I tell jokes and write things because I am bad at sports.
Hello City. I’m going to be continuing my self-indulgent ramble about my unimpressive (and surprisingly light on ska) history of musical taste. It’s going to be an avalanche of text and Primitive Radio Gods inspired dick jokes, so there’s no shame in passing this by to look at new and exciting developments in the world of streaming pornography. That said, I recommend all my internet pals (Tumblr enthusiasts and otherwise) think about doing their own silly little post about their history of music listening. If nothing else, it will trick you into falling down a rabbit hole of delightful YouTube clips. Also, I would read every single one of those types of posts because I’m a colossal nerd that is interested in these sorts of essays/rambles/MS Paint Projects/manifestos.
Check out Part 1 here or at your local prison library.
I had to get my Mom to teach me how to change the radio station. It feels strange to type that out, but it’s true. As a 9 year old, I didn’t really know about AM or FM (possibly because I didn’t see the film FM) and I sure as hell didn’t know how to adjust the tuning wheel to get something other than CBC. I was venturing into new territory and I needed the careful supervision of an adult to make that happen. That last sentence reads a bit ruder than I intended.
What finally pushed me into checking out what else was on the dial was a TV commercial for Winnipeg’s (then) modern rock station, 92 CITI FM. Or more accurately, it was the sight of Adam Duritz bouncing around a living room wearing a fringed suede jacket. (It goes without saying, but I have never been and never will be cool. Not that I haven’t tried before.) This was exciting! It was a man with Tyler Stewart hair bopping around a room the way I liked to bop around the room. To me, this guy was the epitome of cool and I wanted to hang out with him at his radio treehouse.
My Mom adjusted the radio station on my boombox and I just sat in my room listening to my exciting new discovery. I was thrilled. There was an endless supply of songs, just one after the other after the other and… a commercial block that taught me about the importance of auto detailing and getting the most out of my nightlife…and then back to good ol’ modern/alternative rock town.
The first non Weird Al/non compilation album that I ever purchased was Green Day’s Dookie. I’m not an enormous Green Day fan (I jumped ship between Nimrod and Warning), but I think this album ticked all the boxes you could hope for as a “first album purchase”. The songs were snotty, loud and full of swears. Every song doubled as a call to arms for an awkward elementary school kid like myself that needed songs about feeling kicked around or like you were a basket case. Plus you could sing it in that incredibly annoying Billie Joe Armstrong twang that makes you feel all dangerous and junk. I played that CD so much that I somehow faded the design on the actual disc.
My other early non Weird Al/non compilation purchases were not quite as sexy.
My First Five Non Weird Al/Non Compilation Purchases (links included to my favourite songs at the time from these albums of varying quality)
2. Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
4. The Presidents Of The United States Of America - The Presidents Of The United States Of America
ORDERLY QUEUE, LADIES OF DAN’S PAST!
I was glued to the radio for large chunks of the day. It was the soundtrack of my prep for school (featuring the zany antics of Tom & Joe, Winnipeg’s never not delighted by their own antics rock radio morning team, I mostly just listened for the music and Scott Taylor’s sports commentary) and it was what I listened to before bed. I had decades of rock singles thrown at me and I was quickly learning what I liked and didn’t like.
Pretty early on, I realized I didn’t really like all that much classic rock. Heck, I hated most of it. I despised Sabbath, Floyd and Zeppelin and to this day I still couldn’t give a fuck about them. I found a lot of classic rock incredibly dull and chuggy. I wanted fun and excitement. I wanted to relate to things and feel surprised. So, I found myself falling for a whole swath of bands knocking out their latest single and trying desperately to crawl their way up the modern charts. Some of these bands were great and others were colossally shit. Important Life Lesson: Never hitch your wagon to a band that calls themselves Seven Mary Three. You will look back and wonder what the hell your Grade 3 self’s problem was. Shudder.
My biggest and brightest beam of light in the radio landscape was CITI’s “Top 7 at 7” countdown, where they played the most requested songs of the day. This is pretty standard in all cities and everywhere has a station that featured this kind of countdown. I would set up my boombox and root aggressively for what bands I wanted to hear. Like a lot of kids, I also had a blank tape ready so I could record my favourite songs and try to accept the fact there would be some annoying DJ patter woven into each of the songs I was crazy about. I would leap, strut, air guitar, butt shake and make dramatic hand gestures while listening to Smashing Pumpkins, Butthole Surfers and Nada Surf at full volume. I’d do a coy eye flicker while singing along to No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” and I’d try to act intensely nonchalant while wailing along to Weezer’s “El Scorcho”.
While I made my own mixtapes from what I could scramble to record from the radio (who doesn’t like hearing 80% of a Better Than Ezra song?), I still bought as many cassettes as I could get my hands on. I’d either pick them up from the local MacLeod’s True Value or when I was traveling to towns where you can buy music in places other than the hardware store. Award shows became another lifeline to different styles of music I wouldn’t normally be able to access. I would watch the Grammys (it was very important to me that Beck succeed) and try to sort out which cassette I needed to buy next based on the brief clips I saw. This is how I ended up going through a fanatical Rage Against The Machine period in the sixth grade. I watched a fifteen second clip of “Bulls On Parade” during the nominations for Best Alternative Album and decided that I absolutely needed to have political rap-rock in my life. I also began to have strong opinions about Marxist t-shirt slogans for a rough six month period. Apologies to all involved.
Unnecessary Extra List Addition Action!
Five Embarrassing Songs I Loved During This Period Of Elementary School Rock Radio Listening
3. Stone Temple Pilots - Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart (I’ll still defend this to some extent.)
4. Better Than Ezra - Desperately Wanting
5. Collective Soul - The World I Know
And these are just the ones I consider embarrassing. I feel no shame for the Lisa Loeb and The Cranberries stuff I liked. That should send a chill down your spine.
There’s No Radio Where You’re Going
In 1997, I moved from Carman, Manitoba to Ste. Rose du Lac, Manitoba. It wasn’t really that big a deal. I had moved a few times before and I was fully prepared to move again in the future. I’d just go somewhere new and adjust. After all, if I showed up wearing my awesome The X-Files t-shirt and had a brain filled with opinions on the movie Braveheart, I’d totally be the coolest dude in school. (True Story: The girls in the school rushed to see who “the new guy” was. They weren’t afraid to tell me how disappointed they were because they thought it would someone athletic and handsome instead.) The only trouble is that they didn’t have any FM radio stations where I was going. It was back to CBC and back to the wilderness.
My parents felt bad about the isolation and decided to get cable. I was ecstatic. I was (and continue to be) head over heels in love with television. We were without cable for the past few years and this was an exciting new development. Not only because it increased the chances of seeing boobs on television, but it meant my new mode of soaking up music would be MuchMusic. So long audio cassette “supermixtapes”, hello video cassette “supermixtapes”.
In Carman, I self-identified as a rocker. I dabbled in pop, but I was vehemently about being in the “rock” camp. In Ste. Rose (Home of the Hoof and Holler Festival!), I dove head first into pop music. It was also the summer of Puff Daddy and that reignited my love of rap. I dabbled in rap after Run DMC’s Reading Rainbow appearance (I bought Hello Nasty, I pretended to be upset that Easy E was dead, I was actually upset when Notorious B.I.G. died), but I never thought about it as a major part of my music lifestyle. Now that I wasn’t firmly planted in a solitary genre, I could enjoy whatever I wanted. Except for country because I was still a dick about that until I was in my 20s.
This meant I not only knew about the new Mariah Carey single, but I could love it and squeeze and never let it go. When Jimmy Ray instructed me to jump back, turn around now and that he was interested in me doing it again, I was goddamn ready to do it again. Shit, I was ride or die with Imani Coppola in whatever empowering challenge she felt compelled to tackle. I still listened to rock music and air guitared to Harvey Danger when they were on Letterman, but now I didn’t feel like I had to pretend that I liked Metallica or Pearl Jam. I liked what I liked. It was a liberating feeling. I’m not cool, so why should my music be?
Of course liking what I like also meant liking such absolute dogshit. Like a lot of impressionable teens, I feel into a bad crowd. For some teens, that crowd is made up of criminals or gangs or knife throwing bulimics. For me, it was a far worse crowd. It was the crowd of people that liked Limp Bizkit.
In my life, I have enjoyed exactly two rap-rock outfits. One was Rage Against The Machine, the other was Limp Bizkit. Fred Durst and his fellow cro-mags won me over with their simple brand of shouting, cursing and non-threatening tough guy posturing. They weren’t tough guys, but they did play arena friendly rock that was supposed to be menacing. I latched on to it and loved their dumbass nu-metal. I was their target demo: An impressionable fourteen year old that agreed that some days you don’t want to wake up, everybody sucks, you don’t know why but you want to justify rippin’ someone’s head off. Also backwards hats!
(I hopped off the Limp Bizkit bandwagon just a bit before Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.)
Over the next few years, my tastes expanded. I eased up on my diet of rock and started getting fanatical about hip hop. I was drawn to the charisma of Busta Rhymes, the lyrical nastiness of Eminem and the power that Wu Tang Clan had over bees. I even still have a crappy knockoff No Limit Soldiers jersey that features a tank on the chest. It continues to make me say uhh, na na na na, to this day.
I Have Internet Fever (AKA: Dial Up Diphtheria)
Like a lot of nerdy nerds from Nerdtown (located in the rural municipality of Nerd Valley), Napster gave me access to a galaxy of exciting music access options. I could see a band on The Wedge and not have to wait until the next three and a half hour trip to Winnipeg to hear that song again at an HMV listening booth. I just had to convince who ever I was downloading the song peer-to-peer from to stay online for six hours so I could get the “challenging” new Ashley MacIsaac song that I determined was essential to listen to while playing Hearts on a Saturday night.
If I had a CD burner, I could one day take all these songs I carefully curated (more accurately: it was Mr. Show sketches and Cake singles), but our clunky early 90s PC wasn’t prepared for such a task. These songs were trapped in a .wma prison. If I wanted to put together a burnt CD of magical handpicked tunes, I would have to find someone that could help me out. This meant bringing a carefully curated list of songs to a permastoned 17 year old and a ten dollar bill (because I wasn’t friends with any of the people that supplied this service) and hope for the best.
Lots of times the disc I got back was nothing like the one I requested. I wanted something with Black Flag on it (because I saw “TV Party” on Loud once), but instead got Powerman 5000. It was a hit or miss process finding a burned CD dealer. In Ste. Rose, I never got back anything that completely resembled the list. I learned to accept that. It was too much of a thrill to have Eels and The Pharcyde on the same disc, so I just learned to deal with the Jet Set Satellite track I didn’t ask for.
My parents got a new PC around the turn of the century (I feel like a bit of a dickhole typing that out, but it’s true). I now had no middleman fucking up my discs. I was Walter White. I was able to create a product that was purer and of a higher quality than my competitors. It was a glorious feeling.
When I was fifteen, I started wanting to stick my big gin blossomy nose into indie. I watched The Wedge off and on, but I started watching more intently and finding more things I liked. I remember when I was visiting Winnipeg and stressing for hours about which album I was going to buy: Badly Drawn Boy’s The Hour Of Bewilderbeast or Mogwai’s Come On Die Young. I ended up choosing Badly Drawn Boy when I realized that I mostly just liked Mogwai because they made fun of Oasis and Blur and Muse. (Even though I like Oasis and Blur.) If it had gone differently, there’s a chance I could have been a post rock auteur, making music that seems cool in car commercials but isn’t all that much fun to listen to.
Sad Fact: I got my grandmother to knit me a cap like Badly Drawn Boy. Once again, I did not kiss a girl or go on a date until the month before I graduated.
Next up: I’ll yammer on about Blender, NME and high school parking lot rap battles.
