“As you sleep with electric guitars / Range rovin’ with the cinema stars” - Elevate Me Later (Ell Ess Two)
Irvine is a planned community. It is a city owned by the Irvine Company and takes great pride in being considered the “Safest City in America”. It’s located in sunny Southern California and borders Newport Beach in Orange County, widely recognized as one of the richest counties in America. For some reason, they decided to stick a public university there and didn’t build a “college town” around it (if I’m not mistaken, the college was one of the first things built there). I went to said college and stuck around for about a decade. At first I enjoyed being there because things were so convenient. There was almost literally a Target on every corner (or at least off of each major street), which was a drastic change from living in North County San Diego, which is still somewhat still under development.
Unfortunately, we missed out on the college town atmosphere and we didn’t have a football team. The only thing that my roommate Phil and I could really find redeeming about the place (other than it being Will Ferrel’s original stomping grounds) was realizing that Pavement shot one of their music videos not only in the city of Irvine, but at the University shopping center across the street. Sure it is kind of an irrelevant detail in the grand scheme of life, but we took any victory that could. Besides, Pavement, and perhaps the Replacements are the only bands that I can confidently say, shaped my personality as we know it.
My friends, especially Phil, always wondered why I stuck around for so long. I really don’t have an answer. At first, I think I stuck around because I really liked my church, then it was because I still had some close friends around from college, and then eventually I guess I stuck around out of convenience. I’d be foolish to say that Irvine hasn’t shaped me in some way or another but I can’t say how at this point. Some people probably assume that it’s shaped my appetite for fashion, but that was actually caused by my trip to New York a couple of years back. I do feel compelled to at least look decent when I go to the malls here, but that also might be because I’m 28 and single.
“So drunk in the August sun and you’re the kind of girl I like because you’re empty and I’m empty” – Gold Soundz
I’ve always assumed that the longer you date someone, the bigger the fallout becomes when you break up. Sadly, the girl that did the most damage to me… I can’t even say that we actually dated. There was some stringing along, some mixed messages, some feelings shared including the dreaded “I like you but…” In hindsight, I should’ve bolted instead of sticking around for the drama, so I will be fair and assume my share of the blame. She was a couple of years older, so maybe I thought she would be above these shenanigans (naive move on my end). It was a situation that ugly. People got involved (no retraining orders or violence, just a lot of politics, I guess), and right when I thought things were going to calm down, she told me she had started dating someone else with one minute left to go on my lunch break, which led to a pretty ugly breakdown at work. For some reason she kept telling me that she wanted to be friends and I believed her. Then on my birthday, she apparently had forgotten that she “had a date” and that she couldn’t tell me personally, so she sent me the message through our unassuming mutual friend, who I basically yelled at. It was the beginning of the end for me, both at that job and to be honestly, at church as well. It was the first time in my life where I understood what “needing a change of scenery” really meant.
” Was a distant voice/ Made me make a choice/ That I had to get the fuck out of this town” – Box Elder
One day I had left my laptop at my friend’s apartment and I needed it to do some work. I called him but he wasn’t home but he told to swing by and pick it up because his roommate was home so I shouldn’t have a problem. So I knocked on the door and after waiting a few seconds, I turned the knob and walked in and grabbed my laptop from the living room. As I turned to leave, I heard a gun cock back and then saw it pointed at me. I guess my friend didn’t tell his roommate I was on my way over to get the laptop, so I explained to him why I was there and calmly told him “you can put your gun away”. He disarmed the gun, stopped pointing it at me and gave me some sort of explanation about how he was training to be a cop and some people in the complex knew about it and he was paranoid about them or something that didn’t exactly make any sense. (I don’t think he passed his psychological exam – true story) While he didn’t actually fire the gun at me, it was an experience that has definitely stuck with me. I never felt like I was in any inherent danger, but my friend’s apartment in the “safest city in America” was the last place that I ever imagined having a civilian pull a gun on me. While I’m pretty sure this happened before the fiasco with the girl, perhaps I should’ve taken this moment as a realization that I didn’t belong here. It was a moment that didn’t make sense on so many different levels, and usually when this happens in a dream, I wake up because I know I’m in a dream. It was a moment where I should’ve realized that me being in Irvine didn’t make sense, and that I just needed to “get the fuck out of this town”.
Some bands/artists are really intimidating to get into. Sometimes it’s because of their extensive back catalog (like Bob Dylan), others is because of the amount of musical ground they cover (Bowie), and perhaps because an artist has put out some sketchy albums (The Kinks, Brian Wilson). These are artists that usually can’t be confined to a 1 Disc best of, and who wants to buy a best of collection anyways? Personally, it makes me feel really lame, and it’s usually the record label’s idea of what “the hits” are so it’s usually less than satisfying. (Side note: I would think that iTunes and Amazon would make best ofs obsolete by now, but with these NOW compilations still selling millions of albums, most of America does not agree with me.)
The one band that I had a lot trouble getting into is Sigur Ros. They don’t have the most extensive catalog and they’re not genre jumpers, they’re just Icelandic. I’m not racist towards people of Icelandic descent or their music (still loving Bjork). Sigur Ros doesn’t sing in English ( or it’s very rare) and only one of their song titles are in English, which makes it extremely hard to identify their songs. They actually sing in hopelandic, which is basically a tweaked version of icelandic, aka, they sing in a language that is basically made up. I had tickets for their show and I wanted to be familiar with what they were going to play beforehand, like I would for any concert. It’s not that I wanted to know the set list verbatim, but I wanted to make sure I knew where one song ended and another song started. I think with a band like Sigur Ros, with their 10 minute opuses, it’s an extremely smart move.
I perused the band’s message board and found some of their setlists for this tour. Because I am not privvy to the Icelandic/Hopelandic language, I could not tell off the top of my head if I had a good majority of these songs in my musical library so deducing what songs I needed to buy from iTunes became a difficult chore: copy song title from message board, paste song title into my iTunes library to see if I already had it, if not, copy song title to iTunes store to buy song. Usually this process is much more basic. It’s looking at the song titles and knowing if I had them or not, there wouldn’t be a need to copy, paste, or even look in my library. Luckily for me, the songs I didn’t have all came from one album, saving me money, but not really saving me any time.
It’s not that I had never heard of the band before. I just usually don’t pay attention to their track names when I listen to their stuff, but I know that after I go to a show, I like to know exactly what was played. This probably makes me sound like a very casual fan. I know this band is so amazing live that they’ve made my sister cry (or possibly crygasm), and actually at the show, the girl standing next to me fainted. I had liked what I’ve heard from them, I just hadn’t learned their language and all their song titles (long song titles don’t stick in my brain very long, I’m looking at you Sufjan Stevens). I’m sorry if I don’t remember Viðrar Vel Til Loftárása off the top of my head or that I have no idea what that means. To look like less of a poseur, I oraganized a playlist on my iPhone with the songs they’d been playing throughout the tour and got really familiar with them. I might even be able to tell you now what song is playing in a really butchered way, like “ooh they’re playing Sagglepuss” (Sæglópur).
I ended up really enjoying the show and I was able to successfully differentiate the songs from each other. They truly are a band that could bring people to tears and they indeed live up to their reputation. I still to this day can’t tell you what any of their songs mean, or recite any lyrics for you, but I can probably tell you which album each song is from and I can definitely tell you that I ama fan.
We are currently in a very anxious time for the entire state of Minnesota. At stake is the well-being of every person in the state. Who’s holding them for ransom? A 26 year old professional baseball player named Joe Mauer. If you don’t know who Joe Mauer is, ask any Minnesotan over the age of 5 and they will probably be able to recite you his Wikipedia page ver batim: born and raised in St Paul, Minnesota, was the highest rated quarterback and baseball player coming out of high school, drafted first overall by his hometown Twins in 2001, has won two batting titles and an MVP award by the age of 26 and will hopefully be signing the richest contract for a catcher in baseball history (somewhere in the ballpark of 200 million dollars over the next ten years) for the hometown team. If you don’t know or follow baseball, all you need to know is that there is few greater joys for small market sports fan than watching a hometown kid (or ONE OF US as Minnesota hockey fans like to say) become a star for the hometown team. Mauer in on track to become the best catcher to ever play baseball and is perhaps the best player playing today. If he doesn’t sign his contract before it expires, there is a huge fear that he will leave for New York or Boston for probably $10 million dollars more a year. This fear is probably unwarranted since Joe Mauer is the Jay-Z of the Twin Cities. He runs this town.
I’m not sure if I’m exaggerating when I say that there will be a riot in the Twin Cities in Mauer ends up leaving the only place he’s lived for the East Coast. There are some sports fans who are far too emotionally invested in their teams, where they can be hostile when told critical things about their teams/players, even when they are absolute facts. These people are referred to as “homers”. These people can be difficult to deal with because you can’t use logic or facts on them. They’re loyal to a fault, and typically are too far invested in their teams/sports that they are hard to have normal conversations with. There was a movie that was made about this last year called Big Fan, starring Patton Oswalt. While I don’t know of any homers that have followed their favorite athlete (and entourage) to a strip club, I’m pretty sure that there are some homers that will vandalize the newly minted Target Field (which ironically they paid for via their taxes) if Mauer doesn’t sign his contract.
I’ll be honest, in some ways I’m very much a homer. I usually know which players have Minnesota ties, like the 2010 olympic team (about 1/3 of the team is either from Minnesota, went to a prep school in Minnesota or went to college there). I can usually admit when my teams are bad and I try not to overrate players I have special ties to (I probably played little league baseball against Pat Neshek or his brother). I’m a bit of a homer when it comes to Minnesota music as well. I’m a huge fan of Low, (Bob Dylan and Prince are universally beloved so we can skip them), I will defend Semisonic as being far better than a one-hit wonder, and I love Tapes ‘n Tapes, though I will admit Walk it Off is a huge letdown after their amazing debut, The Loon.
There’s a new “kid” on the block from Minnesota that I just can’t get behind and it’s not because they’re not from the Twin Cities (neither is Low or Team USA captain Jamie Langenbrunner). It’s because this kid is just terrible. I, of course, speak of Owl City whose hit “Fireflies” was the number one song in the COUNTRY not too long ago. I’m not one of those people who gets annoyed when an artist becomes too mainstream. I never liked Owl City, even with their inspirational unsigned artist with a Myspace account to chart topper story. I won’t touch the whole “they sound like Postal Service” debate because my friends’ heads will explode, but I must say this. As a Minnesota native who is supremely proud of it, how do I reconcile being ashamed of this particular Minnesota artist?
This is probably anti-climactic but the only way I’ve thought of is just to not mention that Owl City (which is really just one guy, I don’t even know why I know this) is from Minnesota. It’s like when a movie comes out, the trailers and posters only point out the “good” things affiliated with the movie, not the bad. The next Halle Berry movie trailer will most likely NOT mention she was in Catwoman but it WILL most likely mention her Oscar win. The next Danny Boyle film will mention that he directed Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting but will most likely leave out A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach (maybe). So lets let this be the last time we discuss the origins of Owl City. Adam Young, I wish you the best of luck in your musical career, but Minnesota only has room for one native son to cherish and his name is Joe Mauer.
When I was a kid, my sisters would have guy friends over (read: guy friends, not boy friends), and they would pit me against the guys in a match of baseball card trivia. They would formulate questions from my collection of cards (“What team does this player play for?” ”What position does this guy play?” “Which arm does he throw with?”, etc.) I would routinely trounce these guys who were much older than me. I can only assume that my sisters made some money off this since that’s what people do when they have a little freak show at their disposal. I was an encyclopedia of baseball trivia.
So what can be concluded from this, is that even my earliest childhood memories show that I’m a huge geek. I’ve moved on from geeking out about baseball cards to other things like music, film, and clothes (things that are much more expensive than baseball cards). For some reason, people find it odd that I’m a huge fan of hip hop music. Hip hop gets a bad rep for its misogynist, violent and egotistical lyrics. I can’t deny it’s out there and I’ll admit that I like some of it. It was definitely something that kept me away from hip hop at first, but slowly it kept calling to me.
I started listening to hip hop in high school. I had already firmly entrenched myself into indie-rock at that point, so I had already given up on radio stations telling me what’s hot and new. I did watch a lot of MTV (they still played videos at this point) and found myself in love with a video by Redman for a song called “I’ll Bee Dat”. The song and video poked fun at traditional hip hop conventions, and most refreshingly, at himself. (To paraphrase: “my middle name must be ‘he ain’t @#$%, cuz when i walk by the girls say ‘he ain’t @#$%!’”) I picked up the album, and while it wasn’t an album full of “I’ll Bee Dat”s, I was hooked and the hip hop obsession started to take shape.
Technically this wasn’t my first rap album purchase. I owned some Beastie Boys albums but my fellow music geek friend refused to believe that the Beastie Boys were hip hop. He was reluctant to give it a shot so I had to trick him. How did I trick him? I found a hip hop group that played their own instruments and didn’t rap about shooting people. That group/album was The Roots and the gateway album for him was Things Fall Apart. How did I find out about The Roots? This is where the geeking began for me.
“I’ll Bee Dat” is from Redman’s album Doc’s Da Name 2000, which features a collaboration with Busta Rhymes. Busta Rhymes used to be in a group called Leaders of the New School who collaborated with A Tribe Called Quest on the song “Scenario”. Q-Tip, from A Tribe Called Quest guests on Mos Def’s album Black on Both Sides on a track that I don’t want to mention the name of. Mos Def has a guest appearance on Things Fall Apart. (Another acceptable route would’ve been that Q-Tip and J Dilla produce Tribe material together and J Dilla also produced a bunch of track on Common’s Like Water for Chocolate and Common makes an appearance on Things Fall Apart.) It’s from these collaborators, producers, and “family trees” that I started to find more and more hip hop artists that I liked, and once I had my friend on board, I had someone else to help me pick up these records. It’s like playing the 6 degrees of separation game. (*I’m sure in the hip hop version, everything ties in with the Wu Tang Clan)
I used to tell people I listened in indie-rock. Then I started telling people that I liked indie-rock and hip hop. Now I just tell people that I’m a fan of music and that’s the truth. When I first started to listen to hip hop, I listened to a lot of “back packer” rap and a lot of artists that were associated with the Okayplayer movement, but even within that genre, I’ve branched out. I’m not a rap lover, or a rock lover. I just love music regardless of genre. It’s probably something that I should’ve known was bound to happen to me since the geek in me never left. With baseball cards, I never cared how good or bad a player was, or what team he was on. I just wanted to absorb all the information that he could, and now I’m doing the same thing with (good) music.
The first thing I got from a mail order catalog was The Lounge Ax Compilation, a benefit CD to keep a club in Chicago in business. I was maybe 14 or 15 years old. Had I ever been to this club? No. Did I really care about the fate of this club that I wanted to help? Kind of, but not really. I was more interested in the fact that I would be getting previously unreleased tracks from Sebadoh, Superchunk, Seam, Yo La Tengo, Guided by Voices and Archers of Loaf. I don’t think the CD sold enough money to keep Lounge Ax in business, but at least I could say I did my part as a 15 year old living in San Diego.
Every time you mail order something from a record label, they send you an updated catalog with your purchase. Being new to this mail order world, receiving the catalog was a pretty exciting thing. I would take it to school and my friends and I would look through it to see what we would be ordering next. We were young and were curious to see what great bands we’d missed out on because of our youth. So, going through the Touch and Go, Sub Pop, and Matador Records catalogs were expeditions for us. ”The Jesus Lizard did a split cassette with Nirvana? They must be great, right?”
Honestly, I don’t know how I waited for my orders to come. I know it sounds foolish, but I would send cash to these record labels through the mail. I don’t think I ever stuck change in the envelopes, and i would wrap my bills in the piece of paper my order was on to prevent people from recognizing there was cash in the envelope, but obviously it was a huge risk. I was completely vulnerable. Fortunately, every order I made safely made it to each label and I received all but one shipment, and for that one shipment I didn’t receive, I was lucky enough to have my sister, who was working in “the biz” at the time, stand up for me and make some calls to make sure I got what was rightfully mine.
I didn’t just order CDs from these labels. I started to order vinyl, mostly 7″ singles. Sadly, I missed the boat on the first run of the Sub Pop Singles Club and when I went to college, I missed the boat on the 2nd run because I was poor or flakey, or both. There was no room in the dorms for a vinyl record player and then Amoeba Records in Hollywood opened, and iTunes started releasing “exclusive material” so my mail order adventures came to a halt.
It wasn’t until the last year or so where I’ve re-committed to my love of mail order (I blame Sub Pop records with all their reissues – and the fact they give you a digital download with each vinyl purchase). It’s obviously a lot different now than it was in the late 90s. Now it’s online, you get tracking numbers, and I have credit cards/debit cards to make sure that my orders get to where they need to go. I could make the pretentious argument that it’s not the same as it used to be because of all the “technology” involved, but I’m not going to. I’ve never really considered myself a record collector, but I love the fact that I get the same feeling when I get my records in the mail now that I got over 10 years ago and that I’ll do the same nerdy things like lay out all my colored vinyl as if I were putting together some sort of brilliant artwork (I have white, yellow, pink, blue, red, purple, sea green, orange and of course black – I know you don’t care, I just wanted to brag).
Music has always been a big part of my life. From the piano lessons I took when I was 7, to the countless hours of walking around with my walkman/discman/ipod and headphones, I really have no clue where I’d be without it. I’m just glad to know that as I get older, I still have the same crazy passion for it that I had when I first discovered it. I know that my spending on shows and vinyl will be curbed over time as the priorities in my life change, but I am confident that the few times that I am able to order something, I’m going to still have that same excitement that I had when that Lounge Ax compilation was at my front door.