Your Dramatic Turn of Events

when i was 13 and in high school (this is the mid seventies) i found the music that was made for me. made for white teenage boys. easy to make the call, take a judgement. i bought deep purple's machine head.

two years later (maybe october 76?) my mum bought me my first issue of NME.

punk man.

I didn't think of seachange. I was expecting to get 100 results of Beck's album if I did that.

good q btw aja ;)

the next major change for me (and i've told these before i know zzzz):

i'm in the backseat of a car with some guys i don't really know well. they're young socialists at 17. left school the year before. we're going to a party. we've parked beside an oval in ther middle of suburbia. the bong is being passed.

i'm fcked off me skull. they put on Y by the pop group. i am in dub space for the very first time.

Re-posted from an older thread:

I remember seeing the video for "Eighties" by Killing Joke on some random cable channel (not MTV) at a friend's place on Cornelia Street right off 6th Avenue in the summer of 1984, becoming haplessly gobsmacked at its simple, malevolent brilliance and racing across the street to Record Runner (little subterrenean record shop, now called Subterrenean Records, I believe....meanwhile, there is a more recent shop called Record Runner a block to the west) to buy the 12". Also remember wearing a Motley Crue t-shirt at the time (black with handcuffs in the eyesockets of a skull) and feeling instantly ashamed of it.

Because I was 10 that never really went anywhere, So My tastes changed when I was 13 and was introduced to Modest Mouse, Built to Spill and what have you. It just went on from there, ntill I was 15 and decided to start listening to electronic music one day, "one day" being litteral here.

Still, I think the biggest influence was really getting into (around age 15) PJ Harvey Rid of Me and NIN Downward Spiral. Did some serious realigning of my perceptions, to find my way around those records & figure out how to hear more than just screeching atonal noise in them, which is pretty much what I started out hearing. Before then I'd been accustomed to listening to top 40 pop and alt-rock, but it was all really accessible and catchy. I guess that stuff didn't fit too well with my angry teenage gloom-and-doom mindset. I also recall a particular day spent with headphones, a cassette of Black Flag's Damaged, and my walkman cranked as loud as it could possibly go.

A couple years later, Helium The Dirt of Luck - a friend at college radio, cool, cool DC scenester, gave me this to review so I felt obligated to pay attention, and after that I could appreciate more difficult music. Still one of my favorite records. Maybe it's not so difficult to like, but at the time it was for me - and afterward, I was happily listening to everything from early PiL to the Fall and fighting to snap up the new releases on Amphetamine Reptile and Drag City before the other DJs got a hold of them.