Quick version: Go check out Pandora for cool self-selected streaming audio based on your tastes.
Long Version:
When I was a kid, living in deepest darkest Chilliwack, I used to mourn the loss of any sort of current or edgy music. Now, don’t get me wrong,
I don’t for a moment think I ever actually *thought* the word “Edgy” when I was thinking about music, but I sure knew I wasn’t getting what I wanted to hear on CHWK 1270 AM…
Thank God (Who Is Lord Over Chilliwack, I was told many times per block) for my Uncle Bill.
Bill was a sometimes-DJ who was in his 20s as I was just getting into my teens, and every year at XMas, I’d get a mixed tape or two. Full-on “High-Fidelity” philosophy MIX TAPES.
Those gorgeous Maxell 90Minute CrO2s would arrive (sometimes just one, but later on, usually two) with both sides CRAMMED with music I’d never heard, and probably never would have, in some cases. I went through those tapes like new they were encyclopedias at a monestery and played most of ’em until they broke. They were my soundtrack of the world outside small-town Chilliwack. The music that was decidedly NOT being listened to by the bullys and preppies. Music they’d just never understand – were incapable of appreciating – that didn’t exist in Chilliwack’s 1950s mentality.
The only problem with those tapes is that they didn’t have artists, just titles.
I learned years later how hip I actually was, musically speaking. I could’ve gone toe-to-toe with the kids with the crazy hair and long black trenchcoats if I’d just realized that the backpatches they were wearing were the same bands I’d scrawled lyrics of across my bedroom walls.
In short: I knew my shit, without knowing it at all:
- I was listening to U2 from their first album – didn’t know it until Joshua Tree came out and I asked a friend “Is there another band this singer was in, like, six or seven years ago?”
- Sinead O’Connor starting her duet with The Edge, before she was bald.
- The Cure before Standing on the Beach.
- Elvis’ old stuff before it was cool to remix it, or make fun of him for being fat. The B-sides only, of course.
- Psychedelic Furs before Valley Girl.
- Simple Minds before Breakfast Club.
- Chaka Khan before anyone knew who the hell Whitney Housten is/was/would-be.
- Coldcut’s Beats and Pieces from “What’s That Noise?” LONG before anybody’d heard the “Seven Minutes of Madness” remix of Paid in Full on the Colors soundtrack. When I stumbled across Coldcut again, it was years later, when they showed up on the Journey By DJ series, and they blew my mind all over again. I don’t think I’ve musically been the same since.
- Was Not Was – Papa Was a Rolling Stone and I Feel Better Than James Brown
- James Brown – The Payback, and Papa Don’t Take No Mess (thus explaining why I was so into Prince later)
- Joy Division
- Depeche Mode (again, from the word go).
- INXS (heard Johnson’s Airplane from The Swing in a hip clothing store on Robson, so that doesn’t count).
- Parliament Funkadelic – after our generation was introduced to them as “Those guys in the outfits at Woodstock” but BEFORE Digital Underground started talking about them.
And that’s without actually having a tape in front of me. One of these days I’ll transfer them all to MP3 in their original order. Why? Because I can’t buy those tapes like that anywhere. When will the RIAA figure this out?
Okay, so here’s the thing:
www.pandora.com is my Uncle Bill times about a billion, and crammed into a streaming audio website.
You tell it an artist or a song you like, and it starts spitting out music you might also like, as in streaming it at you. You can vote that you like it, or hate it, and it’ll adjust what else gets played based on those selections.
there’s more stuff, but Dead Like Me’s on now…
