I have a very...tentative...relationship with music. I wish I could keep up with the conversation when people start talking about bands with names like The Hives or The Strokes or The Vines or The Peas or the Bees or The Goats or The Random Plural Nouns, but none of that stuff has ever registered with me. Some very well-intentioned friends have tried to teach me, have made mixes for me, have told me what songs mean, what the songwriter was going through at the time and why that makes their song more poignant.
I have no idea why this sloughs off my brain like pudding off a freshly-preened duck, but almost nothing seems to stick. I barely even listened to music at all until I got to college, aside from my extensive collection of They Might Be Giants and Garth Brooks cassette tapes. Seriously. That was it. Thankfully, my roommate and his padded boxful of CDs at least opened my eyes to the fact that other music existed at all, and even though one of the things I learned is that I fucking despise Korn with the fiery, burning passion of a thousand million suns, and also who someone was referencing if they told me they wanted to fuck me like an animal, I did discover one band I liked that managed to lodge itself in my consciousness.
A new game for the Macintosh came out my freshman year of college: Marathon. A basic, but still very good, first-person shooter, Marathon and its sequels feature a lot of aliens, and the shooting to pieces thereof. And I played that game. A lot. Like, a lot lot. At the same time, there was a debut album put out by a new band: Garbage. My roommate played that CD. A lot. And eventually, Garbage became my internal soundtrack that played while firing a plasma gun. To this day, I cannot think of one without the other running through my head. It certainly helps that a lot of the songs sounded like they were written specifically to kill aliens to: "I came to cut you up / I came to knock you down / I came around to tear your little world apart / I came to shut you up / I came to drag you down / I came around to tear your little world apart / And break your soul apart." If you can think of a better soundtrack for hunting aliens on a foreign planet, I would certainly like to hear it.
Garbage became my first real music crush. I would go to music stores and flip through all of their imports and singles, buying all the remixes and B-sides I could find. I would dutifully file them away in my very own, newly-acquired CD Book. I would read about special edition LPs that came in feather-covered jackets, and I would covet them. And of course, I went to see them in concert and thought I was very clever when I said that I was channeling my repressed heterosexual desires through hot-as-fuck Shirley Manson. Also seeing them in concert fucking rocked my fucking face right the fuck OFF.
I am pleased to report that in the years since, I have bought many more CDs, several of which I actually found on my own. Most of what I listen to is pretty dreadful, I admit -- a lot of Happy Hardcore and bouncy overdone fast-and-loud dance junk sung by self-described divas and anything else that is likely to be played at a gay dance club full of shirtless hotties writhing around on E (hmm, maybe I have discovered why I find the music so appealing?) -- but I do not care. If it makes me bop around in my chair at work, it is a good thing. Garbage is still my first love, though -- which is why when I saw a commercial during adult swim last night for a brand new Garbage album I had no fucking idea was even coming out, my heart did a little skippy hop, I decided that Josh was in serious trouble for totally not keeping me up to date, and I started looking for my shoes to run out to the store. Which was when I realized that 11:45 pm on a Tuesday night is far too late to go out and buy music. About five minutes later of looking up stuff about the album online, it totally hit me, I smacked myself in my stupid head, and I downloaded the FUCK out of that bitch, thank you very much iTunes. I have been listening to it nonstop since, and I am very pleased to report that thus far, it reminds me of their first album more than the intervening two: "Stick it to them like a phoenix risin' / There's nothing grander than the big surprise / They can't hurt you with their sticks and stones / About time, take them right between the eyes." I realize that suitability for shooting bug-eyed monsters to is not the most reliable bellwether for music, but nevertheless, it has served me well thus far. Now I just need to find more alien uprisings to quell. Seen any lately?