.

The Name of This Blog

In November of 2006 two of my loves came together in a way that I never could have expected. After another grueling day of middle school, I rode my bike over to a friends house for (what I assumed would be) yet another innocuous afternoon of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This was a game that my parents had expressly forbidden me from playing, so I already had a bit of an adrenaline rush going as I turned down his street. I arrived ready to help him joyfully commit drive-bys and outrun the cops, but I arrived to find something completely different: Guitar Hero II.

Guitar Hero became my obsession. That plastic guitar represented an object that combined the two things I cared about most in life: music and video games. It also mixed these two passions with my then-burgeoning hobby of (real) guitar playing. All of these things came together and took the form of one convenient package that tickled my brain and became the main topic of conversation among my group of friends for the next year. As we all practiced our plastic shredding it quickly became a race to see who could work their way from “Easy” all the way up to “Expert” first. There was something epic about being the first one within our group to have completed “Free Bird” on the next difficulty before anyone else.

While the competition was certainly a key factor in the game’s longevity among my group of friends, the primary reason that I kept playing was music discovery. The game turned me onto literally dozens of classic rock acts, most of whom I’d never listened to before. There were major bands like The Police, Iggy Pop, and Deep Purple who were all exposed to me first through this game. The songs included in Guitar Hero II’s soundtrack offered forays into these artist’s extensive discographies, and in some cases, the songs featured are still my favorites by the artists.

But it wasn’t just legacy acts, Guitar Hero II also included a fair number of smaller, more obscure acts and up-and-comers who I had absolutely never heard of. Bands like The Toadies, The Sword, and The Living End all became obsessions of mine over the next several years of high school. These licensed songs were all part of the “career mode” you had to play though as a part of the game’s natural progression. Guitar Hero also included “bonus songs” from lesser-known indie artists that you could purchase with in-game money that you earned from playing gigs (just like a real rocker!)

I could probably write a page (or at least a paragraph) about what each one of the songs in Guitar Hero II means to me, but one song in particular “The Fall of Pangea” by Valient Thorr stuck out to me. What the fuck did ‘the fall of pangea’ mean? I didn’t know, but it sounded wicked.

A year later in 2007 my Guitar Hero obsession had died down and I had moved back to traditional video games. In the winter of 2007 I was playing a game called skate. which had a similarly kick-ass soundtrack. Within its 40+ song setlist was a song by Valient Thorr curiously enough. “The Man Behind the Curtain” was the band’s first breakout hit, a song which centered around a blistering guitar riff that frequently (and abruptly) pauses allowing for the booming drums and manic vocals cut into the track. The song was so infectious that I was compelled to download it in addition to the rest of the band’s second album Total Universe Man.

Within Total Universe Man there are several tracks consisting only of spoken dialogue over subdued instrumentals. One such track is “Intermission: Thesis Of Infinite Measure” which is a rambling paranoid stream of consciousness on love, humanity, and music. I think that the track speaks for itself more than a lyric sheet ever could, but the ending phrase “swim into the sounds” is something that has stuck with me ever since I first listened to the album. The fact that it’s repeated five times makes it feel all the more haunting and important.

While the line is poetic on its own, I’ve always read it as something deeper. The song’s “structure” is loose at best, but it’s ending is crystal clear: it is a plea. Using the analogy of swimming, our narrator repeats the final line five times for emphasis. He wants the listener to shut off their mind and be absorbed by the music. Swim into the abyss of the melody and be consumed by the sound. Lose yourself in the songs and become surrounded by nothing but music. Swim into the sounds.

I think that’s a beautiful notion. Sometimes it’s all you want to do, just float on your back out to sea, or in this case, float into a space where the music is focused on so wholly that nothing else matters. It represents the ideal way to experience music, with a blank mind and an open heart. Like the tide, you need to let music carry you wherever it needs to. You can’t fight it, and you can’t stop it.

I chose this phrase as the name for my blog because it not only depicts this beautiful, poetic, trance-like way to experience music, but also because it represents so much. It represents a formative time in my life when me and all of my friends were bonded together over a plastic instrument. It represents all the music that that game (and its sequels) turned me onto. It represents a time in my life I’ll never get back, but that I wouldn’t trade in for anything. Guitar Hero represents one of the most important moments of in musical journey, and it turned me onto an embarrassing number of bands.

On some level, there’s a weird stigma to admit that you “discovered” something as basic as “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin'” through a video game (much less one where you press colored buttons and pretend to play along with it), but hey, I was 13. I’d heard maybe 10% of the songs on the soundtrack before playing Guitar Hero II, but I came out of it knowing more about classic rock than I ever would have otherwise. It educated me on old classics and turned me onto new bands I’d never heard of. I gained a greater appreciation for the guitar as an instrument. It led me down a musical rabbit hole that informed my taste and impacted the way I think about music for the rest of my life. It was the first time I’d ever been so invested in a video game because I was getting out of it as much as I was putting into it. From a snobby “music fan” standpoint, it’s hyper-embarrassing to admit how much I got out of these games, but sometimes you just have to not care. Sometimes you just have to let the music take over and gently float you downstream. Sometimes you have to let the music take you on a journey and let it lay you aground wherever it pleases. Sometimes you just have to swim into the sound.