Blue Paper For Anyone
Griffith Park Observatory
Originally uploaded by Ghostly Penguin Display. I think I might as well try to make this into a casual 30 day meme for the 5 or 6 of you who still update Livejournal. By "casual" I mean that I probably won't update every day, I'll run out of ideas after about 10 entries, and clyde_park will likely be the only other person who actually participates.
So then, day 1 was "list 10 items that are always recommended to you by iTunes Genius, Amazon recommendations, Pandora, or whatever other services you use, that for whatever reason you just don't like at all." Day 2 was "8 things you think you should be a fan of based on your overall lifestyle, that you have never explored or partaken in."
Day 3: Your biggest 180 - something for which you once had ultimate disdain that you are now rabidly obsessed with, or vice versa. It can be any aspect of culture; music, movies, food, computer software, farm animals, furniture, sports, you name it.
Mine would have to be The Beach Boys. In high school and college I thought they were the epitome of bad music. If you look at how they were representing themselves in the 80s and early 90s, it was an easy mistake to make; singing at Reagan fundraisers, appearing on Full House, Kokomo... To a young person living in the midwest during those years, the Beach Boys were just about the un-coolest band in the world. They were the music everyone's 50 year old Republican uncle listened to while barbecuing in his Hawaiian shirt.
It wasn't until I moved to California that I learned about their more adventurous stuff when a co-worker introduced me to "Sunflower", "Surf's Up", "Holland", "Friends", "20/20", & "Smile". Hearing those albums while driving along the Pacific Coast, I finally understood. I got into the whole underground cult of Brian Wilson that was being spearheaded by young (at the time) LA bands like The Wondermints. (We all know the fortunate story of how that turned out for them.) I collected "Smile" bootlegs from the internet and became a minor player in the Poptopia / IPO subculture that was then based in LA, but has now spread throughout the world. 16 years later I still haven't gotten tired of those songs and I'm now of the opinion that the Beach Boys output from '65-'73 is about as good as pop music gets. In the past few years I've even re-evaluated my stance on their early surf, cars, & girls stuff. I'm still slightly horrified by their 80s & 90s antics, although Brian Wilson's solo albums "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" and "Orange Crate Art" are much better than you think. Strangely (or fittingly) enough, I only listen to The Beach Boys between Memorial Day & Labor Day.