CDs from 1990. bonus track: inarticulate ramblings about music.
It probably won't surprise anyone who's seen the recent Donnie Darko vid to learn that making it sent me into a phase of listening to The Blue Aeroplanes more obsessively than I have for a few years. Swagger, mostly, since that's where "Cat Scan Hist'ry" comes from, but also Beatsongs and Life Model (as I mentioned before). Then sisabet invoked The Godfathers in a recent comment and the next thing I knew I was listening to Birth School Work Death on perpetual repeat. And for a while last week it was The Cavedogs, and I've realized that part of the reason I like Nada Surf's Let Go so much is that it reminds me of Joyrides for Shut-ins for reasons that are perfectly intuitively clear to me but which I have thus far failed to articulate.
All of which got me thinking about the music of 1990, or rather my little corner of the music of 1990 (i.e. late high school, specifically the end of junior and beginning of senior year).
1990 was a good year for me, musically. I was still in third-generation-cassette-tape territory then, and many of those tapes perished in The Great Dr. Pepper Catastrophe of 1991, but in the intervening years I've picked up a few of them on CD...
The Blue Aeroplanes, Swagger
Luka Bloom, Riverside
The Cavedogs, Joyrides for Shut-ins
The Church, Gold Afternoon Fix
The Connells, One Simple Word
Cowboy Junkies, The Caution Horses
The Darling Buds, Crawdaddy
Sara Hickman, Shortstop
The La's [self-titled]
Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain
The Posies, Dear 23
The Pursuit of Happiness, Love Junk
The Replacements, All Shook Down
They Might Be Giants, Flood
Toad the Wet Sprocket, Pale
The Wedding Present, Bizarro
And then of course there's all the bands that put out good stuff in 1988 and 1989 that I was still listening to, including a bunch of artists already mentioned but also The Hummingbirds, The Mighty Lemon Drops, The Sundays, The Pixies, The Children, The Godfathers, Mary's Danish, 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M., Syd Straw, New Order, New Model Army, Camper Van Beethoven, The Stone Roses...
And all the stuff from that era that I've never owned on CD and don't know release dates for: The Tragically Hip, The Young Fresh Fellows, The Smithereens, The Smiths, The Cure, The Shoes, The Breeders, The House of Love, Aztec Camera, Teenage Fanclub, Jane's Addiction, drivin' 'n' cryin', Scruffy the Cat, Guadalcanal Diary, Richard X. Heyman, Midnight Oil, Michael Penn... and on and on and on.
You know those First Fandom icons that were going around some months ago? Mine would be cassette tapes.
I was always musical-reasonable voice, some piano talent, good sight-reader and so on-but I didn't know how much I could love music until I was twelve or so, listening to 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M. on a friend's boombox at nerd camp, and it was like part of me broke open just so this new thing could come in, like something in me that had been sleeping all along woke up already dancing.
After all these years I still don't know how to talk about music, about what it does to me. If you asked me about my first love it would be books, no question, but music gets at something in me that books don't touch. I love books, but I have a crush on music-an adolescent crush that's never let up or worn down or mellowed out. It's that same beautiful stupid intensity.
I can't remember life without books; I have always had books-not as many as I wanted, often not as good as I needed, but there. Music, though... for a long time I had a life without music, without the music that most speaks to me, and in some ways it still seems like an impossible gift that I should have it now.
There are some similarities between books and music, of course. They're both points of connection between the self and something outside it. The book itself is not the point; it's the reading of the book that matters, the book we help make by reading it. The song itself is nothing; it's the listening that matters, the finding of that place where the song and the self intersect.
But they're different, too, or at least the way I experience and think about them is different. The spatial metaphors are different: a book is something I go into, an undiscovered country, the voyage out to somewhere I've never been; the song goes into me, the journey's all inside, to this place where for a second everything snaps into focus: I'm still here, but "here" is different now.
This is what I don't know how to express: how music gets inside me and lives there, marks everything, makes everything a little more intense, all the outlines a little more defined, all the lights a little brighter, all the colors a little deeper. How I recognize songs I've never heard before, how songs I've heard a hundred times can still surprise me. How everything siezes up and then lets go, how the mundane becomes heartbreaking or catastrophic or exalted, how three chords and a cliché can turn me inside out.
I have some language for books; one way of looking at the last half of my life is that I've spent it starting to figure out that language. Music, though - nothing gets at it. The only way to express it right is to be in it-that paradox of being part of something bigger than the self and at the same time being isolated from everything else, of inhabiting for a moment, for three perfect popsong minutes, this private inside world.
That paradox is what I love about live shows: the opportunity, the possibility, of being alone in the music with the people who make it, to be there with them in that same transported state. It's why I don't go dancing much: there are always too many people there for whom the music's just an accessory, an excuse for whatever else they're thinking about, distracting me when usually what I want to do is just be there with it. It's why I'll probably never be an audiophile in the technical sense: I get too caught up in the what to worry about the how.
The what: the song in me, the still point around which everything swings.
All of which got me thinking about the music of 1990, or rather my little corner of the music of 1990 (i.e. late high school, specifically the end of junior and beginning of senior year).
1990 was a good year for me, musically. I was still in third-generation-cassette-tape territory then, and many of those tapes perished in The Great Dr. Pepper Catastrophe of 1991, but in the intervening years I've picked up a few of them on CD...
The Blue Aeroplanes, Swagger
Luka Bloom, Riverside
The Cavedogs, Joyrides for Shut-ins
The Church, Gold Afternoon Fix
The Connells, One Simple Word
Cowboy Junkies, The Caution Horses
The Darling Buds, Crawdaddy
Sara Hickman, Shortstop
The La's [self-titled]
Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain
The Posies, Dear 23
The Pursuit of Happiness, Love Junk
The Replacements, All Shook Down
They Might Be Giants, Flood
Toad the Wet Sprocket, Pale
The Wedding Present, Bizarro
And then of course there's all the bands that put out good stuff in 1988 and 1989 that I was still listening to, including a bunch of artists already mentioned but also The Hummingbirds, The Mighty Lemon Drops, The Sundays, The Pixies, The Children, The Godfathers, Mary's Danish, 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M., Syd Straw, New Order, New Model Army, Camper Van Beethoven, The Stone Roses...
And all the stuff from that era that I've never owned on CD and don't know release dates for: The Tragically Hip, The Young Fresh Fellows, The Smithereens, The Smiths, The Cure, The Shoes, The Breeders, The House of Love, Aztec Camera, Teenage Fanclub, Jane's Addiction, drivin' 'n' cryin', Scruffy the Cat, Guadalcanal Diary, Richard X. Heyman, Midnight Oil, Michael Penn... and on and on and on.
You know those First Fandom icons that were going around some months ago? Mine would be cassette tapes.
I was always musical-reasonable voice, some piano talent, good sight-reader and so on-but I didn't know how much I could love music until I was twelve or so, listening to 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M. on a friend's boombox at nerd camp, and it was like part of me broke open just so this new thing could come in, like something in me that had been sleeping all along woke up already dancing.
After all these years I still don't know how to talk about music, about what it does to me. If you asked me about my first love it would be books, no question, but music gets at something in me that books don't touch. I love books, but I have a crush on music-an adolescent crush that's never let up or worn down or mellowed out. It's that same beautiful stupid intensity.
I can't remember life without books; I have always had books-not as many as I wanted, often not as good as I needed, but there. Music, though... for a long time I had a life without music, without the music that most speaks to me, and in some ways it still seems like an impossible gift that I should have it now.
There are some similarities between books and music, of course. They're both points of connection between the self and something outside it. The book itself is not the point; it's the reading of the book that matters, the book we help make by reading it. The song itself is nothing; it's the listening that matters, the finding of that place where the song and the self intersect.
But they're different, too, or at least the way I experience and think about them is different. The spatial metaphors are different: a book is something I go into, an undiscovered country, the voyage out to somewhere I've never been; the song goes into me, the journey's all inside, to this place where for a second everything snaps into focus: I'm still here, but "here" is different now.
This is what I don't know how to express: how music gets inside me and lives there, marks everything, makes everything a little more intense, all the outlines a little more defined, all the lights a little brighter, all the colors a little deeper. How I recognize songs I've never heard before, how songs I've heard a hundred times can still surprise me. How everything siezes up and then lets go, how the mundane becomes heartbreaking or catastrophic or exalted, how three chords and a cliché can turn me inside out.
I have some language for books; one way of looking at the last half of my life is that I've spent it starting to figure out that language. Music, though - nothing gets at it. The only way to express it right is to be in it-that paradox of being part of something bigger than the self and at the same time being isolated from everything else, of inhabiting for a moment, for three perfect popsong minutes, this private inside world.
That paradox is what I love about live shows: the opportunity, the possibility, of being alone in the music with the people who make it, to be there with them in that same transported state. It's why I don't go dancing much: there are always too many people there for whom the music's just an accessory, an excuse for whatever else they're thinking about, distracting me when usually what I want to do is just be there with it. It's why I'll probably never be an audiophile in the technical sense: I get too caught up in the what to worry about the how.
The what: the song in me, the still point around which everything swings.