Friday Cheese April 9, 2010

This is it – this is the song that totally changed the course of my musical interests.

In 1992, I was 19, and I’d been into Heavy Metal pretty much exclusively for the past 3 years. It was the soundtrack to being pissed off about the everything, so it never seemed discordant or wrong. And then one day…

… I literally just wasn’t pissed off about everything anymore. Like a light switch, I got up, dropped an Exodus CD into the stereo… and was totally bored. I didn’t know what I wanted to listen to, but Heavy Metal just wasn’t it – and I could not figure out, for the life of me, what I was into. And in the pre-internet days, you couldn’t just scamper through the poppy-fields of bittorrent until you found something pleasing, you were kind of stuck with whatever was on the radio, TV, or what your friends told you about.

I spent my time at my job, cashier at a movie theater, wondering what the hell I was into now – I have quite honestly in my life never felt that moment of sudden and total disconnect from what had been a popular past-time. And as I flipped through the paper, seeing what movies were opening (movie cashier = free movies at most of the theaters in the area), I saw the advertisement for “Cool World”, and remembered that it looked interesting. So I & and a friend saw it the next day during a matinee showing, and while we were amused by how terrible it was, oh holy crap the music, what WAS that? I had to know more.

I’m not sure if this is exactly how it happened, but my recollection is that on the way back from the theater, I stopped into Tower Records and bought the soundtrack CD, and dropped it in when I got home… and holy fuck yes, there was that sound that I had totally been looking for – and that was Moby’s “Ah-Ah”.

Again – no smartywebs in those days, so I picked up the name “Moby”, and looked for his name on other CD’s. That led me to compilation CD’s he was on, and I picked up the artists I liked from those compilation CD’s… and on it went from there, with pokemon-levels of mania about collecting this really wonderful alien sound that reminded me there was more to life than the suburbs, watching television, or ending up at mother-fucking Dennys AGAIN, because there was nowhere else to go.

Someone at Tower Records put a few issues of Mondo 2000 next to the techno compilations, and on a whim, I grabbed those, and as over-the-top pretentious as they were, that was my next introduction to something else out there.

So today’s chunk ‘o techno cheese is that first song that sucked me in.

(Side note: If for some reason you just HAVE to listen to these songs I’m posting more often, add the RSS feed URL as a podcast to iTunes, and you’ll download each song as I post them)