musicology 101 - dazed and confused. i have a very narrow range of music i enjoy. i'm not a music snob by any means, i'm just selective about what i listen to. not based on quality, but usually, genre. i pretty much only listen to hip hop and um, nostalgia stuff. for reasons having to do with fob boats and english as a second language, i missed out on most of the i love the 80s. which is, i'm thinking, not an entirely bad thing since i'm not bogged down by a whole extra decade's worth of music to reminisce over. heck, i think i missed most of the early 90s too. so really, we're looking at maybe only the last ten year's worth of music that i genuinely have an appreciation for.



the first songs i can remember really digging were the beach boy's "kocomo" and "toy soldiers" by martika. man those were good songs. i have no idea what i did for music in the periods between middle school and high school. i must have been a very out of it deaf sheep. i gave my mom a judy garland tape once for her birthday. i ended up listening to the damn thing about a thousand times more than she did. between being judy garland's biggest fan and having an intimate working knowledge of the ad&d handbook, i was terribly cool. why didn't anyone else agree?



whenever "10,000 maniacs unplugged" and yanni first hit the scene is when i started to buy my own music. i also had pearl jam's "ten." and i'm sure dr dre's "the chronic" was stuck in there somewhere, teaching me new words and phrases. i never quite figured out what "you never know she could be earnin her man and learnin her man -- and at the same time burnin her man" meant until waaaay later. that snoop, always saying the most confusing things. so, that was probably the extent of my muscial collection until i was of legal smoking age. dr dre, warren g, yanni, the multitude of maniacs, pearl jam, eric clapton and judy garland. i acquired a love for jewel, alanis morrissette and oasis somewhere in there, senior year of high school. for a brief moment in 96, i was in lockstep with current musical tastes. "who will save your soul" was my jam. i was finally listening to what my peers were listening to.



oh nope, two steps forward, one step back. freshman year, the most popular cds in my rotation were still jewel, alanis and another album whose name i'm unwilling to divulge. i didn't even properly hop onto the puff daddy band wagon when the bling revolution came. i was still too busy trying to follow in the hot footsteps of the original lyrical gangsta. to my credit, i never got onto the electric slide train. that electric slide shit was gay and required too much coordination. also, nobody told me to c'mon n ride the (party) train either. clearly i was left for dead at the station.