I can't help it....
Towards the end of every semester, I create a "grading" playlist that usually includes the loudest, meanest, twisted, most guitar-crunchingist music I own. It's not just Metallica and Anthrax. It's not just System of a Down and Pantera. It's not just Sepulutra and Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine and Tool and Faith No More.
It's also Guns N' FUCKING Roses.
I find it absolutely necessary to listen to this kind of music in order to get through the mind-numbing and soul-crushingly bad essays and exams I end up having to grade. But then a song like "Estranged" comes on and I'm pulled back in time -- 15.5 years back -- to when I was a sad teenager listening to sad music. And of all the GnR songs I love, "Estranged" is the one that still blows me away.
I realize this makes me a huge, huge music loser. I realize I have no credibility. But, dammnit, I was young and impressionable. Where would any of us be without the music we still love even though it's not that cool? I realize Mike has left The Police behind. But he still has the Kinks (are they still cool?) and Talking Heads (they are still cool). Rob, I know you have all sorts of guilty pleasures from when you had a Gumby-cut. And Buddy, don't think I don't know about all your musical skeletons. Oh wait -- I don't.
Anyway. I was just sitting here grading and Axl Rose was singing in that whiny voice and all those lyrics that are so much better than Poison and Trixter and Skid Row were getting me though a decently written essay. I couldn't help but feel that strange yearning that very few albums from back in the day stir up. It's not always yearning -- it's often a strange reminder that I once was very depressed and detached and listened to certain songs repeatedly, programming them for moments like this, a decade and a half later, when I'm not depressed and only moderately detached.
But damn if Slash's solos don't still kick serious ass.
So, all melodrama aside, what are the songs that can still kick you in the gut because of the trauma or joy they might be associated with?
Comments
there's nothing wrong with guns n roses. i only really started liking them in the mid nineties. i couldn't stand them in the late eighties. everyone has a closet favorite or two. mine would be van halen. vicki's would be (ugh) kiley minogue. i let her slide with that one, only because i think kiley is hot.
Posted by: mike | January 16, 2008 12:23 PM
springsteen always gets me. "badlands" is the one song that turns me into a lonely, depressed, defiant 15-year-old every goddamn time i hear it. but i don't think of him as a closet favorite--i'm pretty out as far as he's concerned.
elvis costello still gets me. no one's lyrics are as vicious and biting as his.
again, not embarrassed by that though.
pink floyd--roger waters more specifically--and some of the old burnout bands are probably the ones i don't, uh, brag about. i loved floyd--and roger waters' "pros and cons of hitchhiking" is probably in my top 5 albums of all time. rush was pretty great in high school. i still like tom petty.
but the one you'll all rip on me for is the grateful dead. sorry, but they're still sentimental favorites from a misspent youth.
Posted by: phaedra | January 18, 2008 9:43 PM