High Fidelity

I've wanted to do a post on music for so long and I actually stated this post back in July. I've worked on it here and there over the months but it wasn't quite right. I knew I was waiting for the perfect end to the story and I finally got it!

In high school I hovered on the fringes of the indie music scene in the SF bay area. I went to all kinds of grungy little clubs and heard garage bands ranging from fabulous to frightening. The Bay Area produced Green Day in the late 8o's; a few years before they went huge and I saw them in several tiny venues-it was truly awesome. (It's my only claim to fame so I have to brag.) My two best friends were music guys; they were straight out of High Fidelity. There are several scenes in that movie that were almost exact quotes from my real life. My favorite is when the John Cusack character is reorganizing his vast record collection from alphabetical to autobiographical. It's a music nerds dream. I've tried to do the same thing with mix tapes and playlists because I love that idea that music tells the story of our lives.

And speaking of mix-tapes...the very idea is so definitively 80's that it's almost sickening. I still remember when I got a stereo with 2 tape decks that could copy songs from one tape to another. (Doesn't that seem antiquated now?) I remember making tapes for myself or friends and how it was this major gesture of friendship if you made someone a tape. For one, it was a glimpse into your mind and soul and second, the tapes were a major pain in the a** to make so they knew you'd spent some time making them. Of course, the idea was that you were giving this other person something new musically so you had to have at least a few really obscure songs to offer. Not an easy task when you don't have i tunes or the internet. It meant hours of searching music stores, talking to people and listening to lots and lots of bizarre stuff. It was a real financial investment too because you usually had to buy the entire album. No .99 cent songs at the i tunes music store to downloaded instantly with the click of a button. Sometimes when you were poor, grounded or stumped you'd have to resort to taping something off of the radio (total mix-tape humiliation btw). Either way the mix-tape has a place in the hearts of all children of the 70's do they not?

So I recently had reason to make a play list for a new friend and it was such a different experience. I just hopped on over to my play lists, grabbed my top 2 or 3 out of each play list. Fiddled around with the order for a few minutes and burned the disc. It was actually a little anti climactic--so I had to make a blog post about it that they could look at after they listened to it. So after geeking out about it for a good hour I felt sufficiently fulfilled in my mix tape/play list duties. Good fun...happy listening.