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…
November 23rd, 2005 at 12:33 pm
Hello John(not John) ! Glad I have some sort of legacy… I think the reason I did not put on the names of the artists was it made it more mysterious. I also find people tend to judge music by the artist associated with it. (Also it just wouldn’t fit in any legible manner) Besides I also liked it if people then asked me “who don’ t’at”.
Hey congratulations I understand you are a Poppa Burger now. Coool ! Scaary !
Cheers !
‘Unka’ Bill
November 24th, 2005 at 8:14 am
Awesome man,
I had a similar experience and here it is.
My parents divorced when I was six and mom moved out here to bc with all the kids (three from a previous marriage, and me) and then I got shipped back to my pop for the reason that I was the only product of the union between them. My summers after that were usually spent as a single flyer on aircraft (wicked cool when you’re nine and get treated like a rock star when travelling, might explain my obsession with playing in bands!) so that I could spend time out here with mom. In the summer of 86 (transition between grade nine and ten, only metal, the Beatles, and country music in my head, and the thrill of riding the roller coaster at expo 86 like 30 times in a row) I spent what was to be my last visit to mom before I moved out here rebuilding a swimming pool and getting to know her new husband. All of this paled in comparison to one subtle yet Jon’s universe changing event initiated by my “ten years older than me”, used to play in a shitty new wave band when new wave was new, brother Sean. My mom, Granny, the new husband and I were about to take off for two weeks on a houseboat in the shuswap lakes when my brother handed me a cassette. “Hey jon, this is a band i think you might like, they do an old duane eddy cover and it’s pretty cool. Also you can just tune mom out when she gets to be a bit much.”
In my hands was “In Visible Silence” by “The Art Of Noise”. I pushed play on my walkman on the drive up to shuswap and it was cued to the track my bro liked, “Peter Gunn”. It was kinda ok so I rewound and listened to the whole thing. Alot. Fuck the sound of the loons and the view of the lake. All I saw was the roof of the top room of the boat, where my bed was,where I sequestered myself for the next two weeks, to be astonished and baffled by the sounds coming out of my GE walkman. How could you possibly compare nature to the triumphant synthesised horns and chorus of brazen girlie singers (that no nudie mag that my dad “hid” in a pile at the bottom of his closet could compare to the image in my minds eye) yelling with everything they could muster “LEGS!!!!LEGS!!!” I was hooked. As soon as I got back to Ontario I bought everything the group had ever done, and was not let down. I even fashioned a home-made button that I wore around my school that said “Have You Heard The Noise?”. So…a little long winded but, let’s just say I understand where you’re coming from and if it wasn’t for my older brother, I might be that guy with the mullet walking around to this day saying “I don’t think anyone truly understood Def Leppard. Their message man, that’s what life is all about!!! ROCKET!!!!YEAAAAHHH!!!!”
November 25th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Oh. My. GOD. I may be able to stay at my job just a little longer because of Pandora.
Also, great story (you too Jon. But I do think Def Leppard is misunderstood) & love that your uncle dropped by.
November 30th, 2005 at 3:31 pm
ps: this *really* doesn’t work with Aimee Mann. I get an Aimee Mann tune every 5 songs and the other 4 songs are crap that I hate. Like Natalie Imbruglia. I have come to the conclusion that only Aimee Mann sounds like Aimee Mann.
Got a good selection based on Soundgarden, though.