Welcome to "Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do," a new series here on PoYB. Please first read this blog post I wrote in 2009.
There, I listed 22 subjects that I would NEVER write about on this
website. Here in 2018, I say: don't fucking tell me what I can't do. For
a total of twenty-two posts, I will be blogging about these subjects,
in striking defiance of my 20-year-old naiveté.
TODAY'S "FORBIDDEN" SUBJECT: "Why Rolling Stone is still legitimate after publishing that terrible Lady Gaga cover"
WHY IT WAS FORBIDDEN: If I was saying that I will never write about how RS is a good magazine, then my point was that RS is NOT a good magazine, you see? Hahah?
HOW I WILL WRITE ABOUT IT: Reflecting on the debt that I owe Rolling Stone. This is technically also a "The Night That We" essay.
TODAY'S "FORBIDDEN" SUBJECT: "Why Rolling Stone is still legitimate after publishing that terrible Lady Gaga cover"
WHY IT WAS FORBIDDEN: If I was saying that I will never write about how RS is a good magazine, then my point was that RS is NOT a good magazine, you see? Hahah?
HOW I WILL WRITE ABOUT IT: Reflecting on the debt that I owe Rolling Stone. This is technically also a "The Night That We" essay.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Night That We... (discovered music)
Part XXII
Magazine Mentor
November 2003
I sometimes pretend otherwise, but there was a time in my life when I didn't really give a shit about music. If we're being honest, that time wasn't too long ago. Every intense music fan has that awakening at some point in their lives, at various ages. Mine came relatively late. But like all music fans, I can pinpoint exactly the moment when that awakening came. And it's a fucking lame one.
Prior to this moment, I didn't have much in terms of appreciation for music. Some highlights from my life listening to music in grade school, perhaps: I owned a copy of The Best of Nickelodeon Nicktoons; I would take band names that I heard from Y100 and write them on my pencil case like a fucking poseur; I owned a copy of Banjo-Kazooie: The Soundtrack; I would get pumped up for a basketball game by listening to "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)"; I made a mix cassette featuring prominently the R&B stylings of TLC; I owned and listened to many times a recording of the Philadelphia Honors 2002 Band featuring a spirited rendition of "Thus Spake Zarathustra."
Again, I was coming up on my fifteenth birthday, and I didn't know shit about music. But I did know one thing: I was a big fan of lists. This is the reason I walked out of Blockbuster with a shiny copy of Rolling Stone magazine, still with the extra-large pages, its cover a bold red with gold trim and a stark white mega-headline: 500 GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME.
I had never really heard of ANY of this shit! It was wild! Like, okay, I had heard of the Beatles, duh. I had been beaten over the head with commercials for the compilation album 1 like the rest of America. But I had no fucking clue what Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was, and the album cover was so colorful, and it was ranked #1! I had to explore it. I had to know everything about this list.
And the really enticing part was that all the writers who collaborated on the list made each individual album seem so damn important in the blurbs. It was like there was this whole other world that I didn't have a clue about, and Rolling Stone was grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me and yelling at me to come be a part of this.
The coup de grâce was that the issue (the one that I bought, anyway) also came with a free sample CD of selected songs from the albums on the list. There were only nine songs, but dude, I listened to that CD probably three times every day for a month. This was the definite confirmation that I wanted in on the whole "music" thing. The tracklist is here on Discogs. I no longer own the CD, but just looking at the tracklist brings me back to those days in my parents' basement family room with their "state of the art" five-piece sound system, wondering what the fuck was the deal with this Dylan guy and this Floyd guy, and how the fuck soon can I get in on this action.
For a while, the Rolling Stone 500 was my scripture, my guidebook into the wild world of the musical canon. Since I purchased the issue in late November, Christmas was right around the corner, and I asked Santa for Sgt. Pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon and Physical Graffiti and Tommy. I fell in love. I brought a Christmas gift card to Best Buy and went right to their CD section (hahaha, I know, right? 2002!) and bought Highway 61 Revisited. My dad was pressuring me into buying Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits instead, but I scoffed. The Rolling Stone 500 had to taught me to revere the album as a work of art. I didn't want just a collection of songs. I wanted an album that fucking meant something to enough people that it landed on #2, all-time!
All my spare money went toward CDs around this time in my life (which wasn't a whole lot, mind you). The obsession started with the cataloguing my music, ripping all the music onto my parents' old Dell desktop computer, burning CDs for friends (mix CDs whose tracklists would probably be so very cringe-inducing if I saw them today). There was stumbles along the way, for sure. E.g. that same first Christmas, I also received Metallica's Black Album, and it was... not for me. Rolling Stones' unquestioning praise for these 500 albums was not without flaws, after all.
But it laid an important foundation for my listening experience. It was a great way to begin my journey, to have a mentor in magazine form, teaching me what the cherished albums in music history were. I put on emphasis on the "begin" part of my musical experience, though, because at the end of the day, listening to classic rock forever is no way to go through life, is it?
In 2005, I received a couple of mix CDs from my then-girlfriend, and for the second time (musically, at least), my mind was blown. I knew originally from Rolling Stone that there was a whole world of music that I had to burrow into, but with this mix CD filled with indie rock classics, I realized that there was this whole OTHER world that Rolling Stone didn't even touch, didn't even fucking scratch the surface. This new CD showed me that all the great music wasn't released decades ago, before I was born ("I was born in le wrong generation," or any of that bullshit), but that great music was being released RIGHT NOW. And I've been swimming through new music ever since.
But it all started with that fucking issue of Rolling Stone. That is so goddamn lame to say, mainly because Rolling Stone is, in general, a fucking lame ass rag. It's a magazine that is stuck in the past (they considered a fucking U2 album to be the best song of the year... in 2014). It's a magazine for has-been hippies and technology-deficient dads.
For a kid who didn't know jack shit about music, though, looking into the past was the perfect way to start, and I owe a great deal of my love of music to its guidance. That's why I'll never completely dismiss the magazine, no matter how pathetic it is in its failed quest to stay relevant (even if that involves putting a deeply uncomfortable picture of Lady Gaga on the cover). There's always old music to dive into. Music's history is deep and rich, and I don't mind having Rolling Stone to keep guiding me back to the past, always there help me discover what once was.
Magazine Mentor
November 2003
I sometimes pretend otherwise, but there was a time in my life when I didn't really give a shit about music. If we're being honest, that time wasn't too long ago. Every intense music fan has that awakening at some point in their lives, at various ages. Mine came relatively late. But like all music fans, I can pinpoint exactly the moment when that awakening came. And it's a fucking lame one.
Prior to this moment, I didn't have much in terms of appreciation for music. Some highlights from my life listening to music in grade school, perhaps: I owned a copy of The Best of Nickelodeon Nicktoons; I would take band names that I heard from Y100 and write them on my pencil case like a fucking poseur; I owned a copy of Banjo-Kazooie: The Soundtrack; I would get pumped up for a basketball game by listening to "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)"; I made a mix cassette featuring prominently the R&B stylings of TLC; I owned and listened to many times a recording of the Philadelphia Honors 2002 Band featuring a spirited rendition of "Thus Spake Zarathustra."
Again, I was coming up on my fifteenth birthday, and I didn't know shit about music. But I did know one thing: I was a big fan of lists. This is the reason I walked out of Blockbuster with a shiny copy of Rolling Stone magazine, still with the extra-large pages, its cover a bold red with gold trim and a stark white mega-headline: 500 GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME.
I had never really heard of ANY of this shit! It was wild! Like, okay, I had heard of the Beatles, duh. I had been beaten over the head with commercials for the compilation album 1 like the rest of America. But I had no fucking clue what Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was, and the album cover was so colorful, and it was ranked #1! I had to explore it. I had to know everything about this list.
And the really enticing part was that all the writers who collaborated on the list made each individual album seem so damn important in the blurbs. It was like there was this whole other world that I didn't have a clue about, and Rolling Stone was grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me and yelling at me to come be a part of this.
The coup de grâce was that the issue (the one that I bought, anyway) also came with a free sample CD of selected songs from the albums on the list. There were only nine songs, but dude, I listened to that CD probably three times every day for a month. This was the definite confirmation that I wanted in on the whole "music" thing. The tracklist is here on Discogs. I no longer own the CD, but just looking at the tracklist brings me back to those days in my parents' basement family room with their "state of the art" five-piece sound system, wondering what the fuck was the deal with this Dylan guy and this Floyd guy, and how the fuck soon can I get in on this action.
For a while, the Rolling Stone 500 was my scripture, my guidebook into the wild world of the musical canon. Since I purchased the issue in late November, Christmas was right around the corner, and I asked Santa for Sgt. Pepper's and Dark Side of the Moon and Physical Graffiti and Tommy. I fell in love. I brought a Christmas gift card to Best Buy and went right to their CD section (hahaha, I know, right? 2002!) and bought Highway 61 Revisited. My dad was pressuring me into buying Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits instead, but I scoffed. The Rolling Stone 500 had to taught me to revere the album as a work of art. I didn't want just a collection of songs. I wanted an album that fucking meant something to enough people that it landed on #2, all-time!
All my spare money went toward CDs around this time in my life (which wasn't a whole lot, mind you). The obsession started with the cataloguing my music, ripping all the music onto my parents' old Dell desktop computer, burning CDs for friends (mix CDs whose tracklists would probably be so very cringe-inducing if I saw them today). There was stumbles along the way, for sure. E.g. that same first Christmas, I also received Metallica's Black Album, and it was... not for me. Rolling Stones' unquestioning praise for these 500 albums was not without flaws, after all.
But it laid an important foundation for my listening experience. It was a great way to begin my journey, to have a mentor in magazine form, teaching me what the cherished albums in music history were. I put on emphasis on the "begin" part of my musical experience, though, because at the end of the day, listening to classic rock forever is no way to go through life, is it?
In 2005, I received a couple of mix CDs from my then-girlfriend, and for the second time (musically, at least), my mind was blown. I knew originally from Rolling Stone that there was a whole world of music that I had to burrow into, but with this mix CD filled with indie rock classics, I realized that there was this whole OTHER world that Rolling Stone didn't even touch, didn't even fucking scratch the surface. This new CD showed me that all the great music wasn't released decades ago, before I was born ("I was born in le wrong generation," or any of that bullshit), but that great music was being released RIGHT NOW. And I've been swimming through new music ever since.
But it all started with that fucking issue of Rolling Stone. That is so goddamn lame to say, mainly because Rolling Stone is, in general, a fucking lame ass rag. It's a magazine that is stuck in the past (they considered a fucking U2 album to be the best song of the year... in 2014). It's a magazine for has-been hippies and technology-deficient dads.
For a kid who didn't know jack shit about music, though, looking into the past was the perfect way to start, and I owe a great deal of my love of music to its guidance. That's why I'll never completely dismiss the magazine, no matter how pathetic it is in its failed quest to stay relevant (even if that involves putting a deeply uncomfortable picture of Lady Gaga on the cover). There's always old music to dive into. Music's history is deep and rich, and I don't mind having Rolling Stone to keep guiding me back to the past, always there help me discover what once was.
1 comment:
I just started reading Steven Hyden's Twilight of the Gods, and boy, does this blog post seem like a weak ripoff of that book. Please believe me when I swear that I wrote this before I picked up that book. I'll show you library receipts if you need them.
Post a Comment