Mix Tape #1
May 15th, 2008After spending the last few days listening to way more Mariah Carey than is ironically acceptable, I starting thinking about my incredibly shitty taste in music. I decided I should start a series about the mix tapes that helped keep me from being a total idiot about music. This is the first one.
As a kid I was discouraged from listening to music that my artsy parents didn’t like, which was most popular music. The forbidden music is always the sweetest, so I eventually developed a secret nightly ritual of listening to the Top 5 at 10 on Q94. I’d drag my clock radio under the covers and write down the list of songs the 5 most popular songs in my trashy southern town every night. Then I’d run to my parents’ wall-mounted rotary phone and try desperately (and always in vain) to be the 5th caller, clutching my little list of songs. It is really fucking hard to try to dial fast on a wall-mounted rotary phone, let alone redial, but I was too dumb to give up.
All this hammered into me a love of the crappiest dreck that ever plays on a radio. Paula Abdul, Wilson Phillips, Rick Astley - I loved it (and still do.) I didn’t know no better! I listened to shit almost exclusively until High School! That’s when I got a crush on an older boy and realized I had no idea what he was talking about most of the time.
Jared Kappel had big eyes and wore stripey shirts and plastic toys in his disgusting ratty hair - all of which I found charming. He also played classical guitar and listened to all this music I had never heard of. In a burst of bravery I bought him a blank tape and asked him to make me a mix. He returned it to me a few days later with the blueprint for my musical taste for the next few years - Primus, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Ministry, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Dinosaur Jr., and Nine Inch Nails. In hindsight, I know that many of those bands would soon become unavoidable, but at the time they were just breaking on college stations.
I snapped that mix into my stereo and heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time. For a music-(albeit terrible music) obsessed 14-year-old, that was like sex. Dirty sex. And “Jeremy”? What the fuck was this song about?! Whatever - there is a dude singing about biting breasts, not walking the dinosaur, so it was pretty goddamn exciting. I don’t remember which Nine Inch Nails song was on it, but they’re pretty much all aural pornography.
At the time I thought I fell in love with Jared instantly. A few months later when he slept with a friend of mine at a party I threw, I decided maybe it was just the music. Either way, I listened to that tape so much it got all stretched out. The music slowed down and the songs all slipped down a few keys. Long after Jared was gone, I loved all those bands.
I feel bad that kids now don’t have grindy fuckable music to get them through adolescence. Chromeo and Rhianna are great but neither of them make you want to damage someone sexually. And isn’t that what being a teen is about?
