I climbed up to the shelf above the closet in my sewing room today to get some crap down from “the archives” (or rather the boxes of accumulated crap that represents the criminal evidence of my youth). I needed my old cassette tape collection for reasons.
Okay, by reasons, I mean that I felt like listening to poor quality recordings of shitty rock bands that engendered in me the first fizzings of adolescent hormonal nuttiness and a burning need to curl, fry, spray, and tease my hair into a tormented thatch which could easily have housed a moderate flock of guinea fowl. Don’t be fooled by this outer crust of “cool” bands ranked across the top of the box. Just below the surface lurks all of the Mötley Crüe, Poison, and AC/DC required to seriously dent a young girl’s understanding of romance, sex, and the place of leather bodices in fashion.
For my birthday this past year, my parents gave me this wonderful all-in-one stereo affair that contains a radio, record player, CD player, cassette player, and a jack for USB music devices. It’s a delightful little thing, about the size of a small microwave oven, and has been in regular use since Joseph was born. I regularly put on some old doo-whop music or Big Band and two-step the little chap around the front room. He seems to find it soothing. But today, I thought that it would be amusing to dig into the archives.
If you were to make a guess as to my schoolgirl appearance based on the contents of this box of cassettes, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I’d worn a whole lot of black mascara, skintight acid wash jeans, band tee-shirts, and my boyfriend’s motorcycle jacket. There’s an awful lot of cheesy, sexual-innuendo-laden buttrock in that box, is what I’m saying. I never was that cool, though. And I certainly lacked the levels of commitment necessary to transform myself into a badass rocker chick. I was vaguely aware that deep down, my musical tastes were substandard, even by early 1990s benchmarks, and that when pressed I’d be unable to stand up to the usual type of record-store-clerk musical obscurity pissing match. So, I didn’t wear my musical heart on my sleeve and looked like a generically dorky Midwestern schoolgirl.
All the same, the music that spoke to me mostly talked dirty:
I’ve lived a life largely unfettered by good taste and now that I’m well into my 30s, I am thoroughly unabashed about enjoying the dumb crap I enjoy. Buttrock, JPop, Sousa marches, noise, basically whatever foolishness crosses my ears and and sparks a little flurry in my depraved hippocampus. A lot of the music I love best certainly pre-dates the heyday of my own youth; hell, some of it outright pre-dates me. The bulk of Led Zeppelin’s back catalogue was wailed out well before 1977. AC/DC was well on their way to rock-n-roll world domination by the time I got a look-in. I just plain love big, noisy, simple rock. Slade, Nazareth, Black Sabbath, pretty much anything that caused parents distress in the 1970s has been causing me great joy since ever I was aware that I liked certain types of music better than others.
All this should be considered a guilty pleasure, I suppose, but I simply cannot muster up a whit of guilt over my sketchy but enthusiastic enjoyment of naff old guitar-driven party music. Soz, not sorry.