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| Stories of Rock Music Faggotry (starring me) by I need clarification 11/19/2007, 4:45pm PST | ||||
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| I grew up in a house full of classical music, which my dad listened to in the evenings and all weekend. We went to the local university symphony at least twice a week (I would bring an Encyclopedia Brown book and a flashlight and sit in the deserted balcony), and a big event every year was when the London Symphony Orchestra came to Daytona Beach for a week - we would go to every concert! I loved the LSO, mostly because they played on the original soundtrack to Star Wars. I was playing violin at the time and even knew the concertmaster's name (I read it off the program), and would fantasize that one day I would have his job, starting the tune-up and shaking the conductor's (John Williams, OF COURSE!!) hand to start the evening. In actually I couldn't even get out of the second violin section in youth orchestra, growing taller and taller while the (new) kids around me stayed the same height, until the whole situation was ridiculous and I just quit rather than make my mediocrity and dedication to not practicing EVER any more obvious.
When my mom and dad split, my mom began re-exploring her love of pop music right where she left off, which meant lots of Simon and Garfunkel, as well as Dan Fogelberg(!) and who knows what else soft rock folk faggot shit. The end result of all this was I got to middle school without really hearing any rock music at all. While my classmates were rocking out to Rock and Roll Over and whatever else, I was busy trying to pretend that I am a Rock was some sort of hard-core tough guy shit. To make matters worse, my best friend Patrick was some sort of music nut, who was like 11 but had every punk record out there including rare imports and was already PSH above bullshit stuff like Kiss and even The Police! So when he started talking about Echo and the Bunnymen, I was so far out of my league it wasn't even funny. The only good news is he was a "mom" friend (ie. he lived about a block from my mom's house), so I had time for him to teach me about rock music and still act like I knew something around my "dad" friends, the guys in my dad's neighborhood. His idea of catching me up on rock music was to hand me a stack of Devo albums, which I promptly memorized and they were instantly my favorite band OF ALL TIME. Even my first concert! But clearly this wasn't going to cut it with the non-elite music crowd and I still had a lot to learn. In my usual style I decided to skip actually trying to know anything about rock music and just say I did. This led to such things as listening to "Start Me Up" by the Stones and when they all go "I'll take you places that you've never ever seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenaaaayayaahhh..." I would shake my head and laugh quietly and go, "Oh, that's just SO Rolling Stones, those crazy guys." That's pretty bad, but even worse was I was listening to the music BY MYSELF when I would say things like this. i also tried to transfer my assumed classical musical theory knowledge to rock criticism, like when my friend Mark was over and we were listening to "Rock the Casbah." It annoyed the fuck out of me that he liked the same song I did, so I would one-up him by saying, "Man the bass... part... [I was pretty sure it was called a "line," but I didn't want to risk using it and looking like a FOOL]... in this song is so good." Then I would pretend to only be listening to the bass, while he missed the substance by concentrating on the singing and guitars and electronic radio squeals from the cockpit verse. The truth is I was only vaguely aware of what a bass sounded like and I'm pretty sure I was just tapping my foot to the drum beat. By sheer luck it turns out the song does have a good bass line (now I know what it means AND EVERYTHING), but I probably said the same thing about every fucking song I wanted to like more than the other guy. Mark and I also formed about a billion bands, further revealing my complete lack of knowing anything about anything, as I would let him be "singer," and assign myself the role of "synthesizer player," which to us meant I could also create all the background vocals on the fly, electronically. That's how we were able to perform "Fame (I wanna live forever)," "Movin' Right Along (Muppets)," and "Tonight I'm on the Loose (Saga)" with just the two of us. By the time I got to high school I'd had enough of not knowing what the fuck was going on and decided I would learn about rock music chronologically. So for like a year I only listened to 50's music, then early 60's, then late 60's, etc. Unfortunately I graduated before I even got to early 70s and gave up the whole idea in college so for me punk rock still hasn't even happened yet and I'm still trying to catch up to Patrick. :( |
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Stories of Rock Music Faggotry (starring me) by 11/19/2007, 4:45pm PST  Tell them how you won't listen to Nirvana's final album. by 11/19/2007, 4:53pm PST What kind of music do you listen to now? by 11/20/2007, 8:50am PST Bad stuff mostly that makes FSBT laugh at me by 11/20/2007, 9:24am PST |
