Proustian Ratt: Wishing I could hear things with "a child's ears" again

I'm not going to articulate this very well, but the GnR thread made me think about this feeling. This post in particular:

Kiss fans who were 12 somewhere 1975-1980
vs
GnR fans who were 12 somewhere 1987-1991

― Siegbran, Sunday, August 20, 2023 11:32 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's something to that...for me the feeling would go back even farther, like when I was 6, 7, 8...I was pretty obsessed w/music from an early age which came in the form of either metal stuff from older brothers, or 80s pop on the radio (didn't have access to MTV but there was Night Flight and Friday Night Videos)

I had such a good time (natch) reading Nothing But a Good Time (the oral history of hair metal) and I went to Spotify and listened along to whatever band/albums they were talking about. And it was sad in a way, I had fun with it but I couldn't access that feeling, that overwhelming feeling I had when I was a child, that this was the most exciting music, that these guys were superhuman sex, drugs, rock n' roll, and Satan outlaws living the coolest lives in big cities I would never go to.

Part of this was the Satanic panic of the 80s too, like I remember once listening to the classic rock station from Mankato in my room late one weekend and they played "Heaven and Hell" by Black Sabbath (which I had never heard but hear of and that they were Ozzy's old band and they worshipped the devil), and I literally was spooked, I had goosebump and this real feeling of danger with it. Like it had some power that seemed real not just a bunch of pothead dudes who made up some riffs.

It's a little bit like the county fair when I was little, it seemed like such a dangerous place at night, all the burnouts and their girlfriends walking around, all the carnies running games where you could win roach clips with feathers attached to them with little leather straps or coke mirrors with Ozzy or Shout at the Devil on them (we didn't even know what they really were for)

but of course now it would look cheap and dumb...but it was a real feeling then. Like when you were young enough not to "see the wires" so to speak.

But I don't think you can ever get back to that feeling, you know too much now.

Awesome post UMS.

I don't know if this is quite the same, but when I was 8 or 9 I lived for The Monkees. I hadn't really listened to radio much if at all, but seeing them on TV every week I thought that rock bands all lived together in a big house and had zany adventures together.

My friends and I would run around the yard being spies or whatever, and then take a break to get up on the porch and "perform" a song. And I had no clue that the entire Monkees concept was entirely The Beatles remade for TV and masterminded by a producer like Don Kirshner.

"but seeing them on TV every week I thought that rock bands all lived together in a big house and had zany adventures together."

yeah that's exactly it! different vibe/era but that belief that it's really real

it's kind of crazy how very precise some of my memories of that era are. at a middle school dancing, slow dancing with my crush to Is This Love by Whitesnake being a really specific one. Whitesnake sounded like superheros to a 12 year old, it's true. i was probably thinking, wow this must be what life is like IN THE CITY. imagining driving around in a sleek luxury car listening to Still of the Night. I'm sure my sugar-addled mind was just this unholy stew of imagination of what life was like as a grown man: Sonny Crockett, hair metal, the Saturday Night Live opening credits where they're all hanging out in the bar, Michelob beer, etc.

When I was in junior high I remember seeing a photo of a band — Zodiac Mindwarp, I think, but could just as easily have been Motörhead — and thinking, "they look like they would smell." And that was cool, to young me, the idea that a rock band could be offensive just by existing, without playing a note of music.

I think I've mentioned this before, but Alphaville's Forever Young album would scare the hell out of me as a kid... it seemed dark and sinister, full of grown-up themes about sexual obsession, manipulation, etc. (especially Fallen Angel).

When I play it now, it sounds like corny, turgid, bleepy synth-pop... I almost can't believe it's the same album! I can still hear a entirely different "sound" in my head (instrumentation, vocals, everything), when I cast my "mind's ear" back to sitting in front of the stereo and reading the lyric sheet as the record played.

(maybe it was just cuz they're German...?)

This is Zodiac Mindwarp. I mean, look at these guys. They look cheesy as fuck to me now, but as a 14-year-old, hell yes.

https://editorial01.shutterstock.com/preview-440/1274017h/edfa3df6/Shutterstock_1274017h.jpg

haha I think remember seeing a video of theirs and not knowing what to make of it

I totally was the same omar, wrt to that kind of imagery

That looks like the same guy in five different outfits

I had such a good time (natch) reading Nothing But a Good Time (the oral history of hair metal) and I went to Spotify and listened along to whatever band/albums they were talking about. And it was sad in a way, I had fun with it but I couldn't access that feeling, that overwhelming feeling I had when I was a child, that this was the most exciting music, that these guys were superhuman sex, drugs, rock n' roll, and Satan outlaws living the coolest lives in big cities I would never go to.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

One of my earliest (first?) experiences with music obsessions was in 5th grade when a 6th grader got really into The Beatles and organized me and two other kids into a sort of Beatles cover band for a couple of weeks, where we would stand on playground equipment and sing (mostly early) Beatles songs (a cappella) to kids gathered around us. The older kid was John, I was Paul, and for a couple of weeks we got to experience a really minute version of Beatlemania, or at least that is the way it felt standing above the other kids and them watching us "perform." I remember peppering my parents (two Beatles fans) for all sorts of information about the band. "Did you know Paul died?"

A contributing factor to the above situation was the school was incredibly small (like maybe 40 kids K-6) and an extension of our evangelical church, so we were somewhat sheltered from the then current popular music. But another factor is what you are talking about: kids have a certain kind of unselfconscious imagination that the process of growing up strips away. Armor goes on and it is very hard to take off as an adult.

Sorry, I may have diverged slightly from the "scary" theme of the original post, but still think there is a similar process having to do with kids' imagination.

Booming post, ums. I so vividly remember, at age 11, opening KISS Alive/ for the first time and putting it on my yellow plastic GE record player. It sounded like signals from another world, one far more dangerous, sweaty and interesting than my own. I had never been to a concert, didn't have any firm grasp on what they were saying, let alone the content (no 11-year-old is ready for "Nothin' to Lose"), but it was unbelievably exciting. More than 45 years on, I would love to recapture that feeling. The closest I've come, apart from raising kids and watching them have similar experiences, was meeting Gene Simmons several years ago. I had a sense of childlike wonder, even though I could see very clearly that this was an aging, weird dude. I told him Alive was the first album I'd ever bought, and he responded, "Oh, I'm sorry" LOL

I wish I could taste a Michelob the way it tasted when I was 17

xp That's not a very Gene-like answer, tbh (I would have expected something like, "Hope you went back and bought the other three.")

He was surprisingly funny. OTOH, he wouldn't shake anyone's hand.

Sorry, I may have diverged slightly from the "scary" theme of the original post, but still think there is a similar process having to do with kids' imagination.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Tuesday, August 22, 2023 3:52 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no i think you're right, it manifests in all kinds of ways, but definitely something in terms of the brain that you can't feel again as an adult

xpost - i definitely was aware of kiss's image but the first real music i remember was lick it up era so i just saw them as you said some older weird guys so the makeup era never really had a hold on me

In the late 70s Kiss seemed more like superheroes/cartoons than musicians to me, because I probably never heard their music, but saw them in ads in the back of comic books and such. I associate them with the giant Shogun Warrior robot toys from that time.

This is probably a truism, but without the makeup, KISS is just another shitty bar band.

I spend quite a bit of time trying to evoke or recapture this kind of child’s eye/ear perspective on music.

Recently I have been going through a phase of listening to key albums on a Walkman, which both has a unique sound signature and puts me back into a particular intimate space with music.

I realised a while ago that the setup of my home stereo & daybed is pretty much exactly the same as my bedroom in my parents house. Unintentional but I am happy about it.

DJ Cosmo Murphy runs a communal listening event called Classic Album Sundays, she said she wanted to evoke the intensity of the relationship with music she had as a teenager in her bedroom at home.

And all this shit is nostalgia for sure but I tell myself it is redeemable - because in trying to conjure up something of that powerful fascination with music, I am using it to fuel new creative activities in the present day - making my own music, films etc.

Not to get all Billy Corgan but I do consider it going back to the source - because that “prelapsarian” view of music was seething with mystery and possibility.

for me, music was weird. my dad had a 4,000 record collection, my mother loved music, and I enjoyed it at first, but as a kid, I didn't know what I liked.

like all parents do, my dad tried to get me into his favorites, so the first cassette I had as an elementary schooler wasn't Raffi, it was fuckin' Paul McCartney "All the Best", lolz. my favorite band as a kid was Chicago when everybody else was listening to New Kids on the Block and Technotronic. I was also a trend hopper, was into MC Hammer, really the music I liked the most was soul/Motown, and I would borrow my dad's cds to listen to that. and lots of soundtracks.

when I was a young kid I noticed I didn't like middle of the road 'happy' sounding music, like I was a big fan of minor chords, progressions with a little more intensity and melancholy. I did like over the top cheesy pop as well (as I still do).

anywho, by the time I got to middle school I tried to find out what music *I* liked most, because all anybody wanted to do was impose their tastes on me. I began listening to local radio and getting into Euro-dance poppy stuff. my friend (actually more or less just an asshole and a bully) David tried to get me into alternative rock, and I liked a bit of it, but it wasn't my thing.

so anyway, and this is going to sound completely hokey, but I was at a teen club dance night and Metallica came on (it was "Enter Sandman", but c'mon, I was a teen), and something different leapt out at me about that loud, sinister guitar and those barked vocals. I was obsessed for weeks with how that made me feel, stayed up late, and listened to Metallica - "One", and sat there shellshocked at what I just heard.

HI MOM THIS IS THE MUSIC I'VE DECIDED I LIKE NOW. OH, I CAN'T LISTEN TO IT, THANKS?

so from that date it took me like 2-3 years to even acquire a Metallica album, let alone multiple. and some I acquired through deceit and sneakery. everything about the speed, the gallop patterns, the barking, the harmonized solos, like I wanted to dive headfirst into this genre but lol 90s.

(some of this I know I've posted elsewhere but hey why not repeat myself I'm old).

anyway, I eventually heard Pantera, and Cannibal Corpse, and Crowbar, and other heavier stuff, and it sounded positively monstrous. Like I'd never heard anything so abrasive and intense. but I had no money and my mother wouldn't use her money to buy me that shit so I just tried to listen to it where I could, and it felt like this secret gift. always in unlikely places. like Ace Ventura and watching the Cannibal Corpse scene, or cranking the tv up when that one Donkey Kong Country commercial with the heavy riffing came on. Picking up innocuous soundtracks that had metal tracks on them, like Mortal Kombat.

calling 1-800-Music-Now through my computer and listening to the samples play through the computer speakers, hearing like 25 second snippets of Slayer, Death, etc. it was torture to not be able to fully listen to my new favorite genre, the first one nobody had forced on me, the first one I discovered MYSELF.

well, problem solved itself in that I got confirmation money (lol) which allowed me to surreptitiously acquire Death's Individual Thought Patterns, Pantera's Great Southern Trendkill, Crowbar's Time Heals Nothing. Those sounds started to begin feeling less exciting now that they were growing more familiar, but there was a whole chunk of the genre I hadn't even heard yet.

well, hey, I got a job at Steak 'n Shake, and then I finally got into Slayer, and that was a transformative moment - between that and my financial aid at school, I basically ruined my financial future acquiring something like 300 extreme metal albums or so in a year and a half and doing nothing but staying in my room listening to them. as you can imagine, as above, once everything felt familiar, it no longer brought the initial infatuation to my ears, but those first few listens to some of the seminal albums in the genre was like magic.

I had pretty much no friends because I was depressed and (briefly) suicidal in that timeframe but also because all I wanted to do was blast that music all day for the positive feeling it got me.

fast forward 23 years or so and now I'm the old guy who complains that nobody respects Angel Witch anymore and some days just feels burnt out on the scene and its ridiculousness.

which is why I also, simultaneously, discovered hip hop around the same time frame, but that'll be for another post.

sorry for being that guy but weed can def help you recapture that feeling

like if I'm on a strong edible and listen to something I was big into when I was 13 a bunch of old locations will pop into my head. for example I had a rotation of CDs I used to listen to on my paper route and when I do this I can actually see the backyards and patterns of the various doors in my head. which are not images I could exactly conjure offhand.

That's fascinating. I'm not a big weed user, but I've never had that experience while high.

unfortunately my extensive research has not been successful, but everyone is different

It is quite Proustian.

weed can def help you recapture that feeling

After years of abstention I've done this again a bit recently, but instead of getting mellow and being amazed by everything I mostly got paranoid and overthinking, and hypercritical of the music I was listening to. Maybe I'm just too old...

I wish I could taste a Michelob the way it tasted when I was 17

^^^ this.

I don't think there is any music I listened to as a kid that I don't listen to now. Maybe not as much, but very little that I just outright moved on from. If anything? Of course, there is plenty I dismissed as a kid that I now love. I mean, I love music, right? Reading all these lists today has been a joy, just so much love for music.

when I was a kid, around 4 or 5, my understanding of KISS was that Gene was an irl demon that drank actual blood & possibly ate children & i was SO scared of him (correct response but for the wrong reasons lol) and i thought of the rest of the band not as people but maybe superheroes or cartoon people?
but i was less scared of them than Gene
the rest of the band were more just like cool warriors & space aliens & a cat or whatever, they didn’t signify as much terror as he did but he spat blood so that was kind of his intentional vibe

i told this stoey elsewhere i think but my older neighbors had a KISS makeup set & I went over SO excited for them to paint my face

cut to me running home crying because they did my face like the cat drummer (kriss) & i wanted to be the alien guitar player (ace)

my neighbors (both girls) couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want the cat makeup! that was the only makeup knew how to do!

i hated the cat drummer i thought he looked silly. ace was the best because he was SILVER duh

but that uh proustian fear-thrill feeling is still really real to me when i think about first seeing/hearing them. the visual was ~everything~

i think too, being able to hold onto an album as a kid made images much more immersive, like KISS or whoever

like i was terrified of Alice Cooper albums and Iron Maiden albums because they were so big, as big as my head glaring out at me from 4ft shelves — the visual assault was a big part of the thrill of this music at least for me in the 70’s & early 80’s

and the static tinniness of the sounds of them through crappy tv or transistor radios … that added a layer of kinetic electricity for me for sure made it seem dangerous too

I think this kind of thinking can go into your teen years and even early 20s

one band my friends and I were obsessed with was Modest Mouse. this was pre-"Float On" so they weren't exactly a household name yet but I definitely remember late night hangouts where we'd listen to the 2 Mouse CDs one of my buddies had over and over again. I think it had a lot to do with our perception of Isaac Brock, who was a drunken loudmouth and probably someone who'd fucked around a lot with drugs but this gave him sort of a seer quality, like he could cut through the bullshit and see things for what they actually were. maybe the same appeal people see in Mark E. Smith or like, the characters from Trainspotting

I guess I kinda get why we idolized that, when you're a teenager you're not thinking about jobs or starting a family you just want to meet people and have certain experiences and doing it all with a cynical eye felt kinda cool. now I think he was mostly just an asshole whose substance abuse led him to say some weird and interesting things.

Great thread.

I was slightly older when this happened, about 13/14. I had no real access to music beyond Smash Hits and what was on the radio. My folks liked music but didn't - and don't - have that obsessional relationship with it. I would record the top 40 and listen over and over; two tracks I can recall almost in toto, including the space in which I listened: Cherish by Kool & the Gang and You Win Again by the Bee Gees.

Anyway, my awakening was 'Infinite Dreams' by Iron Maiden and just this sense of what *world* is this describing, and where is it? Who did this voice belong to and what had he seen? I was up in the local Woolworth's that week; I bought the cassette single of 'Infinite Dreams' and the two-cassette version of *Live After Death* and that was that, really.

I don't remember fear with it, more just a thrill and a sense of arriving. The fear must have come later that year when I started by Record Collector and suddenly there was this *other* other world, peopled by Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle, something magick, Hadean and chthonic that I felt I'd have to literally *dig* to discover.

I think the crucial thing was the inaccessibility of it - literally having no way to hear this stuff. Bands like these grew in my mind; I'd have proper De Quincey opium visions of what they sounded like, what they got up to. It was transgression with no real sense of where the boundaries lay. Not to say that they sounded rubbish or disappointing when I did hear them but they never sounded quite 'out' enough.

I think the crucial thing was the inaccessibility of it - literally having no way to hear this stuff. Bands like these grew in my mind; I'd have proper De Quincey opium visions of what they sounded like, what they got up to. It was transgression with no real sense of where the boundaries lay. Not to say that they sounded rubbish or disappointing when I did hear them but they never sounded quite 'out' enough.

― (picnic, lightning) very very frightening (Chinaski), Wednesday, August 23, 2023 4:38 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is so otm and such a huge component in how I understand music

When I was 13/14 I bought the first Danzig tape and I was legitimately worried that I was purchasing something "evil" (I was but not in the way I was thinking)

W/r/t accessing that feeling, I agree I think that as you age it becomes harder and harder to connect or even understand why certain music had such a powerful effect on you, but one thing I've noticed (and obv ymmv) is that in order to capture that sense I can't be looking for it or even excepting I kind of have to catch it out of my periphery, which to tie it back to Proust is what's happening with the tea and the madeleine is sneaking up on him, he's not expecting it to happen and he's shocked by it

Which ties back to childhood - you have fewer reference points, and everything is new, so you are frequently surprised and in discovery mode. It's hard to replicate that as an adult because you have so much more experience and can tie new things into your existing framework.

Husker Du’s New Day Rising was practically life changing in how much I related to that sound when I was in high school…many years later it sounds like some well-crafted pop songs but just your regular old verse-chorus-verse music. I can still enjoy it but in the same way I enjoy hearing the 90s alterna-radio hits that were inescapable when I was growing up at that time.

I still get that feeling of the true power of music every now and then, but more like a few times a decade now and it involves that neverending quest that feels less and less worth it as time goes on.

Should probably said requires rather than involves above

I just listened to a podcast where a psychology professor was explaining how children's minds are wired to "explore", and adult minds are wired to "exploit" (based on the learnings from the earlier explorations).

This seems to map pretty roughly to my development of a specific taste in music, until about age 25, then spending the following decades searching for the best examples of those preferred styles.

I'm unlikely to imprint on trap or hyperpop or opera at this point.

(those is why I love the end of year tracks poll, btw -- it's my one shot to actually connect with something outside my normal zone)