Golden Years: A DJ’s Musical Timeline
November 21, 2011
I turned 20 this summer and as I’ve mourned the loss of my teenage years, I’ve also been reminiscing about the music that defined them.
I can name exactly what I was listening to during every stage of my life. Every graduation, birthday, heartbreak, fight, and adventure had it’s own personal soundtrack. Sometimes, I remember the music more then the memories:
2001: I’m 10 years old. At this point, my musical tastes are largely determined by what I hear on the radio and what my older brother is listening to. I buy my very first CD: Destiny’s Child ÛÒ Survivor. To this day, Beyonce remains my favorite female pop artist. I’m also playing Sum 41 ÛÒ All Killer No Filler and The Barenaked Ladies: All Their Greatest Hits on repeat this year – stolen from my big bro.
2002: Cue middle schoolÛÓBraces, glasses, bad hair, and questionable musical taste. I buy Michelle Branch ÛÒ The Spirit Room. I read the liner notes cover to cover and know the words to every song. I discover’ Avril Lavigne’s single “Complicated” and get really annoyed when it becomes popular (so hip). I also buy a Sheryl Crow album this year. If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad?
2003: 7th grade. I make my next purchase: John Mayer ÛÒ Heavier Things. At less then five feet tall I declare “Bigger Then My Body” as my own personal anthem. On someone’s Zanga profile (way too hip for livejournal), I hear “Amie” by Damien Rice. I recognize his voice from the VH1 Top 20 Countdown, which I watched religiously every week (too hip for MTV). I fall in love with Damien Rice. Cue beginning of teenage angst and lifelong pattern of having crushes on boys who are unobtainable.
2004: I’m 13 years old. Hungry for new music, I go hunting through my house and discover a CD given to my brother but never opened: David Bowie – ChangesBowie. Life. Forever. Changed. I listen on my Walkman on the bus to school every day for one year, and I’m hooked forever.
I declare all modern music to be garbage and refuse to listen to anything but Queen, Santana, the Police, the Beatles and Bowie. I save up for my very first iPod. On the back where most people have their names engraved, I choose to write: “Life’s begun, nights are warm and the days are young.”
2005: Freshman year of high school. I credit this next purchase as the defining moment in my musical story. I stand in Target with two albums in hand: a new John Mayer CD (something familiar) and Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News (it has cool cover-art and some song I’d heard on a commercial break of Degrassi).
I bravely purchase Modest Mouse and pop the CD in on the way home from the store with Mom. She calls it “weird.” Which means I have to love it. I proceed to listen to that album obsessively, turn into a full-fledged music addict and never look back.
2006: I’m 15. I get a job at a bagel shop that only plays syndicated episodes of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and therefore learn the words to every popular song from 1970 to 2000. Tracey Chapmen’s “Fast Car” still reminds me of slicing bagels and jamming with my sassy manager Bernice.
Thanks to Myspace and illegal downloading, I become exposed to an infinitely wider array of music. Maybe all modern music isn’t so terrible. I lose the concept of albums for a while here and start amassing a miscellaneous collection of maybe five tracks per artist: The Strokes. The Hives. The White Stripes. Anything with a “the” in front of it. I take enormous pride in the fact that I know different music then most of the kids in my high school in West Virginia. The song on my Myspace profile is Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” and I put some lyrics from Spoon’s “I Summon You” in my AIM buddy profile to demonstrate how unique and deep I am.
2007: A very insightful, intelligent and beautiful friend dies. I’m 16 years old and don’t take it very well at all. It is just the kind of fuel that drives a teenager to listen to really, really gloomy music. And I do. This is the year I burrow into Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab, Radiohead, Elliot Smith, and Neural Milk Hotel. I make a lot of mixtapes and quote far too many song lyrics in my Facebook statuses.
2008: Senior year of high school. I find my Mom’s old Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Cat Stevens albums this year and fall hopelessly in love. But most of my memories of this year are just about being beautifully young and reckless with my best friends. We play “Benny and the Jets” and “Roxanne” over and over again on every jukebox we can find. We drive around just because we can, listening to Ben Kweller and Ben Folds and getting sentimental as we prepare to split up for college.
2009: This is the year I graduate, turn 18 and start my first semester of college. I listen to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot obsessively that spring when trying to decide between schools. I discover this nifty website “Pitchfork” and read all about Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, Deerhunter and Grizzly Bear. My musically inclined senior prom date gives me 12 gigabytes of music he thinks is missing from my collection. I listen to the Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, and Big Star all summer long.
In the fall, I move to D.C. and go to my first real concert – Yo La Tengo at the 9:30 Club. It’s the greatest high I’ve ever experiencedÛÓand I start fiending for live music like an addict, going to any show I can or can’t afford.
2010: I’m a DJ for my college radio station and get what feels like a limitless number of albums from the station (compared to my one-per-year status long ago). For the first time, everyone knows the bands I know- and more about them then I do. Everyone else went to their first concert at age 10. I feel like less of the music connoisseur I thought I was. But it’s thrilling to find people who like the same music as I do.
My friends deem me a “hipster” when I talk about the new bands I like, but I don’t even care because I get to talk about music on my show for two hours every week. I start blogging about music, I make a best of 2010 list, I read music news fanatically, I lose count of the shows I’ve been to, I wonder what I’m even doing in school when what I really want is to be a music supervisor and make soundtracks for other people’s lives- not just my own.
2011: Currently listening to the new Feist, St. Vincent, Girls, and Atlas Sound albums on repeat. Along with all the music I’ve loved over the years and anything else I can get my hands on. When people ask me what kind of music I like, I truly can never answer because I love it all: 70’s Art Rock, Classic Soul, Female Singer-Songwriters, Post-Punk, Twee, 80’s Pop, Rap, Shoegaze, Alt-Country— whatever you feel like calling it.
And I still love Sheryl Crow and Sum41ÛÓand not even in an ironic “Ha Ha this song is so bad/silly/old but I still know all the words” way. Music should never be something you are ashamed of. It’s easy to turn your nose at music that is deemed too popular or too obscure, I’m certainly guilty of it sometimes. As guilty as I am of letting someone’s musical tastes influence my opinion of them. But music is so much more then the stigma that surrounds it, something every music lover knows. You listen to what you feel connected to— and that’s it. In the end, the label, genre, decade, and popularity just doesn’t matter.
The music I grew up with actually shaped me into a different person. I’d never abandon or disown it. I’m genuinely glad I grew up in a little musical bubble in West Virginia— because bursting out of that bubble has been nothing less then exhilarating.
