My Spanish Life.

A conversation with a friend, Mike, left me pondering a number of questions. Not particularly profound or deep, but then again, they never are. But anyway, to the point.

Music.

He mentioned music as a soundtrack to one’s life and indeed, I have to agree with him. Music has been and always will be, I expect, a constant in my life. Not that the sounds will stay the same, but as friends here in Madrid constantly comment – I am never without headphones (even at 2am in a club). Music is what gets me out of bed most mornings. It allows me to disappear into my thoughts and permits me to disappear from them too. Whether it be hip hop, metal, punk, pop, rock, house or whatever, I can be assured that something will strike a chord with me.

But that leads one to wonder… is your music taste dictated by the moods and attitudes of your life? Or are your moods and attitudes dictated by your music? I’m proposing those questions not in order to answer them because I do not have the time or the patience to churn out JSTOR article after JSTOR article to discover the psychological reasons behind liking certain types of music. All I know is that the core music at various points in my life have all been reflective (or vice versa) of my mind state at the time.

With some leeway and boundary stretching, I can point to four major musical periods of my life since age 12 and trap them into bands that I was obsessed with at the time. For the sake of brevity, I will leave it at just four bands but be assured that there were more things being listened to at this time.

So 12 years old – 15 years old:

Nirvana. OK, you may not like them but for a twelve or thirteen year old new to the world of music, they set me up for life. I received In Utero from a friend of mine on cassette, and didn’t return it for a very, very long time. Every day, In Utero was thrashed through my slowly destroying, grandfather’s old stereo. It pushed me into grunge. Into punk. Into metal. Into alternative. Into independent. Into everything. If it hadn’t been for Nirvana, I don’t think I would have ever found my way into ideas that have shaped me now. Now that’s a big call. Kurt Cobain, nor Nirvana, ever espoused all the ideas which I consider important now. But by hell, they opened the floodgates to them. They made me feel different; they made my heart pound (and still do). They made me angry, sad, happy. And I couldn’t get them out of my ears.

Maybe they inflicted negativity on me, but maybe also a love for independence. Maybe. Or maybe I was drawn to them.

15-19 years old:

Tool. I remember owning the Hottest 100 cd from 1997, where TOOL came in second place with the song Stinkfist. I also remember seeing their CD in Dillon’s music on Norwood Parade and being astonished by the cover’s 3D effect. I purchased it. I took it home. Put headphones on. And was sold. Maynard’s voice rang out, echoing feelings that I am not sure if I felt at all. I still can’t listen to Aenima without wanting to curl up in the dark and let it drown me in sound. My music taste was heavier then. I was never a full blown metal head. I can say I own Slayer, and have heard Cannibal Corpse. But I was always drawn to industrial abrasion like Nine Inch Nails, Manson, Ministry. But it was the beauty of Tool which held me steadfast.

Lyrics have always held me. They don’t have to be the most delicate poetry, but they have to convey emotion. And a perfect emotion. Tool, from the age of 15-19 did this for me. I wouldn’t have travelled 10 hours to see them, because I never thought they’d come back again. Tool made me feel like someone else thought the way I did. Maybe I just thought the way they did, or they just influenced me. But they challenged me. I paid for that in some ways. I hung for five years to Aenima. It was my soul, my heart and my thoughts. So did it shape me?

19-23

Impossible to find a video for this band. They never made one. Godspeed You! Black Emperor. My friend, Lucy, gave me this at, I think, my 19th or 20th birthday. She came with three burnt CD’s – Sigur Ros, Mum and Godspeed. Being that I already owned Sigur Ros, I took the other two. That night, at some ungodly hour, I played Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and barely took it out of my stereo for the next four years. It was a different shift for me. It moved me away from anger. Or towards it but in a different form. It took me into a new realm of music. It opened the door to bands like Slint, Mogwai, A Silver Mt. Zion, and a world of new-folk. But it also reenforced my politics.

Maybe I embraced them as a band because they showed me that people could live a life outside the system and succeed. Maybe they don’t even live that life. I had never heard anything like it before. How could a – essentially – punk band write 20 minute opuses without words? How could this still reveal their politics in more ways than a band like Rage Against the Machine or System of A Down ever do? How could they make me feel more emotion than anyone that existed in my life at that time? I was obsessed. And in those years, if you saw me with headphones, that was what I was listening to. Godspeed! will always be punk rock to me. Not the Sex Pistols. Not Minor Threat. Not Bad Brains. Although I will accept them as punk bands. Godspeed! didn’t care what you thought and they had a message. They didn’t need words to convey it. They wanted revolution in some form and they appeared to live their lives in that form. Listening to Godspeed! alienated me from the hippies; it alienated me from the punks; from the Goths; from the Indie kids. I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to walk the streets surrounded by their sonic embrace.

23-26 years of age:

Two videos for this guy. As I said before, I always have headphones on. And for the last four years, it’s a safe guess that I’ve listened to Aesop Rock sometime in the last 24 hours. It took me a long time to move towards hip hop. I have to give credit for this to a guy that I have difficult time thinking of. (Long other story). I was caught into hip hop at first through Atmosphere and Sole from Anticon, but Aesop wormed his way through. Lyrically, I consider him the greatest thing in music. Not only obtuse, but a storyteller, he manages to rhyme tales, emotion and psychological confusion into everything he does. And I am very partial to these aspects.

I chose Daylight first and foremost because I am addicted to it. The amount of times I utter in boredom or conversation pauses ‘Put one up to shackle me, not clean logic procreation. I did not invent the wheel I was the crooked spoke adjacent.’ is absurd. Aesop makes me walk down the street with a bounce. It makes me view the world with cynicism. It makes me want to sneer and bob my head in acknowledgement at the same time – whether that be the chaoticism of BazookaTooth or the more traditional Appleseed.

Aesop makes me want to open my mind to a vast array of poetry, of hip hop, and of literature, only in order to stretch my own ability in smithing words. Aesop makes me question the world. He makes me disappear into a Labyrinth of rhyme. He can make me calm and cool when I want to be calm or alienate me when I feel alienation.

I was told by said friend that he’d give me six months before I was obsessed with hip hop. It was six months to the day. One morning I woke up and it’s all I could listen to. Be it indie, old skool, gangsta, grime, whatever… I would rather here TuPac, Nas, or JayZ than some shitty rock band. Dizzee Rascal than some new English indie group. Keep bling away from me but Hip Hop is my punk rock right now. And it’s far more punk than most punk rock out there.

I am not a head. Never will be. I will forever love music – in all its forms.

And so far, these are the soundtracks of my life.