Thursday, March 03, 2005

Strange Days

I finally got the last of my CDs loaded onto my iPod a couple of weeks ago, and since then I've basically hit "Shuffle Songs" the vast majority of the time I listen to it.

With somewhere in the realm of 1600 songs currently on there, I hear something I haven't heard in awhile every day. Some songs I haven't heard in YEARS since I haven't played the CD in so long, and they make me wonder what kind of wacky place my head was in when I was a teenager. I mean, I listen to wide array of music; anything from the harsher tones of Tool and Isis to the more mellow sounds of Sigur Ros and Guided By Voices (pre-Rick Okasic) is cool with me, but some of the stuff I used to listen to on a regular basis when I was 16 sounds really distressing to me now.

As an example, I can remember my two absolute favorite bands when I was a teenager were Therapy? (the question mark is not a typo) and Ministry. Therapy? was/is this hard Irish band that sang a lot of songs about breaking things and hurting people, while Ministry was just loud and difficult to understand and had charming album titles like "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" and "The Land of Rape and Honey".

Could I really have been that angry back then? And if so, what the heck was I angry about?

Please understand that I'm not trying to imply that people who listen to this stuff are by necessity angry... I'm just saying that *I* was.

I wonder if people who remember childhood as an idyllic time were ever actually children...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ya know, it's funny. I'm the youngest of a large family. What I listened to as a very young child was a lot of motown and what we now call 'classic rock'. When I was a teenager, I was into what we now call 'soft rock'. As a young adult I was really into things like Crue and GnR, with a real lean towards pop-rock. Now... I'll try anything once.

Anyway, back in my angry days... the music never really reflected that. For me, the music I listened to was very much opposite my general frame of mind.

Weird, huh?