In the past few years, there has been a lot of fuss about music sharing. Something that I and my friends regularly engaged in during high school and college – making mix-tapes, in this case – became so easy with the advent of the web and p2p programs that suddenly corporations opened the legal torture kit and went for the throat. Quite apart from all the noise and heat of the file sharing debate, I have recently finally settled in with my CD collection and starting ripping it to disk, so that I can keep a local library on our internal home network. Our DVR, “Stevo”, has a built in music playing system that can read music from any location on disk. I merely mount the music collection via NFS, and have instant access every single piece of music in our home, all with the touch of a remote in the living room.
Ripping CDs has given me the chance to rediscover music from my own past. It’s a bit like cracking open a diary and reading it after ten years of languishing in the bottom of a box. We all buy music that suits not just the times, but our tastes, our feelings, our moods. As I’ve worked from the As to the Ns in my collection, I have taken such a walk.
The first things I hit were Cream and Eric Clapton, the music to which I first was exposed and became hooked in high school. It was a friend of mine, himself obsessed with Clapton (he even used “Tales of Great Ulysses” as the basis of a book report on The Odyssey in his English class), gave me a few tapes and got me hitched. It took time. I wasn’t ready to sponge up the greatness at first, but as things like “White Room” cycled on the tape deck, I realized that the blues could be not just a social statement, but a musical challenge to the listener and the musician alike.
Clapton was merely a gateway drug, softening me up for my first delicious and total addiction: Pink Floyd. It’s trite, I know. But there is something about the mental state of a late teenager and “The Wall” that mix like milk and honey. It’s not necessarily a healthy resonance, but I can honestly say that without the catharsis of “The Wall” – the total story of a man at first isolating himself, then breaking down and bursting his own wall – I might not have come through the most emotionally challenging part of my life: college. With Floyd also came Rush, and thanks to the exposure to my college peers I also found Dream Theater, Metallica (the early stuff), Iron Maiden, Yes, ELP – what I now think of as my “Prog Rock” phase. I’m still in that, though it manifests inself in groups like Angra, Blind Guardian, and Nightwish. Those were my mid-grad-school obsessions, the mix of epic stories and near symphonic bliss an uplifting alternative to the wearing down that grad school became.
Associations have come flooding back. Listening to YYZ over and over again while sitting on the carpeted attic bedroom floor of my best friend, absorbing the musical greatness of Geddy, Neil, and Alex. I still remember in vivid detail what I was doing the first time I ever heard Dave Matthew’s “Too Much”, a memory that will never really be lost (I am afraid to say). I remember sitting in my girlfriend’s apartment while she was away at work, watching people down on the street and breathing the cool Hamden air as I listened to “Walking in Memphis”. I remember the brightness of the light and the smell of Swiss flowers in the air in my CERN office in the summer of ’99, listening to “Guyute” by Phish.
Now I make sense of my college life, my crush on and silent break-up with religion, by listening to “The Hold Steady”. I make sense of our American empire with Green Day, Berlioz, Adrienne Young, and The Flaming Lips. I am purely blown away by The Shins, The Pernice Brothers, and Modest Mouse. I laugh my ass off with M.C. Chris and Ben Folds.
Sometimes, it’s better to discover the music from past parts of our life than to consume everything new under the sun. Not often, for living in the past is as dangerous as waiting for the future. But without healthy reflection, how are we ever to make sense of the long road behind?
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