Music and memories

It feels like we're living in an unprecedented age of being able to revisit our youth through music we used to love. I had a few tapes as a kid, though most of my music tastes ran to the stuff my older brother and sister listened to when they were teenagers and I was impressionable and also desperate to impress. Of course, I used to say I loved '80's music, but I have to admit that I only loved a very narrow segment of it--i.e. whatever was in their tape decks.

At the same time, I had my own private music, stuff no one knew I liked, songs I listened to mostly alone as a kid (a lot of my childhood was spent hiding the things I liked for fear of ridicule or reprisal. My older siblings were--and are--pretty blunt in expressing their views and being the least mature in a lot of ways made my preferences easy targets). Not surprisingly, as an adolescent girl--even as my older brother was introducing me to Pink Floyd's The Wall--I really went for easy listening love songs of the Richard Marx's variety. I thought George Michael had the best voice and there were several Phil Collins songs on my private top ten list of GREATEST SONGS EVER. I didn't have the money to buy my own music and I didn't want to ask someone in my family to sport me the cash (ridicule thing again), so most of the time I listened to the radio fanatically in the hopes that every now and again I could catch a favorite and get it secondhand onto my own tape recorder.

Of course, I grew up, music changed, I changed, old tapes got lost, new ones got made (some even from boyfriends) and I forgot--unintentionally or deliberately--a lot of those private songs that seemed to have so much meaning to me only a few short years ago. In college, I acquired a whole new host of music tastes, mostly through the music collection of my roommate (having never bought music, I just wasn't in the habit and I couldn't stand to waste money on an album before I had heard it through completely and knew I would actually like it). Lots of angry women and their guitars, mostly. Then again, there were still the private songs, a list of which I was starting to keep on my lab computer (I ran a computer lab in the basement of the science building and had staked out a private computer for myself). In the early days of file sharing and mp3's, people on our local network were making music compilations and sharing them over their Apples. My friend Rachel and I spent a lot of late nights in that lab, playing music and doing roley-chair ballet.

Well, I'm an adult now and my CD collection is still pretty lacking (I hate to buy CD's. I really really do). My music collection on the other hand has exploded out, thanks to iTunes (I did a bit of the "free" music sharing back in the day when that was the only option, but you get tired of the sneaking, the bad recordings, the unreliability of downloads and all that). Like I said, you lose old tapes, and then later, old CD's, and you forget. There is a wake of old songs behind us, a musical coming of age history and until now, it was primarily lost, even to us. But just today, I downloaded Savage Garden's To the Moon and Back, a pretty silly song with too much synthesizer and yet listening to it over again, I was back in the computer lab, dancing around with Rachel and the roley-chairs. Here is my history, for 99 cents a piece at a time. Some things I downloaded and eventually erased again--like Billy Joel who was a big part of my childhood, but whose music just hasn't translated well into my current tastes and most of Ani DiFranco who is a very talented songwriter, but I left angry feminist angst at Bryn Mawr. Other songs, however, are wriggling back into my collection, if for no other reason than I like to remember being a little girl, sitting on the edge of my bed with a tape recorder, waiting, just waiting for that song to come on the radio. Yeah, I bought Richard Marx's Hold Onto the Nights. Just because romance didn't turn out to be what I thought it was, doesn't mean I can't remember, and enjoy, my old romanticized version of it.

I love finding my musical past on iTunes. Here's one of the ways I'm finding my musical future: http://www.pandora.com/