Thomas' adventures in Rock and Roll Land

Because I am not entirely averse to stories that may make me look a little silly as long as it is a good story, I will let you in on my ongoing attempts at broadening my musical horizons.

Now, for a great many people, broadening their musical horizons would mean listening to Mozart and Beethoven and classical music.  For me, however, for whom classical is already my favorite, it involves listening to rock music.

I don't want to make it seem as though I have lived in some sort of bubble where I never encountered it before, but I never really got "into" it, or felt any pressure to, because it didn't appeal to me all that much and my degree of indifference to popularity or fashionability as a motive (a two-edged sword, because it can either make people respect and look up to you as an independent or original thinker or dismiss you as a hopeless dweeb).  Also, my parents were not fans (or at least not by the time I was born) so it was not always "around" in the house.

Some time ago I decided that since I like Romantic-era music, and I like jazz, and blues, it would be unreasonable to maintain a prejudice against all rock music and that doing so was a sort of of posturing that I hate anyway.  Also, it is such an important influence on and expression of contemporary culture that it would be unreasonable to ignore it.  So after a while of trying to find out what the "best" rock was to form my opinions of, and realizing that building a collection would be expensive and might just result in too narrow a selection, I found some radio stations that promised the "best" and let them give me a selection.

Since hearing my experiences of listening to - rather than just hearing - rock for the first time might be amusing to people who consider it "normal" music much in the way I, a twenty-something American, was so terribly amused by Bill Bryson's book about coming back to America after twenty years of living in Britain, except that I can't be expected to be as funny as Bill Bryson.

So if you see posts about a song "everyone" knows that sound like it's being written by someone who's heard it for the first time, this is the context for that.

Comments

[Mike]

Thomas, I know how you feel. When I was growing up there was almost exclusively country music in the house. Every once in awhile now I'll be out with friends, comment on a new (to me) song that's playing on the radio or at a store, and they'll stare at me and say, "Yeah Mike, that is a good song. Everyone thought so when it came out in 1993."