“Yeah,” says spectacular music journalist with more knowledge about music than I could ever hope to obtain in twenty years of reading and studying “I remember listening to Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me when I was like twelve and it just blew my mind.” Okay, dude, you were twelve. Where ever did you find a copy of Dinosaur Jr.’s emblematic album that essentially shaped the indie/post-grunge movement about five years before it actually took place? “Oh my older sister,” he says. “She was way cool. She turned me on to all of this stuff. Had me listening to like Pink Floyd when I was five.” Now, I realize there is a certain amount of bullshit to all of this, there is a mystic one must maintain as a bonafide music junkie--one that proclaims you discovered all the monumental albums when you were still preadolescent so that you were completely ready for The Pixies and Nirvana when they hit and took it all in with relish and verve--but at the same time I have to believe some of it. These people just know way too much to have discovered everything when they were like in college. And when I ask these people how they knew or where they found, the answer is always the same “Oh my older brother/sister”.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I never had an older sibling like that. I mean I HAVE an older brother, but not the type that would be handing me Thin Lizzy at the age of three to spin on my little My Little Pony record player (in fact when I was four and five I think I remember listening to Billy Joel and Lionel Richie, not one of the highlights of my musical acumen). My older brother was the type that liked to make detailed WWII model airplanes (and then occasionally light them on fire and throw them off the roof of our house). He was more interested in computer games than the latest LP release of Husker Du (and believe me I don’t believe anyone when they tell me they were listening to Husker Du at the ripe age of eleven). So now I’m saddled with the task of not only keeping up with every new band, but having to continually go back and pick up old bands that I should already know just so I can agree or refute someone when they say Super Furry Animals is so obviously a descendant of Echo and the Bunnyman (which, before you impugn me, I categorically regard as a naft line of thinking). It’s so frustrating. God damn it, where was my older brother in life?
Now, reasonably, I realize I cannot solely blame my older brother for my poor musical education. I did grow up in a town where there was only one extensive music store (I’m talking about the type that is not chain or found in your local mall) in our town, which was a good forty minutes from our house. It’s not like we had access to all this auditory stimulus that now obsesses my daily life. It was pre the days of the internet, so there was no casual information acquisition or music ordering at the click of a button. Still I’m finding a lot of resentment these days that my actual music education did not formally begin until the summer of 2000 when I worked in the venerable library of music knowledge, otherwise known as Rolling Stone. Up until that point I was a novice music aficionado, I had my Pavement and I think I listened to Three Doors Down (an embarrassing admission, I know), but I couldn’t really call myself a “music fan”. It was there, under the tutelage of great rock journalist that the foundation of great music appreciation began. I was a diligent intern so I think the Editorial Assistant who’d hired me took pity on me when he heard me utter the blasphemous statement “I’m just not that into music.” I know, I know, what the hell was doing at Rolling Stone if I was not IN to music. Prestige is probably the only answer I could give. Taking me by the hand he said “child, child, you just haven’t heard the RIGHT music” remember that this was 2000 and we were still very much in the crux of Britney/Backstreet Boys movement. Between himself and the Editor-in-Chief I was introduced to the basic tenants of music. It began with the basics “It all started with The Velvet Underground” and moved on from there. By the time I’d finished my term at RS I could knowledgably speak of everything from Joy Division to The Pixies. I’d heard my first Ramones album in full and could honestly tell you that while Kurt Cobain was certainly iconic, he was probably not the greatest musician of all time.
But through it all I’m still very much a tumble weed adrift. I have no Jedi (or Music) Master steering me through the murky waters. Someone to inform me that while Black Sabbath may have been ground breaking, their music is determinably unlistenable. And that brings me back to the theme of my post. I resent the brother that I had.
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