neurological dryer lint

picked up a few movies yesterday - the excellent kill bill vol. 1 and the crow, which originally i thought was cheesy and badly directed but i've grown to love. the casting was really good - michael wincott, tony todd (heheh, worf's brother from TNG as well as an appearance in smallville), and brandon lee was just excellent. his death was such a tragedy, i bet he would have rocked in some more movies.

but this post isnt about the movie, it's about the soundtrack.

growing up i can't remember listening to much besides jimmy buffett, gordon lightfoot, styx and those old guys my parents used to play while we were sailing. i still enjoy a lot of those groups - nothing relaxes me like buffett or old fleetwood mac.

then i noticed around 7 or 8 years old that my sister was starting to listen to some pretty interesting bands. i was fascinated at this new stuff - i remember weekends when she was down from cleveland visiting, i would get up really early in the morning, go downstairs, put on some headphones and listen to her duran duran tapes before anyone else woke up.

i never really developed my own musical tastes when i was young, though. in the fourth grade, my friend andrew got me hooked on poison's open up and say ahhh. a year or so later i was given a copy of vanilla ice's to the extreme and assured how radical the guy was. to gain the approval of my friends, i was led on a musical leash to whatever the people around me liked.

around my sixth grade year a few of my friends were raving about this band called nirvana. i'd heard their bizarre smells like teen spirit on the radio, thought it was catchy, but never gave it much thought - until people started talking about it ALL the time. the cover art was my mom's only objection to buying me nevermind. i recall how revolutionary my first spin of that album was, how every song made me say 'you can play music like THAT?' and just how real it sounded. gone were the keyboards and synth and overpolished guitars and vocals of everything i'd EVER listened to. it was authentic - it didn't feel like dave, kurt and kris had a plan for this album, it felt like they had been sitting around and someone just passed them some instruments and they just bellowed out this masterpiece.

anyway, i could write for hours about how revolutionary nevermind was. i could write about how metallica's self titled later that year captured my emotional content perfectly, childish illusions slowly breaking down as the world around me came into focus, and being scared and hiding behind sad but true and my friend of misery to protect me.

then 94 came around. end of my freshman year, the height of my bitterness and anger and disappointment with everything approaching rapidly. metallica had led to pantera and megadeth, and my friends and i couldn't really take anything but metal. it was almost drug-like: i was so buried in loud, angry music i couldn't take anything less 'potent'. it was too weak. and as always, my mood matched my music. that's who i was, my identity.

that year my sister made me a mixtape. the beginning of it was the crow soundtrack, and after that were a few other songs that she liked. the first time i listened to the combo of the cure's burn followed by machines of loving grace followed by the calm, beautiful big empty... i think i just calmed down and stayed that way for a long time. rage's darkness is even more calm than their usual fare on that album. slip side melting bobbed my head. it can't rain all the time helped me sleep a few times. and dead souls made me go out and buy nine inch nails' downward spiral disc, and that started a whole new bag. i toyed with kmfdm, pig, stabbing westward, chemlab, ministry... basically took my anger-outlet-music to a different direction.

but i remember well how my mood started to change. i wasn't as angry all the time. i didn't exude pure hostility; i began to feel more and deal with my feelings. over that year, listening to scott weiland on purple sing pretty penny from his heart, about love and emptiness and hurt and fun... listening to say it ain't so and no one else and wanting to write songs like rivers cuomo.. my heart softened a whole lot. it wasn't just screaming anymore. it's like my emotional spectrum widened about a thousand times larger than it had been before. it was at the perfect time, too, right when life took a different turn and started going down the road ive been walking since. go figure how it happens that way. :)