TBQ and music
Jul. 30th, 2002 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueenA few people (hi ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stakebait and kita0610) did a survey about music, and I thought about answering it but honestly I'd have too many songs to list for each catagory. Hardly worth the effort.
Music wise I can be very ecclectic. There are a few things (Sting, Sting and Sting) that I tend to love no matter what, but otherwise I'm open to almost anything, esp if it gets my creative juices flowing. Hence why my CD collection is all over the place. I often buy things in the heat of "Must - own - NOW!" while the plot bunnies are still raging thanks to the MP3 I just heard (I thinkwolfling was ICQing with me the last time that happened).
I started out my music life in the 80s. I've got memories of my brothers' room having "Who" posters, and there was a house across the driveway from mine where the kids always blasted their music, but 80s stuff is what I remember.
Back in elementary school I was big into The Police and U2. Mostly because my Big Brother was into The Police and U2, and I was starting to hone the fine talent of being a music snot. Yeah, sure Madonna and Michael Jackson and blah blah blah but dude! Synchronicity!!
Which isn't to say I was immune to Pop 40. You New York people out there will know what it means that I often tuned my radio to Z100, although LIR (nee DRE, nee LIR) came a close second.
I often made mix tapes from stuff gleaned off of the radio, and as I pack and unpack from various moves those tapes, over 20 years old now, occasionally pop up and sometimes for sheer pain I'll put them in and - GAHHH!!!! What was I thinking???.
Although again nine times out of ten if I was going to keep a song it was an obscure one - stuff that never made it past 20 in a 40 countdown. Not on purpose, it was just where my tastes took me.
Depeche Mode was the next big one, and again I recall Big Brother getting ready for the Black Celebration concert by wearing, you know, black. Including eyeliner, which my cousin helped him put on in a memory I never understood (why was my cousin there?) until about a month or so ago when I got the flip side of some family gossip from my mom.
Beastie Boys were another fav, but that's not so much for Fight For Your Right To PAAAAAARRRRRRRTEEEEEEE as it was that they were local boys! New York baby! Yeah!
(Oh - and about the Beastie Boys. Silly but - the one song that got to me the most after 9-11 was "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn". I was listening to it in my car, it was on the radio, and if I had to guess it was possibly the Friday after 9-11 because I can't imagine or remember any radio station actually playing music that day, and the boys came on and I just started crying and singing along and playing it really loudly in the car because - damn it - they were New York boys! And it was a New York song! And we would overcome this! And I don't think any other song could've gotten to me like that. Not even when Billy Joel did New York State of Mind at that charity show later. Sure Billy was a hometown boy too, but the Boys were local, and from the city and not much older than me (in fact Big Brother back in high school knew them from friends of friends), and so it meant more.)
Ask me to remember the music of junior high school and I'd say it was catagorized by Def Leopard (liked, a preference which didn't start with, but on the other hand wasn't discouraged by the fact that a boy I liked also liked them and hey look! something for us to talk about), Bon Jovi (never liked) and Salt-n-Pepa, the latter of which is only a strong memory because of "Push it" and a time I was in a car with the boy that I liked (Claudio, thanks for asking), a classmate, and Claudio's mom and dad, the former of whom sang along in what was undoubtedly the most humiliating moment in Claudio's life ever because really, when with classmates and esp classmates of the opposite sex you A) never want your parents there to begin with B) definitely don't want them singing and C) really don't want them grooving along with "Push it real good"
Friends of mine were into NKOTB and god I felt sorry for them. One girl - Christine - (I'm just in a naming names kind of place today) - was really into them in that scary way that only 13 year old fans of N'Sync can truly appreciate these days. I remember being at a friend's birthday party while Christine recounted the tale of how she, in the nosebleed seats, had held up a sign saying "I love you _____!!!" and of course ____ looked right at her and she wept real tears and boy wouldn't it be funny to remember which one of the kids it was now and laugh at what became of them, huh?
Oh - and someone who always won my Trying Too Hard Tarot award was Bruce Springsteen. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it, maybe Bruce needed a stepladder to get over himself. Who can say?
High school finally saw me with a CD player and the ability to buy my own CDs and one of the first that I bought was St. Pepper by the Beatles because... well.. it seemed the thing to do. I also got a CD by Prince because shut up I don't make fun of your music tastes now, do I? (I also later turned that CD in to a used CD place in exchange for cash and, apparently, snarky commentary from the guy behind the counter like excuse me but your stock sucks hugely and I'm not going to trade a CD I don't like for another one I don't like because I could have saved myself the trip. At least this way I can buy a happy meal).
I can't even remember all the CDs that I bought during high school. My music memories of that time include Boys to Men, Billy Joel putting another album out, lots of people loving The Little Mermaid, Vanessa "Now you can all go kiss my ass" Williams and me and some of my friends trying to get "Get Off" voted as our prom theme because really how much would that have rocked? I also remember thinking if I heard that "End of the Road" song one more fucking time I was going to take a hostage, no really.
Music for me was - wait for it - Sting (Why Should I Cry For You? - come on! Great stuff, people!) and, probably my ultimate "snap TBQ back to high school" song.... Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Hang on before you throw things.
I know it's a cliche, and fuck knows the media made more out of Nirvana than an evangelical can out of a Jack Chick tract, but if you take the hype that turned Nirvana into the Forced Voice Of The Youth Of Our Nation [tm] you do have a grain of truth, which is that they were the first big thing to come along and blow the kiddy pop out of the water, and if you were a not in the A crowd kid like me and my friends, sitting in the basement of an RPG store with a copy of Vampire the Masquerade and you heard SLTS playing you went - Yeah!
So yeah, Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam and STP and why not? The music served its purpose. I don't say it's the cure for cancer but it worked for me and my friends.
And of course let's not forget Nine Inch Nails - which I first got on a tape from a friend of mine which was on the same tape as an Enya album like that doesn't create anti-matter - and this was also the big, overly cool, "I know things you preppy kids can't understand" music that me and my friends also grooved to, esp because, you know, Trent talked about BDSM and we high school kidlets were down with that, baby.
Yes, we were trying too hard. But we were teenagers, it comes in the job description.
It was also amusing to me to see the popularity of U2 grow (cough, Joshua Tree, cough) and roll my eyes at the people who were just starting to be U2 fans when I of course had been lucky enough to be given the key back with Boy and War. Now I see kidlets who don't know what Sunday Bloody Sunday was about and it scares me.
Then we have college, when I got a real introduction to my guilty displeasures - ie people that I don't care about and probably never will - and on this list I'm looking right at Ani DeFranco and Tori Amos and I'm asking them to please shut up.
Or at least their fans. I'm sure Ani and Tori are fine people (and to be fair I started getting hit by the Tori crowd back in high school) but God could some of their fans have the kind of pretentious fanatacism that you don't see outside of a rabid Mac user. People would just plunk those names down in front of me in hushed tones (memo tostakebait and lucifrix: I don't mean you) and expect me to - I dunno - give the secret salute or automatically start composing poetry about my period or something and I just didn't get it. Yes, you're women, you sing ovary related songs, good on ya, can I please finish my sandwich?
Sting also put out Ten Summoner's Tales around that time, and if I had to be put on a desert island with only one album this would definitely be the one. Or at least my UK copy of it, which has Everybody Laughed But You, and why, oh why, do they have to put different songs on the different versions? I mean really?
College was also when Alanis Morrisette came on the scene, and I started to like her songs until again she was rammed down my throat as the Voice Of Jilted Women and not owning Jagged Little Pill was looked at like an offense to women everywhere so on principle I didn't buy it. Also some of the songs sucked and made no sense. And Tried Too Hard.
Kurt Cobain died when I was a sophmore, and I remember that making me go "huh". Again, I wasn't one of the kidlets out in Seattle rending my garments and bonding with Courtney "I only have a career because Kurt died" Love, and I absolutely hated all the people in the media who talked condescendingly about how kids my age were so moved by this because no, really, some of us just liked the music and went on with our lives. But the flip side of this is that Kurt died at the same time that a member of my family died in a similar, by which I mean drug-related, way and the whole thing, combined with other personal stuff that was going on, sort of piled up on me as a huge lesson that I can't control the world no matter how much I try. Life's always going to shock you.
I ended up getting my tattoo the summer after, partially because I wanted a permanent mark on me of something I could control. Again, not because I cared that much about Kurt, but Kurt happened to die in the same year as a lot of other stuff went down, so when I think of Kurt's death I think of the other stuff, and vice versa.
After graduation I gained an appreciation for some other stuff. Alanis finally grew on me with Uninvited, and then Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, the latter of which I grew fond of because it was playing at a Virgin Megastore in LA when I went out there for my brother's wedding and some of the songs just worked. Yeah she thanked India and god was that silly, but on the other hand "Thank You" reminds me of Elder Brother getting married, and some of the other songs were good fic fodder.
Lauren Hill also impressed me, although I only bought her single for "Everything" and not "Miseducation". I may get "Miseducation" one of these days. But I love "Everything". That's my philosophy right there in a nutshell. I think the only other song that better expresses my spirituality is "Still" by Alanis.
I mention Lauren too because after her we had acts like Macy Gray, who seemed to come along with their own Ani-meets-Tori-esque PR movement of "Oh but you like Macy, right?" and I just didn't get it. I heard "I try" and it was.... a song. Often played on the radio. Whatever message or girl power or what I was supposed to be getting here flew right over my head and I've never found it since.
We also had the movement of Latin music and Boy Bands and Girl Power and I never bought an album by Britney or the Spice Girls or N'Sync but I will admit sometimes that's because I can swipe the songs as MP3s. I will also cop to buying Backstreet Boys singles and entire albums by Ricky Martin. We all have our guilty pleasures.
So like I say, these days I'm all over the board. I still listen to Z100 and LIR, with K-Rock thrown in there to boot. Ecclectic tastes in movies and TV shows help get me stuff from all over, and all things considered I'm the kind of gal who gets both her top 40 and her snotty and obscure groove on. It works for me.
I'm sure I've forgotten something, but there ya go. A brief history of music and TBQ.
stakebait and kita0610) did a survey about music, and I thought about answering it but honestly I'd have too many songs to list for each catagory. Hardly worth the effort. Music wise I can be very ecclectic. There are a few things (Sting, Sting and Sting) that I tend to love no matter what, but otherwise I'm open to almost anything, esp if it gets my creative juices flowing. Hence why my CD collection is all over the place. I often buy things in the heat of "Must - own - NOW!" while the plot bunnies are still raging thanks to the MP3 I just heard (I think
wolfling was ICQing with me the last time that happened).I started out my music life in the 80s. I've got memories of my brothers' room having "Who" posters, and there was a house across the driveway from mine where the kids always blasted their music, but 80s stuff is what I remember.
Back in elementary school I was big into The Police and U2. Mostly because my Big Brother was into The Police and U2, and I was starting to hone the fine talent of being a music snot. Yeah, sure Madonna and Michael Jackson and blah blah blah but dude! Synchronicity!!
Which isn't to say I was immune to Pop 40. You New York people out there will know what it means that I often tuned my radio to Z100, although LIR (nee DRE, nee LIR) came a close second.
I often made mix tapes from stuff gleaned off of the radio, and as I pack and unpack from various moves those tapes, over 20 years old now, occasionally pop up and sometimes for sheer pain I'll put them in and - GAHHH!!!! What was I thinking???.
Although again nine times out of ten if I was going to keep a song it was an obscure one - stuff that never made it past 20 in a 40 countdown. Not on purpose, it was just where my tastes took me.
Depeche Mode was the next big one, and again I recall Big Brother getting ready for the Black Celebration concert by wearing, you know, black. Including eyeliner, which my cousin helped him put on in a memory I never understood (why was my cousin there?) until about a month or so ago when I got the flip side of some family gossip from my mom.
Beastie Boys were another fav, but that's not so much for Fight For Your Right To PAAAAAARRRRRRRTEEEEEEE as it was that they were local boys! New York baby! Yeah!
(Oh - and about the Beastie Boys. Silly but - the one song that got to me the most after 9-11 was "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn". I was listening to it in my car, it was on the radio, and if I had to guess it was possibly the Friday after 9-11 because I can't imagine or remember any radio station actually playing music that day, and the boys came on and I just started crying and singing along and playing it really loudly in the car because - damn it - they were New York boys! And it was a New York song! And we would overcome this! And I don't think any other song could've gotten to me like that. Not even when Billy Joel did New York State of Mind at that charity show later. Sure Billy was a hometown boy too, but the Boys were local, and from the city and not much older than me (in fact Big Brother back in high school knew them from friends of friends), and so it meant more.)
Ask me to remember the music of junior high school and I'd say it was catagorized by Def Leopard (liked, a preference which didn't start with, but on the other hand wasn't discouraged by the fact that a boy I liked also liked them and hey look! something for us to talk about), Bon Jovi (never liked) and Salt-n-Pepa, the latter of which is only a strong memory because of "Push it" and a time I was in a car with the boy that I liked (Claudio, thanks for asking), a classmate, and Claudio's mom and dad, the former of whom sang along in what was undoubtedly the most humiliating moment in Claudio's life ever because really, when with classmates and esp classmates of the opposite sex you A) never want your parents there to begin with B) definitely don't want them singing and C) really don't want them grooving along with "Push it real good"
Friends of mine were into NKOTB and god I felt sorry for them. One girl - Christine - (I'm just in a naming names kind of place today) - was really into them in that scary way that only 13 year old fans of N'Sync can truly appreciate these days. I remember being at a friend's birthday party while Christine recounted the tale of how she, in the nosebleed seats, had held up a sign saying "I love you _____!!!" and of course ____ looked right at her and she wept real tears and boy wouldn't it be funny to remember which one of the kids it was now and laugh at what became of them, huh?
Oh - and someone who always won my Trying Too Hard Tarot award was Bruce Springsteen. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it, maybe Bruce needed a stepladder to get over himself. Who can say?
High school finally saw me with a CD player and the ability to buy my own CDs and one of the first that I bought was St. Pepper by the Beatles because... well.. it seemed the thing to do. I also got a CD by Prince because shut up I don't make fun of your music tastes now, do I? (I also later turned that CD in to a used CD place in exchange for cash and, apparently, snarky commentary from the guy behind the counter like excuse me but your stock sucks hugely and I'm not going to trade a CD I don't like for another one I don't like because I could have saved myself the trip. At least this way I can buy a happy meal).
I can't even remember all the CDs that I bought during high school. My music memories of that time include Boys to Men, Billy Joel putting another album out, lots of people loving The Little Mermaid, Vanessa "Now you can all go kiss my ass" Williams and me and some of my friends trying to get "Get Off" voted as our prom theme because really how much would that have rocked? I also remember thinking if I heard that "End of the Road" song one more fucking time I was going to take a hostage, no really.
Music for me was - wait for it - Sting (Why Should I Cry For You? - come on! Great stuff, people!) and, probably my ultimate "snap TBQ back to high school" song.... Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Hang on before you throw things.
I know it's a cliche, and fuck knows the media made more out of Nirvana than an evangelical can out of a Jack Chick tract, but if you take the hype that turned Nirvana into the Forced Voice Of The Youth Of Our Nation [tm] you do have a grain of truth, which is that they were the first big thing to come along and blow the kiddy pop out of the water, and if you were a not in the A crowd kid like me and my friends, sitting in the basement of an RPG store with a copy of Vampire the Masquerade and you heard SLTS playing you went - Yeah!
So yeah, Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam and STP and why not? The music served its purpose. I don't say it's the cure for cancer but it worked for me and my friends.
And of course let's not forget Nine Inch Nails - which I first got on a tape from a friend of mine which was on the same tape as an Enya album like that doesn't create anti-matter - and this was also the big, overly cool, "I know things you preppy kids can't understand" music that me and my friends also grooved to, esp because, you know, Trent talked about BDSM and we high school kidlets were down with that, baby.
Yes, we were trying too hard. But we were teenagers, it comes in the job description.
It was also amusing to me to see the popularity of U2 grow (cough, Joshua Tree, cough) and roll my eyes at the people who were just starting to be U2 fans when I of course had been lucky enough to be given the key back with Boy and War. Now I see kidlets who don't know what Sunday Bloody Sunday was about and it scares me.
Then we have college, when I got a real introduction to my guilty displeasures - ie people that I don't care about and probably never will - and on this list I'm looking right at Ani DeFranco and Tori Amos and I'm asking them to please shut up.
Or at least their fans. I'm sure Ani and Tori are fine people (and to be fair I started getting hit by the Tori crowd back in high school) but God could some of their fans have the kind of pretentious fanatacism that you don't see outside of a rabid Mac user. People would just plunk those names down in front of me in hushed tones (memo to
stakebait and lucifrix: I don't mean you) and expect me to - I dunno - give the secret salute or automatically start composing poetry about my period or something and I just didn't get it. Yes, you're women, you sing ovary related songs, good on ya, can I please finish my sandwich?Sting also put out Ten Summoner's Tales around that time, and if I had to be put on a desert island with only one album this would definitely be the one. Or at least my UK copy of it, which has Everybody Laughed But You, and why, oh why, do they have to put different songs on the different versions? I mean really?
College was also when Alanis Morrisette came on the scene, and I started to like her songs until again she was rammed down my throat as the Voice Of Jilted Women and not owning Jagged Little Pill was looked at like an offense to women everywhere so on principle I didn't buy it. Also some of the songs sucked and made no sense. And Tried Too Hard.
Kurt Cobain died when I was a sophmore, and I remember that making me go "huh". Again, I wasn't one of the kidlets out in Seattle rending my garments and bonding with Courtney "I only have a career because Kurt died" Love, and I absolutely hated all the people in the media who talked condescendingly about how kids my age were so moved by this because no, really, some of us just liked the music and went on with our lives. But the flip side of this is that Kurt died at the same time that a member of my family died in a similar, by which I mean drug-related, way and the whole thing, combined with other personal stuff that was going on, sort of piled up on me as a huge lesson that I can't control the world no matter how much I try. Life's always going to shock you.
I ended up getting my tattoo the summer after, partially because I wanted a permanent mark on me of something I could control. Again, not because I cared that much about Kurt, but Kurt happened to die in the same year as a lot of other stuff went down, so when I think of Kurt's death I think of the other stuff, and vice versa.
After graduation I gained an appreciation for some other stuff. Alanis finally grew on me with Uninvited, and then Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, the latter of which I grew fond of because it was playing at a Virgin Megastore in LA when I went out there for my brother's wedding and some of the songs just worked. Yeah she thanked India and god was that silly, but on the other hand "Thank You" reminds me of Elder Brother getting married, and some of the other songs were good fic fodder.
Lauren Hill also impressed me, although I only bought her single for "Everything" and not "Miseducation". I may get "Miseducation" one of these days. But I love "Everything". That's my philosophy right there in a nutshell. I think the only other song that better expresses my spirituality is "Still" by Alanis.
I mention Lauren too because after her we had acts like Macy Gray, who seemed to come along with their own Ani-meets-Tori-esque PR movement of "Oh but you like Macy, right?" and I just didn't get it. I heard "I try" and it was.... a song. Often played on the radio. Whatever message or girl power or what I was supposed to be getting here flew right over my head and I've never found it since.
We also had the movement of Latin music and Boy Bands and Girl Power and I never bought an album by Britney or the Spice Girls or N'Sync but I will admit sometimes that's because I can swipe the songs as MP3s. I will also cop to buying Backstreet Boys singles and entire albums by Ricky Martin. We all have our guilty pleasures.
So like I say, these days I'm all over the board. I still listen to Z100 and LIR, with K-Rock thrown in there to boot. Ecclectic tastes in movies and TV shows help get me stuff from all over, and all things considered I'm the kind of gal who gets both her top 40 and her snotty and obscure groove on. It works for me.
I'm sure I've forgotten something, but there ya go. A brief history of music and TBQ.
