I come from a very musically talented family. Despite my congenital leg-up, I still manage to be fairly music-retarded.
From age twelve to age eighteen, I listened to one single artist religiously, breathing in her words like Gospel and measuring my heartbeats to her uneven acoustic strums. Sigh... Jewel. My first love. I somehow felt desperately related to her plight. She lived in a van for years! Did you know that?! She scraped by on tips she earned entertaining in bars and on street corners, bleating out her misfortune at having a really shitty dad and living an under-priveleged life until Hollywood decided that she was blonde-and-blue-eyed enough to be in their exclusive club. Although none of this reeeeeally describes myself in any way (well, maybe one-sixth is pretty accurate), when I listened to Jewel sing it was as if her words yanked the skin off my bones and soaked my naked frame in a bath of warm light and acceptance. I used to go into a trance when I played her album Pieces of You. Really. I would put the cassette into our living room stereo, and I would get down on my knees in front of the speakers and sway creepily back and forth like a blind version of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
This happened until I was a senior in highschool and my brother sent me a burned copy of The Get Up Kids' On a Wire album. It broke my concentration on strong female woes and opened my eyes to the world of music spread before me. From there I became an Indie Music Scene junkie and started shooting up the broken vocals and sob stories I found in each playlist. Ohhhhh girly boys, how I love thee.
I rejoiced in the genre of Converse shoes and Vasolined black hair for years, sporting band T-shirts and tennis sweatbands while playing Jenga and watching re-runs of Baywatch. I was on top of the indie music scene, rejoicing in the neglected glory and smug narcissism that accompanies it, until...
... the music got too cool for me.
All of a sudden, in my freshman year of college at UCSB, I realized that the music scene was expanding at a rate that left me panting and jogging sadly behind, choking on its dust. Everything changed in the blink of a heavily-black-linered eye.
Band names transformed from cleverly catchy three-worded titles to full sentences that led the tongue on quirky abandoned phrases and half-answered enigmas. When I first heard the name "Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah" I laughed so hard that I tinkled a little bit and left a slappy red high-five mark on my quadricep. As the band names grew to twenty syllables, I found my patience with The Music Scene shortening, and my ambition shrank into my comfort zone of What I Already Knew. I became a lyrical hermit. Whenever people tossed their pre-Bieber bangs and boasted about a new unheard-of music group, I yawned and sipped on my canned beer. I flirted briefly with the idea of starting a career in naming obscure musical groups; wouldn't YOU buy an album from The Presidential Hair Piece Horrors or She Wrote the Peacock White?
I am SO stressed out by the quantity of "hip" music flooding all over itself in the audio waves of the Indie Scene. I can only handle being hit on by a new band maybe every four months. In the interim I concoct a playlist of feel-good grooves and let it lull me to sleep every night. When the time is right I open my ear canal and heart to the seductive tones of another sultry music group. My friends have grown accustomed to my Tourettes-style screams of enthusiasm about songs I'm stoked on that they've already laid to rest in the musical graveyard. When I start cheerleading about a "new" band that I'm excited about, they smile sympathetically and pat my head with the CD case of last year's hits that apparently swarmed past me without detection. I would say pretty confidently that I'm about five years behind the music scene at any given moment. I'm currently obsessed with Murder By Death's album Who Will Survive and What Will Become of Them? Britney and Gaga yank their hips in front of my discretion but I hold steadfastly to my vows to not be overwhelmed by Mister Music and All His Glory. Nay... while you are scrolling through iTune's lastest top sellers, I am licking the scratches off my oldest Ben Folds CD. I am DETERMINED to defeat the music industry's promiscuity by remaining loyal to my heart song's crucial players. Although it may leave me contemporarily in the dark, it allows me to at least form enough of a relationship with each artist that I feel comfortable enough around him or her to Zumba-dance a physical accompaniment in the dark solace of my living room.
I'm pretty serious about founding that committee for The Nomenclature of Obscure Musical Groups, though. I mean... c'mon... I can probably think of six ways to incorporate Unicorns into your title that you failed to see, so... just saying....
Rock on!!!
P.S... DOUBLE RAINBOW!!!
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