Now That We're Here, We May As Well Go Too Far
I’m 39 years old. Ten years from today. I’m in a home that’s mine and I’ve just finished dinner. Maybe with my family? Maybe not. Too soon to tell. It’s time to unwind and clean up. I put on a record I’ve heard a thousand times, but still crave every now and then. It’s from my youth. It’s comfort food. It’s Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. For you, I think it might be The Strokes’ Is This It, let’s say you were a couple years ahead of me in school. I might alter my memory to Turn On The Bright Lights around 2012 or so to make some girl think I’m as smart and full of mystery as I’d like to be. My point is the music of our youth has legs and stays with us until were nearing middle age, washing dishes and staring listlessly out the window. For my dad it was Air Supply, and when he really wants to let loose, the ever-present Eagles’ Greatest Hits. Thank god cooler shit came along.
I’m not going to sit here and act like the music critic that I’m not. I’m not going to waste your time dissecting some album or band you already have an opinion of, scripted to a tee and ready to whip out at a moment’s notice at parties. But something happened in the mid 2000’s: the guitar came back to popular music in a very real way.
I remember the NSYNC being piped down my ears as a young man in a car full of sisters on various family vacations. I won’t lie to you and say I don’t know the lyrics to the majority of NYSNC’s songs as a result of this travesty. At some point I found Led Zeppelin. I started taking the Beatles way too seriously. I found my own genre, with which I would break free from the shackles of the mighty pop overlords Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez. My point is I found my thing in rock music, but the majority of the records I loved were from antiquity. They were draped in the mystique of decades long since gone, lower gas prices, and black and white rock docs on VH1 classic at 2:00 am. Worlds collided when my older sister brought back Arctic Monkey’s first LP from the UK. When this kid that lived down the street that I didn’t really like (he had a guitar amp and I had motive) burned me a copies of the Stroke’s Room On Fire and King’s of Leon’s Aha Shake Heartbreak, I felt like I had finally found my people. I felt like now I didn’t have to stay after class to talk to the kind of creepy 58-year-old history teacher about how important and misunderstood the Who were to get my fill of geeking out about music. Obviously talking about music was that important to me, I was willing to risk my safety and reputation for god sakes. I had always loved rock music and I knew I could talk about it for hours with anyone who would listen, but there wasn’t a tangible, current reference for me to call my own. Until there really fucking was.
I understand this is a tired story brought to you by another middle-class white kid from the tough streets of suburbia. But its real to me dammit! I don’t think it was the same for contemporaries of my father who heard Hendrix and the Stones for the first time. That shit was a revelation. This was different. This was mystery come to life in real time, at the perfect time. I hadn’t wised up and found the beautiful lineage of music between that time and my teenage years that were the mid 2000’s. Later I’d go on to fill the gaps, when I was younger the 80’s just seemed too horrible and over saturated with chorus reverb to produced anything worth my time. I later learned from my mistakes (looking at you Johnny Marr).
Everyone looks at the soundtrack to their youth with reverence and pride, as if it was born of their own personal need and conscious. I’m getting to the point in my life where I get angry at teenagers in public, I’m starting to see a light at the end of the student loan debt tunnel of death, and sleep is not something I avoid like the fucking plague. My priorities in life are not solely comprised of “pizza” and “getting laid”, but let’s not get carried away with this whole maturity charade, those things are still important. And I’m not quite sure how a mortgage works, but I am regularly googling how to get involved in one.
I have eras of my life to look back on now. I can string together cause and effect without therapy. I can “remember when” for the first time. My favorite era so far is the one in which I heard In Rainbows for the first time and my heart exploded and I thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers were the greatest band on the planet. My opinions and emotional reactions were as unadulterated and as sincere as it could possibly get. Things might get more complicated as time moves along, but sincerity sounds like a good goal to me.
Next month I’m going to introduce you to Bryan Hammond, another member of the Black Rectangle Collective. I hope you’ll join me. Thanks for reading this month
As sincere as I can be in spite of myself,
Chase
p.s. If anyone ever wants to share their story or connect with what were putting out here at BRC, please feel free to reach out: chaserickerbrc@gmail.com
