Rhetoric:- The times, they are a'changin

I have many talents.

I know that sounds conceited, but it is true. I am aware of the fact that by some great stroke of fortune for me, the neurons of my brain are better at recognizing patterns and creating connections than some other people. This is not to say that I am better than anyone else, because there are talents of which I am truly deficient.

Musical ability is one of them.

I love music. I don't think there is a style of music that I won't listen to. Sure, there are certain artists that shit me to tears, but that is because of who they are, not the music itself. I find it quit funny that this is the case, because I didn't grow up in what one would call a "musical house". None of my family play musical instruments, there was no singing around the piano at Christmas. But I love music in all its forms, and I love listening to music in all the ways that you can. Whether its sitting in a dark room with a good set of headphones, or thrashing around in a mosh pit; sitting in a pub chilling out and listening to a band play; getting down and dirty on the dancefloor of a nightclub; having to have a shave put on a tie to head out to the Opera House, or screaming like a banshee amongst several thousand other banshees at a stadium concert. I love it all!

It's at this point that I mention that generic pop do not count as "music" for the purposes of this rant. It's a product, marketed to 13 year old girls to make record labels vast quantities of cash. This is not to say that all popular music has no intrinsic value. From my way of thinking, the difference is whether someone actually wanted to say something through music, or to pay their light bill. There is nothing wrong with writing shitty pop tunes to pay the bills; arguing that it is "music" is abhorrent.

Something that I often reflect upon is how I came to love such divergent styles of music, and their different vehicles (particularly live), in spite of the lack of a "musical family". If you will indulge me, I'd like to trace the roots of my love for music, hopefully coming to some sort of conclusion as to why I can on Friday night enjoy "La Boheme" and on Saturday night destroy several lower vertebrae moshing to "Rage Against The Machine".

The earliest exposure to music that I remember is to my brother's country music when he was going through that phase (if I had of known that he would take it all to heart and move to Hicksville and become a redneck, I might have tried to stop him when he was ten). I remember Slim Dusty, and John Williamson. And I remember that I didn't like it much.

I think I was about 7 when I got the first tape I ever asked for: "Serious Fun" by The Firm. I still have it. It's great. It's funny. It's pop shit. It wasn't until I was about 9 that I really started listening to music and being able to differentiate styles. Then, in the mid-80's I saw a movie that changed my musical life forever. You may well laugh, but thanks to Michael J. Fox, I was completely blown away by Chuck Berry's music. His rendition of "Johnny B. Goode" in "Back to the Future" was, on reflection, pretty shocking. But so was the music - that attacking guitar solo that breaks into the up tempo rock-n-roll classic threw my mind open and I went "ssshhhhhiiiittttt" (I am sure I knew that word at the time, sorry Mum). And I am guessing that it had the same effect on the kids who heard it the first time it was played in the 40's. I rifled through mum and dad's cassette collection for something that sounded the same and there it was, a compilation of hits from the 50's. And it was so good! I was a changed child.

For the next couple of years, rock-n-roll was my thing. Chuck Berry was to remain my favorite artist for many years to come, and even now, when I hear that familiar guitar solo, I am transported back to my youth.

As I continued to grow up, my tastes were influenced from other sources. I didn't get into the white-boy-with-guitar-rock that my brother loved (which is kind of amusing coming from Newcastle, cause that's pretty much all you got back then). The next watershed moment was when a good mate from primary school said "Here, listen to this!" Thumping bass, interesting scratching sounds, and two guys not so much singing, as talking. I had discovered RUN DMC. Thus begun my path down a different road from that of most of the guys I grew up with. They had their Guns and Roses, I had Ice-T. They had Metallica, I had Public Enemy. For many years, I emersed myself in rap, which when I think about it is quite funny, because it was very difficult to get rap music in Newcastle in the late 80's and early 90's. The fact that there was no "rap" section in the record store meant that you had to ask the store to order it in (and pay stupid amounts of money for it). But because there was no rap music on the radio, it was very difficult to hear about new artists. I remember trolling through the covers of rap tapes that I had already go to find the names of other artists so that I could go and find their music. There wasn't much of a rap scene in Australia - a couple of groups in Sydney and Melbourne, but again, it was very difficult to get a hold of their material.

At the same time, I discovered house music through some older friends. At this point in time, house music just didn't work for me; I think the reason was that I didn't have any use for it. House music was made for dancing, and I didn't have anywhere to go dancing. It did however lay the seeds for the style of dance music that was soon to overtake house, at least for a time; rave.

But back to my first love. Something strange happened in the early 90's."Black" music exploded. Hip hop was the new thing. Gone were Guns and Roses. Now everyone wanted MC Hammer, Tone Loc, Vanilla Ice and Young MC. This was 1991, and it was the first time that I realized that rap music was "black" music. I looked back, and realized that all the music that I had been listening to over the last 7 years was "black" music. And I had never realized. This is very much to the credit of my parents who never even blinked when I said that I wanted a Chuck Berry tape for my birthday. I am sure that for some other parents, this would have been the loss of their son.

For a time I was very happy that rap music was popular in Australia because it meant two things:

My happiness was soon to wear off however, as the other phenomenon of the mid-90's began to come to the fore: homies. They dressed in stupid clothes and pretended to be really tough. And they listened to rap music - "hip hop" as they were to call it. I for one did not want to be associated with this, and thankfully, I found a way out.

One of the albums that I have continuously gone back to hearing is "Hand on the Torch" by Us3. Most people would recognize the track "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" as a very big single from the mid-90's. But for me it was more. It was accessible for me, because it involved rap. But there was this other sound to it. This jazz sound. My appetite was whet.

I was lucky by this point to have been working for a number of years so I had a bit of cash saved up. I went down to the second-hand store and bought about 30 jazz records and went home to uncover the mysteries of this new music style I had discovered. I was stunned. The talent of these artists, the sounds they could make with instruments. They way that it moved you; played with your emotions. It was a revelation. By chance it happened that one of the local pubs had a weekly jazz session on Sunday afternoons. So, trying to look older than I was, I would head down to the pub and sneak into the beer garden to listen to the bands play. Sure, they weren't John Coltrane or Miles Davis, but they had something that I would never get from either of them - the intimacy of a live crowd. The interaction between audience and musician. The bilateral relationship that is established at a gig is something that is a very special bond, and some of my greatest memories over the last ten years have been attending live concerts and experiencing such a bond.

At the same time as my love for jazz was growing, I also started heading backwards. Not to rap, but back to the dance music scene. The rave was born, and in all its guises: happy hardcore, trance, goa, gabba. It was all there, to be had and held, to be loved, and to be legislated out of existence. For a brief moment, young people throughout the world understood how human beings could get along: peace, love, unity, respect. PLUR was the acronym for all nations to live by - unfortunately there isn't enough ecstasy on the face of the planet to make some people just get on.

As jazz and rave enchanted me, a musical revolution of sorts was taking place while I was completely oblivious. The "alternate" scene arrived, with angst by the bucketload. And I missed it completely. When everyone at school was crying because Kurt had shot himself, I was asking "who?". It wasn't until well after the Smashing Pumpkins were broken up that I discovered "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" and really got into Nirvana. And to think that for once I could have been cool!

Two major things happened to me in the closing years of the 90's. I turned 18, and I went to university. In some ways, turning 18 was truly a disappointment. Mainly for the fact that I could now (legally) get into the venues where the music that I wanted to listen to was played. Unfortunately, these venues, by and large, weren't playing the music that I wanted to hear. Newcastle, as I have previously stated, is the home of white-boy-with-guitars rock band in Australia. So looking for a venue playing happy hardcore was like banging ones head against a large brick wall looking for the soft part.

University was to prove a much more stimulating place. I am still wrestling in myself whether meeting a certain individual at uni was a good thing or a bad thing. But he did do one really great thing for me, and that was to introduce me to the world of broadcast radio. The students association of my university ran a radio station that broadcast throughout the campus and the town in which it was situated. As the saying goes: a star was born.

Ok, maybe that is exaggerating slightly, but having access to a vast collection of music, and an audience that had to listen (well, until they got up to the energy to turn the radio off). Over the next 5 years I was exposed to music from across the spectrum. The other thing I discovered was how the music industry works (see paragraph above regarding pop "music").

There was another pressure at university which diversified my music tastes: study. Yes, as much as some people will try to argue otherwise, I did in fact actually undertake some study while I was at university. And it's kinda difficult to concentrate on the ratio descideni of a child molestation case whilst listening to happy hardcore techno. It just doesn't work. So along came Chopin, Mozart, and what I like to refer to as "the monkie dudes" (as in the Gregorian chanting guys - this wasn't much of a stretch from Enigma though, just minus the beats). From there, it wasn't much of an extension to opera; you just can't type slowly to one of those soaring solos.

So where to from there? Something that I have been thoroughly enjoying over the last couple of years has been live music. I think this is a result of two factors: the fact that I now have a (small) amount of income with which I can pay to get into gigs, and the fact that I my body just won't take the nine-hours-on-the-dance-floor-non-stop-body-rock-water-bottle-in-the-back-pocket-avein-it-hardcore-stylee night out (yeah I know, skateboarding was a bad choice of adolescent outdoor activity).

Thankfully, Ireland has a great tradition of live music. In Dublin, there are some places that have live music every night of the week. I am looking forward to see where this plethora of choices takes me.

So where does this leave me? Is there a reason to explain why I have such a varied taste in music, when others around me argue for hours over whether "breaks" is better than "hard house"? To tell you the truth, after typing all this, I haven't come to any conclusions. Maybe its the fact that my taste in music has evolved organically and unimpeded, not having someone tell me that I couldn't listen to something in particular. Or maybe it's the fact that I am just the biggest fence sitter in the world, and I can never make up my mind whether to shit or get off the pot. Either way, I am glad that I have such a diverse taste, although it means that I always have too much music and not nearly enough time to listen to it all!

February 2003.

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