VH1 and Sponginess

For all my talk about metal, hip-hop, and my punk counterculture mentality (make no mistake, I am a hipster shithead at heart) I also have an affection for a very specific era of pop music. At the risk of talking about the same year again, 2006 was an important period because I had nothing better to do than absorb everything around me. I was culturally-conscious for the first time in my life, and as a result, much of what I care about stems from this time.

Specifically, in 2006 I had nothing better to do than watch VH1 every morning. It’s a weird go-to thing for a thirteen year old to watch on a saturday morning, but I guess at the time it was an intoxicating mixture of titillation and maudlin pop tunes. As seems to be a recurring theme during this time period, I just didn’t know any better. I was a sponge, happy to absorb whatever random droplets of media rolled my way. 2006 was also early enough that I couldn’t really seek out anything on the internet, and I was far too young (and lazy) to actually go and discover things in a record store. As a result, I defaulted to watching VH1 for one to two hours every morning. Nothing weird about that. Just a 13 year old boy watching the top 20 adult contemporary music videos. Over and over and over again.

While I think it’s a hilarious image in retrospect, I actually have a profound appreciation for what is ultimately just another year of generic pop songs. There’s probably someone a year older than me who feels the same way about 2005, and there’s probably someone a year younger than me who feels the same way about 2007. But for me, I have a soft spot in my heart for The All-American Rejects, The Fray, KT Tunstall, and Shakira. Her hips didn’t lie to me.

This Spotify playlist is relatively comprehensive and reflective of the hits that year. Now let me stop you before you say anything else. There’s a lot of corny shit in there. A lot. I recognize that. “Bad Day” by Daniel Powter? Yeah you’re the reason I’m having a bad day, Daniel. “For You I Will” by Teddy Geiger? How bout you don’t, Teddy boy. “Waiting on the World To Change” by John Mayer? How ‘bout you make the first move, Mayer. Yeah this is basically sitting in a dentist’s office waiting to get your teeth drilled music. This is some cornball shit, and I fully admit that. Sometimes dragging your shame songs out into the light is healthy.

VH1 wasn’t all bad at this time, there was also some genuinely good stuff from this era that I’ll still listen to occasionally: “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, “Dani California” by the Chilli Peppers, and “Idlewild Blue” by OutKast are all songs I unabashedly and unironically love. I just find it weird that all these genuinely (and objectively) great songs occupy the same space in my mind as stuff like “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield.

God knows I’ll never put down an individual’s taste, but there’s no reason I can’t put down my own. I’m grateful that I moved out of this phase within a year and stopped relying on “the charts” for new music by the end of the year. I’m sad that this is the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like a member of the MTV generation. They got Nirvana, and I got Blue October. They got The Breeders, and I got P!nk. They got 90’s Madonna, and I got 2006 Madonna. It’s not all bad music, I’m just sad that these are the songs that I associate with my early teenage years. It could have been so much better. I could have been so much cooler. But hey, sometimes ya just gotta roll with the punches. Sometimes you can’t keep a 13 year old from obsessively watching Nelly Furtado. And now, for better or worse, 2006 pop is one of foundations of my musical pyramid. Such is life. Sometimes you can’t hide your inner teenager.

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.

Hip-Hop and Musical Adventurousness

I never thought I’d be a hip-hop guy. I first became musically-conscious in my early teens and pledged allegiance to “rock” early on which, in my mind, meant swearing off everything that I perceived as mainstream. The classic rock that was so revelatory in middle school expanded my horizons and led me to grunge, metal, and stoner rock phases throughout my late teens. By the time I entered college I’d never genuinely been a fan of a single hip-hop artist apart from the now-defunct comedic hip-hop duo Das Racist… I suppose I did like Eminem, but being a white suburban teen, that was more out of obligation than undying fandom. I was still aware enough to realize I was missing out on something, but the juvenile punk rock mentality I had developed kept me from “giving in” to what I perceived as a lesser form of music.

It wasn’t until I saw a reddit thread announcing the premature release of Kanye West’s Yeezus that I realized I was missing out on something. The excitement was palpable, and the title (“So uh… Yeezus leaked.”) was intriguing enough to lead me to search the album out. I was so out of the hip-hop loop that I didn’t even realize this was a Kanye West album until I Googled it. I figured what did I have to lose? I downloaded the album, listened to it twice and didn’t get it. I knew Kanye was one of the biggest artists in the game (especially after his monumental 2010 album), but Yeezus on its own didn’t reveal to me to see what others saw in him.

Ironically, that same summer I had also gone down the rabbit hole that is Ween and discovered the beautiful insanity that is John Frusciante. Perhaps through those two artists I’d built up a tolerance to “dissonant” music because I ended up revisiting Yeezus during a vacation later that summer and fell in love with the record. The song “Bound 2” specifically hooked me early on and ended up being replayed constantly over the course of the trip. Everything from the sample, to the delivery, to the punchlines, to the way that Kanye twisted his words over the beat was amazing to me… and it was something that only that song did. Everything else on my iPod was rock, Yeezus was the only album within those 120 gigs that sounded anything like that. That same trip I heard “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and took it as a cosmic sign I needed to give Kanye a chance and check out the rest of his discography. I downloaded the rest of Kanye’s studio albums and figured that would be that. He was the only good hip-hop.

A year and a half later at the beginning of 2015 I found myself balls-deep in college, chipping away at a handful of remaining courses as I entered one of my last years of school. While I’d enjoyed my trip through Kanye’s discography, that journey didn’t lead me any deeper down the rabbit hole of hip-hop, instead I’d thrown myself deeper into rock and the genre was beginning to lose its luster as I found myself listening to more and more podcasts. Ironically, inspired by two separate reddit posts: one for Lil Wayne’s mixtape Sorry 4 the Wait 2, and a second (now deleted thread) for Drake’s surprise album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late both inspired me to give those releases a listen. Once again the excitement and experiences of complete strangers led me to albums I never thought I’d be listening to. Both Lil Wayne and Drake were artists which I had previously written off as musical fast food, yet they were both single-handedly inspiring hype and excitement the likes of which I had rarely seen online.

Between the epic history of Wayne’s Tha Carter V and the thinly-veiled shots both he and Drake seemingly took at Birdman on these releases, I realized I was missing out on something. That’s not to mention all the excitement, hype, and inside jokes that comes with the territory of hip-hop. These two releases opened the floodgates.

Based on how pumped Sorry 4 the Wait 2 got me in the gym, I was led to Young Thug, one of many rappers heavily-inspired by Lil Wayne. I’ll never be able to articulate why I love Young Thug as well as some of the articles written by professionals and music journalists, but things like this Instagram and this website speak for themselves. Young Thug is a creative force who has dismantled the previous boundaries established by the genre of hip-hop and created a sound rooted in upending the listener’s expectations. He’s a gangster who wears dresses. He’s a cold-blooded killer who calls his best friends “bae.” He’s a man who has written absurd lyrics like “I'mma ride in that pussy like a stroller” and made it sound so fucking natural.

If Lil Wayne and Drake opened my personal floodgates to hip-hop, then Young Thug removed the hinges and turned me into the type of hip-hop head that there is no coming back from. A month later, Kendrick Lamar dropped To Pimp a Butterfly, an album widely-considered one of the best since Kanye’s MBDTF. On the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum Travis Scott released Rodeo which quickly became one of my favorite “less lyrically substantive” releases of the year. Both of these releases showed me that hip-hop can’t be placed in a single box, it’s more than drugs and women (though they are still discussed often). That summer Vince Staples released Summertime ‘06 and Future released DS2. These releases ended up serving as a perfect “sample platter” of what the genre could do. These albums along with the infamous Drake/Meek Mill Beef made me feel like I was a part of something not only bigger than myself, but more exciting than any other genre I’d ever been a fan of.

2015 represented a sea change in my musical perspective. Hip-hop is now my primary genre and I visit boards like /r/hiphopheads every day. It’s a scene that’s ever-changing in the most exciting ways. I’m just glad my eyes were opened when they were and that I’m now no longer missing out on an entire world I didn’t even know existed. It was childish to withhold an entire genre of music from myself, and I’ll never make that mistake again. As much as I wanted to pretend that I was musically-diverse, you’re still only as adventurous as you want to be, and if a lack of adventurousness means missing out, then you’re doing music wrong. Music should be fun, enjoy what you enjoy, but don’t ever close yourself off to something, because it just might be your next obsession. That’s a lesson I’ll carry forward for the rest of my life, and I owe that all to a guy who compared his teeth to toilet paper. Sometimes brilliance can come from the most unexpected places.