Hey guys, it's Jen.
The other day I went to a party and I said something dumb about music and suddenly I felt like I was 16 again, not knowing things. I feel like it's pretty common, but a lot of people don't admit that they formed their earliest musical taste around the things that were in their proximity, which usually are radio hits from the 50’s forward, back in my day, and the music that your parents had.
So always playing in the car was Oldies 104.3 [singing] Oldies 104.3… Which is gone now, long gone. I distinctly at one point remember my mother singing the opening to Kiss Off by The Violent Femmes… vuilulnt fulms. Um, but when I was older, like when I was listening to the alternative station, I remember I mentioned that I… have the memory of her singing it. She's like, I've never heard this song before. And I was like, the fuck you didn't! But she was a huge fan of INXS, and Hootie and the Blowfish, and Del Amitri. All still bangers.1
(But the thing is, so many people think that they don't know who Del Amitri is. And even Family Guy, I want to say, made a joke using the Del Amitri song. Everybody knows who Del Amitri is. For a while you couldn't avoid them. That doesn't mean that they're bad though.)
When I was a teenager, I started going to punk shows at the Fireside Bowl, the famous, the world famous Fireside Bowl. Not really because I like the music, because it was mostly awful, because local bands are mostly awful. (I have like two stories, maybe three, about the Fireside Bowl, but that's for another time.) The only reason I went to those shows is because it was something to do, first with my cousin who was also my best friend, and then when I got a little bit older, my high school friends. It was one of the only all-ages things in town to do.
The only band I ever “discovered” liking from there was a band called the 45s out of Atlanta Georgia, and they were fucking great, and the internet wasn't quite up to par as far as, like, finding old bands— Actually let me look them up right now… Ah! I found them on AllMusic. Are they still around? Dude! Oh, I'm so glad they have a... Okay, let me look. Oh, there's only a header. Search for 45s band in existing articles. I hate Facebook. I hate this, I don't want this, but... Well, I'm excited. I'm going to look into them again. Um, this is actually one of my— I really, I say that now, but I probably won't.
The only music I ever truly discovered on my own was Ugly Kid Joe and Psychedelic Furs, which obviously go really good together. Both were chosen on the same day when I was about eight years old. I liked their covers, so I picked them out of the discount tape cassette box that was, like, as tall as me in the Jewel-Osco electronics section.
The only other pure musical discovery I can think of came later with Stroke 9, Who nobody remembers, which I found while browsing through the listening station at Tower Records. Later, some of the friends who I would go to punk shows at the Fireside Bowl with, some of those people would make fun of me for being excited about finding this band, this song, this album that I liked. And it turns out that it was on the radio and I had no idea. I think because I wasn't listening to the alternative station at the time. It was obviously a good song if it was on the radio, like mathematically at least. I still show it to people.
Oh, there was Dimmu Borgir. We're all going to argue about how to pronounce it. I don't care. Whatever. I'll say Bor-Jeer, I don't care, they can come tell me themselves. For some reason, in my first apartment, my television antenna started to receive a video channel. I don't know if this was new to the area broadcast and was a known channel, or if it was something that had to do with the digitization. I don't remember and I think it only showed videos overnight until like a certain point in the morning. And it wasn't The Box. I remember The Box, too. This was way after The Box, and there was Dimmu Borgir and I was like— At 4 a.m. I thought, oh this is amazing.
Still both of those things were only available, it’s not that I went out of my way to find them. Everything else, I learned from friends, even the same friends who I was going to shows with. I was literally handed an X-Ray Spex album by a friend who didn't like it, and I only learned about some of my favorite pop punk bands like Good Charlotte, (who I have a story about) and Alkaline Trio, because they were bands that boys I liked hated. Bands hated by boys I liked. When Myspace happened, I used to go through profiles of people I thought were cool, and I would investigate the music that they had on their list to see if I liked it.
Usually I didn't. Usually I felt like, there's no way that people could like this stuff, that they were all challenging each other to be more and more obscure. But what do I know? Along the way through finding my musical taste, I learned that I was usually wrong about music facts or opinions in one way or another, so I stopped having them. I worked at a venue for years in Atlanta, and I still thought that local bands sounded like trash, but I blurbed them on the website anyway.
Of course I end up with a guy in a local band, but he had to learn when I don't think something of his is shitty, when I think it's really, really good.
I have pop ears and he should trust me. But, you know.
Being with a guy in a band, music comes up a lot at parties. And the other night I had shared that I had recently learned, that a lot of the songs I like that I hear out in public and Shazam, they all end up being by the same band, which is Fleetwood Mac, who is a very prolific band with multiple vocalists. And I said, those two have very specific but non-gendered voices, don't they?
Like. The silence hung in the air, and I was like, okay, everybody just doesn't know what I'm talking about here, huh? And it's like, okay. I know that Stevie Nicks has a distinct voice again. The voice is distinct but it, it is not necessarily a feminine voice. And don't tell me that Lindsey doesn't have a jolly feminine exuberance on on the back end of his voice, same as Michael McDonald, don't tell me!
Anyway.
And so after like 10 seconds of silence and people calculating like, who's gonna, who's gonna, who's gonna correct her? I wrote in my notes: Lindsey sounds like a giant, singing through a helium balloon; He has a weird feminine Nico-type quality. I know nothing [about music] but my ears work, and that man is a vocal non-binary.2
And then some guy was like, oh, oh, especially Christine McVie, who I think is who you're thinking of. And I was like, yeah, well, I don't know. I just learned that I like them. And then somebody put on Fleetwood Mac, and everybody kind of forgot about it, which was a relief.
But geez, I hate feeling that way, I hate that so much. I was just, like, 16 again and it sucked so bad. But I mean, it's fine, obviously it was fine. Everybody was very nice and nobody said, nobody said that I was stupid out loud, which is good. It's nice. That's a nice thing. I mean, you know, if somebody did— I'm going to stop now.
Has anybody else ever experienced, like, a defect in [pop culture] knowledge, like a missing portion of the brain that everybody else seems to have and like revels in sharing? I don't know.
[“The Edge of Seventeen” Live]3
This video is creepy as fuck, though.
It is mostly Christine, though.
Email me if you want to be a pedant.
