Sweet Memories

So, musically...it's been a little slow the past couple days. Bands don't really fall out of trees and land on my doorstep no matter how much I might want them to,(although they do have little smoking clutches not far from where I live) but that's okay. There are quite a few stories in my pipeline which are just on hold until the calendar gets around to them. It's cruise control at the moment. I suppose it's times like these that make a person wax nostalgic. When there's nothing else going on, the easy thing to do is flip through the ol' album collection and pick something that's got dust on the cover. I've got a few of those. They're from the days before I had to get one of those monstrous CD racks so they just sat on my desk at home while the sun poured in the window and bleached the spines. They're the ones that get shafted to a box in my closet when I need to make room for something new and "cool." Yeah, those. It's funny the way that life circles around though, because things like music tastes have stages, I've noticed. The first stage is that initial infatuation with a group or band, it was the kind of thing that would strike right after summer vacation in middle school with half the class. At that moment, everyone is madly in love with the artist and who wants to be left off the band wagon? But then there's that screwy little period when all you want to do is separate yourself from the idea that that music ever got pipped through your headphones (and I guess this is more true in the young years, but I'm not exactly old so I'll let you know when I get there). Affinity levels drop, sometimes because of the shine that's worn off or because of a real drip of a sophomore album. Honeymoon's over folks, there's nothing to see here. After that, time passes and every last tiny spark has died. That band is over and there is no doubt that they've been over for a while and people feel distanced enough from the old days that it comes back into vogue to admit formerly questionable tastes. Personally, I think it stems from that desire to come across as self assured and confident, the way we all would like to be all the time about our tastes, especially back then. Weird. It's a false sense of maturity and an idea that we've moved passed it all. "Look how above everyone's opinion I am," when really it the same type of conformity as third grade when everyone wore Nike.

But then it's also important to separate a stroll down memory lane. It's not a matter of somewhat self consciously proclaiming ,"I totally just listened to the Backstreet Boys," but more a matter of figuring out what everyone was doing back in the day, where they come from, and ultimately who they were before we knew each other. I know in my case, there are few people that I've known more than five years, so I love talking about the music and the toys that we had or never got and of course the old commercials. For my age group, the Spice Girls were a collective experience
that nowadays we shake our heads about, because apparently they're trying to or actually did get back together. Good stuff. Did we really dig that? Yeah. In fact I never took their CD off my rack. Why would I? I might get sentimental one of these days.

I say that no one should ever be ashamed of what they once liked, even if it's not really en vogue yet to say so. One way or another that group or singer influenced their tastes whether it was to keep moving in that direction or run in the opposite. Plus, what would we talk about at lunch?