Saturday morning earworm invitational

[mrissa]

I'm going to go finish cleaning the house and then get dressed and buy some fruit and doughnuts at Byerly's so my folks and grands and my Onie can come over for breakfast. (Hazards of being a morning person.) But first: athenais posted her rock and/or roll quiz results, and I got to talking about soundtracks to my college years in the comments. It's not always what popular music of the time would indicate -- the Wilburys and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were more a part of the second half of my college years than time would indicate, because Matt was the one with the stereo, and Matt is a huge Tom Petty fan. (Or was, but I suspect that the correct answer here is "is.") First half of college featured more Rolling Stones than one would expect, given that I graduated high school in '95, and also skzbrust's album was frequently in the rotation but not on the Top 40 radio at the time. On the other hand, some stuff is totally temporally predictable: the Counting Crows popping up under every rock*, for example, and Janelle bringing Alanis Morisette's first album into the physics office, and "Semi-Charmed Life" coming on the radio every time timprov and Curt and I were in an automobile together.

So what's the soundtrack of your late teens/early twenties? Any songs that immediately take you back, and are they of the type where everyone** of your age would recognize them or stuff that made people outside your social group confused?

*scottjames, half the time I use that expression, I think of our conversation in high school:
Me: "Stop finding suitors for me under every rock!"
You: "I can't help it if that's where they live!"

**For non-markgritter values of "everyone."

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's maybe a bad sign that I preemptively earwormed myself with Buddy Holly's "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care."

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

It seemed everyone I hung out with could be found listening to the same groups, but they weren't necessarily to my taste. The Cure, for instance, or Jane's Addiction, and most definitely Metallica, and (unfortunately) Nirvana. But I preferred more mellow (or morose, depending on how you see it) music, and my personal soundtrack was an amalgam of songs from Cocteau Twins and Erasure and the slower, sadder songs from the Cure, and Shriekback, and The The, and lots of Suzanne Vega. When I hear songs from those bands today, I am instantly taken back to the cinderblock walls of my dorm room and I feel like I am in college again. I like it very much. It feels very safe and fresh and full of opportunity and adventure. I refuse to get rid of my scratched old CDs from those years because of it. I play them from time to time because I miss it and I like to reminisce. I don't get the chance very often, but when I do, it feels very important and good and right. It's amazing what strong emotions music can so easily evoke.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

More morose than Nirvana.

Golly.

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

Hehe, I didn't do so well on that test, since I'm still kind of young and don't know all the classic rock there is. But my soundtrack to growing up was filled with mostly 70s, 80s and 90s. But I did score 99% higher than other people my age, which obviously proves that other people my age have no musical taste. ;)

Were I to actually list the artists on my soundtrack to life... well, it'd take a while. But Queen is definitely up there. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had totally not pegged you for a Queen girl. Wow.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

[Unknown site tag]'s album?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Like this. (http://dreamcafe.com/rose.html) If you're interested, I can check Uncle Hugo's and see if they still have any. I think you'd like some of the lyrics; I have a better sense of your taste in words than your taste in music, so I can't say about the rest as much. But I like it.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

The soundtrack of my late teens/early 20s, in no particular order:
By my own choice: The Cure, Erasure, Kraftwerk, Rush, Jethro Tull, the Grateful Dead, Queen, Clones at Play[1].
Through exposure by others: Guns N Roses, Nirvana (yuck), Jane's Addiction, Laurie Anderson, Nancy Sinatra, Red Hot Chili Peppers.

[1] Excellent New Orleans funk band, now sadly defunct. I would kill or die to get hold of a copy of their tape now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am not nearly as down on Nirvana as your household seems to be, but most of what I hear of Nirvana is the Unplugged album.

Nancy Sinatra and the Red Hot Chili Peppers: together again for the first time.

An incomplete list

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Pre-college: Pete Seeger, Up With People (their concerts were fun, especially the ones with Pete Seeger...), Beatles, Tom Lehrer, JS Bach, Mamas and Papas, Johnny Cash... I dunno, mostly what was on tv and which concerts I went to (mostly with parents).
College: Steeleye Span, Cat Stevens, Louis Armstrong, Monty Python, Cab Calloway, PDQ Bach, the rock of the time, silent movie scores.
Post college: More Steeleye Span and Celtic Folk/Rock, Patti Smith, Leadbelly (and other old folkies), Lionel Hampton (and other Big Band), Dr. Demento, I went through a bluegrass phase at one point...

... and then I hit 25 and my musical taste was frozen forever. No! Wait.... come back...

Re: An incomplete list

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee. My dad did that "hit 25 and musical taste frozen forever" for awhile, and then I hit 14 and unfroze it for him. My dad and I have nearly identical taste in music, which is very convenient, except I like some girlier stuff more than he does. (My dad, for whatever reason, is not big on Tori Amos.) Significant overlap with your list there.

One of the bits of soundtrack for the last half of my time at college was Pete Seeger's double-disc album with Arlo Guthrie, "Precious Friend." Love that. There are all kinds of things we quote from that without thinking, like, "I read it! It's really true."

I had to kill a record store clerk with my dagger-like glare once, because I asked if they had any Pete Seeger, and he said, "Uhhh, like, do you mean Bob Seger?" No. In fact, I can tell the difference. Honestly.

[pameladean]

I have no idea what everyone would have recognized or who would have been puzzled, but what I liked was Simon and Garfunkel, The Grateful Dead (for certain values of them, emphatically not including any live stuff); Bob Dylan; Leonard Cohen; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and Janis Ian. I didn't like the Beatles, but I got over that eventually. Some of the above is probably not rock, but I never really cared about the difference.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to limit the question to rock.

When I was 12, my dad gave me a couple of Janis Ian albums along with some Jethro Tull, Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and all the textbooks from his college philosophy major*. He set them down in my room and said, "Here. I think you're going to need these." And left.

He was right.

*He was a philosophy/chemistry double major.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see I'm not the only person who prefers non-live Grateful Dead. In the studio, they could be massaged into some semblance of a great band. Live was very much hit or miss, depending on who was on how much of what that night, and what kind of shape Jerry's voice was in (sometimes he could sing like an angel and sometimes he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket). One of my best friends my freshman year of college was a big Dead tape collector, so I got to hear the highs and lows of live Dead.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

REM, Guadalcanal Diary, The Connells, John Wesley Harding, The Smiths, Counting Crows, Suzanne Vega, Crash Test Dummies, NIN, Robin Williamson (and the Incredible String Band), Steeleye Span, Oysterband, June Tabor...

I haven't really done a lot of branching out in music in the 10 years since I got out of college, sadly. Although I have discovered Kelly Hogan and Vienna Teng and they both make me really really happy.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, NIN! I forgot to mention them as well! Thanks for reminding me. (And it's okay; I still prefer the older stuff too, Natalie.) :)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

My essential college music would probably be the BNL Album "Rock Spectacule" which was played all the time in my sophomore dorm. I still think of that year everytime I hear "If I had a Million Dollars"

I do, on my bookshelf, have a taped-from-the-radio tape with a lot of the rest of the college years music--the Freshman by the Verve Pipe (and I went to college in michigan, so we can identify 6 different versions of it) and lots of other things that I can't remember.

These days I still listen to the exact same *kind* of music on the radio, just 10 years later--still modern rock/alternative, still some of the same bands, sometimes even the same songs, if the radio's playing 'old' stuff. ;)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"The Freshman," oh yah, constantly around in college years. At various points I wanted to shout, "Enough with the guilt-stricken sobbing with his head on the floor already!!! Go take a shower and drink some coffee and volunteer at a suicide hotline if you feel that bad!!!"

Also, like everyone else our age, I saw Green Day quoted as prose on way too many college T-shirts etc. It's not something unpredictable! It's something totally predictable by now!!! I can predict exactly what Green Day song you're going to quote here, and in the end it's trite! Aughhhh!

...and yet, she said guiltily, that very same song kind of knocks me back to exactly those years, so I guess it worked. If they put it in a movie set in the mid-90s when I'm 50, 90, whenever, I will know exactly what they're evoking, and it will, in fact, be evoked. So I suppose I can't complain too much.

Latecomer

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= I didn't have much money, so I relied on the used record stores. This meant that I tended to be years behind everybody. The world had moved on to postpunk when I started to listen to early Clash albums, for example.

The postpunk and new wave eras made for some mighty good radio, so I could keep up with the free music of the times. When that era was overwhelmed by formulas and commodification, I was a college radio DJ, still playing what little good stuff there was (and getting it for free).

Re: Latecomer

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

College radio DJs sometimes have a certain amount of indie cred, but our college radio station was not audible from the physics office two buildings over, so at our college it wasn't much. I expect they didn't get much good stuff free, either. It was a really hard job to keep filled, from what I remember.

What we could hear from the physics office, besides Janelle's Alanis album, was MPR. So fund drive weeks were the bane of our existence, and they invariably fell before a big test, when we could have really appreciated actual music most.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

What I listened to had little to do with what much of anybody else listened to. I never listened to the radio, and at college I was rarely forced to either.

I did pick up Procul Harum, Yes, and Emerson Lake and Palmer from Jonathan Adams in college. There was certainly a lot of Monty Python, including the music (when I went and played with Ron's radio show, I liked to slip in their musical tracks in the midst of "ordinary" music without telling people).

I got a stereo about half-way through, and listened to music more after that. I don't think music was important between me and any girlfriends, either.

[pameladean]

Certainly not; I never played "All Around My Hat" until I wore out the record during the long-distance phase of our relationship.

P.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Late teens: let's see, I was 18 in 1975 when I went off to college. Disco was just starting to hit its stride, and that kind of music turned up at college dances and parties. I loved ABBA, and still do. On the stereo at our sorority we listened to Heart and Aerosmith. On the radio it was either prog-rock, which I found infinitely tedious, or stadium rock, which I listened to hoping for something good.

But by 1978 I started really liking what was on the radio. Roxy Music, the Clash, Patti Smith, B-52s, just about everything labeled New Wave or Punk. I went New Wave myself, shaving my head in 1979 and dressing like a pop star. I loved 80's music across the board except for rap and hip-hop, and that takes us into my thirties and out of your survey.

What I leave out is the total immersion in classical music which occupied a lot of my listening time from 1975 to 1979. I was a music major, I bathed in the stuff.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One year, each physics office (senior, junior, and sophomore) had a copy of ABBA Gold. The hazards of going to a Swedish-American college. The very last thing in the world you want is three off-sync competing versions of "Super Trouper." Unless it's two off-sync versions and Gus practicing the ST:NG theme on his trumpet in the junior office.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Lot's Who, Stones, Airplane, Jimi etc, tons of Motown soul too. Your basic very hard rock/soul mixed in the beginnings of love of post big band jazz and romantic classical. All that and real sounds of mech war, I still get goose bumps when hearing a 212 or HU-1D going overhead.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Oh, you guys are making me feel old, but I'll play.

The music I loved in my late teens/early twenties was a real mix, just like it is now. I think unless they lived under a rock most people my age would recognize them. I know at the time this music horrified my parents and most of the older people I knew.

I loved Dylan, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, Cream, Blind Faith, Joan Baez, Iron Butterfly, The Who, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Judy Collins, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull, The Moody Blues, Janis Joplin, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills and Nash (plus Neil Young when he joined), James Taylor, Carole King, The Mamas and The Papas and the Beatles, especially John Lennon.

This is by no means an all inclusive list, but this is a good sample of what I listened to at that age. I still love it all, but I didn't stay stuck there. I moved on as music moved on.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Several of the people answering this are older than you, hon.

My mom's and my taste in female vocalists partially diverges because she thinks Janis Joplin is an endpoint, and I think she's a beginning.

This comment got me singing CSN&Y's "Helpless," which timprov turned into "Elfquest." Just the other day we were listening to Pete Seeger singing "Turn, Turn, Turn," and I told him how people walked out of my parents' church when they played it for a youth service when they were teenagers. The world has changed so much.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

The musicians that only I seemed to be into:
Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Professor Longhair, Jacqueline du Pre, Earl Hines.

The musicians that a whole lot of people around me were crazy for:
Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush (especially The Sensual World), This Mortal Coil (especially Blood), His Name Is Alive, Capping Day, Boiled in Lead.

And the musicians that everybody my age has heard of:
Nirvana, Sinead O'Connor

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

Oh! How could I forget No Means No!

I had a good time confusing the record store clerk when I picked up some Haydn and some No Means No in the same record-store run. He blinked at me and said, "Are both of these for you?!"

[ckd]

My college years hit the latter part of the 1980s, so it was, y'know, post-Wham. Since those were also the years when I made the move from tapes to CDs, I wound up listening to older stuff as I acquired (or re-acquired) it, which tended to mix things up a bit.

Of the carryovers from high school, the various folks related to Genesis over the years made a number of appearances. Invisible Touch was one of those albums that I played over and over and over and over again, as was Peter Gabriel's So. Mike + The Mechanics made their appearance, and Phil Collins was still on the stack.

I also did a bunch of musical looking back; while Graceland was new, I was listening to older Paul Simon as well; I stocked up on James Taylor's backlist on CD even before buying the CD player. I had plenty of Queen, Billy Joel, and so forth.

The real musical shift came not too long after that, though. I discovered 10,000 Maniacs with In My Tribe; picked up various late-80s one hit wonders like Cutting Crew, T'Pau, and Breathe; fell in love with Les Misérables; picked up The Joshua Tree; and continued to listen to "Weird Al" Yankovic. Kate Bush's The Whole Story became one of the most common CDs in the player, and

Later, Edie Brickell and Roxette came along as Billy Joel started falling into the sappiness trap (though "We Didn't Start The Fire" was still worthwhile). Elvis Costello's Spike joined the heavy rotation playlist, and as my college years came to an end I was introduced to They Might Be Giants by way of Flood.

Songs that immediately take me back? OMD's "If You Leave" to the end of high school [1986]; Genesis's "Throwing It All Away" to freshman year [1986-1987] and the summer that followed. Les Mis is sophomore year [1987-1988], from start to finish. That fall and winter? Lots of James Taylor ("Never Die Young" in particular, but some of his older stuff too). Late spring and summer [1989]? 10,000 Maniacs, most of Blind Man's Zoo but particularly "Trouble Me"; Elvis Costello's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror". Senior year [1989-1990]? TMBG's "Birdhouse In Your Soul" or "Particle Man".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a friend who had a Peter Gabriel album his roommate called the cactus album, because "#@%&$, it sounds like he @#$%& sat on a $#%& cactus and can't $%&*% decide whether he #$&* likes it or not!"

Graceland is one of our albums for driving Iowa. One has to be careful with albums for driving Iowa. A bad choice means hours of unhappiness.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

pixies
frank black
pere ubu
belly
sleater-kinney

oh man, i miss liking those crappy early pere ubu songs that just sound like noise now. i have gotten too old for it. i miss the lyrics that mean not a thing. i miss the grating saxophone and being able to swing along and sing the words of one of them with my boyfriend.

i saw secret scenes in the cracks of the city
i saw secret scenes in the seams of the world world world!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I thought every girl knew about The Pixies because of Kim Deal, because she is a GIRL and plays bass. Apparently I was wrong.