[Part I] // [Part II]

They say you were something in those formative years…

For many, our love of music begins with the influence of our family and friends. I can remember my mom blasting Hendrix so loud the windows shook and I could feel it through the stool I was sitting on. Or hunched by the kitchen window watching the spread of milky coldness on the glass while my father cooked with Paul Simon singing “Mother and Child Reunion”. Still later, I would remember my brother buying Bon Jovi patches for his denim jacket.

There does come a time when something we hear goes beyond our inheritance. When I consciously chose an artist that no-one else championed, it changed what music did for me — it became an expression of my personality. Musical taste, to me anyway, is sometimes an instinctual compass that unlocks a part of who we are. These are some stories about those moments, as told by our contributor team. –fog

Red Hot Chili Peppers

My first real love in life was skateboarding. From the age of 7 upward, it was all I would do with my time. I’d take my horrible factory-made deck out into the school carpark down the road from my house and spend hours on end trying to slappy curbs and ollie manhole covers. Eventually, when I’d skinned my knees enough or twisted my ankle so badly I could barely walk, I’d hobble home and sit down to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which needs very little introduction as a grand source of musical education for skaters and non-skaters alike. It was with the release of Pro Skater 3 and its nuclear warhead of a soundtrack that I was first introduced to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their track “Fight Like A Brave” featured on the game, and the first time I heard it stands out in my mind as the first time I ever consciously fell in love with a song upon first discovering it. I went to the game playlist and turned off every other song except for that one. I consumed it over and over and over until every riff, every rhythm, every lyric was ingrained into my brain like a tattoo. It’s not their best song, I know it. It’s not even close to their best song and is probably one of their lesser ones when looked at objectively. Yet, the act of skateboarding to the song, first in the game and then later in reality on my Sony Cassette Walkman, was pure serendipity. The driving, thumping rhythm, the rebellious lyrics and rabble-rousing chorus; everything seemed to synchronise in a sublime way with my motions. The crack of my wheels hitting the ground seemed to mirror the crashing snare, the screech of my powerslide was emphasised by the halting guitar riff. The warped instrumental flourish at the song’s midpoint seemed to accompany me as I ollie 360’d into a noseblunt along the 10ft awning, before triple kickflipping out (in the game, in case it wasn’t clear). The track seemed to become one with skateboarding as an activity for me, and every time I pushed off I’d hear that initial countdown into the rolling rhythm.

As a ’90s baby in the UK with no interest in fighting through inane radio DJ babble to hear the latest releases, there was but one place to find the top tracks for the week in a condensed package: the Friday night BBC1 chart show, Top of the Pops. The long-running hour-long programme featured live performances, music videos, and a top ten countdown that led into a live performance or video of the UK’s number one song. Aside from acting as a finish line for the school week and reining in the weekend with a lively bang, it also served as a major touchpoint for my musical education, helping me discover not only bands and artists, but entire genres I had no idea existed. I tuned in as usual around mid-2002, the year after my introduction to RHCP, to see them performing their latest track, “By The Way”. That melodic opening, the thunderous, scraping bass, the nonsensical verses — performed by a band I had never actually seen before. The song sounded completely different to “Fight Like A Brave”; it lacked the groove, the riotous simplicity. But I loved it. The perceived heaviness entranced me, got into my bones. Unfortunately, in the early 2000s, the only way for me to re-experience a song was to buy a physical copy, and a few months later, I got my wish. On Holiday with my folks, we happened upon a street seller who had laid out his wares on a beach towel along the main beachside road, a tourist hotspot. These were CDs, thrown into clear plastic slipcases with crudely photocopied album covers. The asking price was comically cheap already, but after my dad did a bit of haggling, the price reduced even further, and I finally had a copy (literally) of By The Way, the album, held tight in my hands. As soon as we went back to the hotel I slapped it into my Sony CD Walkman (I’d upgraded by that point) and devoured it. And then again, and again.

I think a major aspect of the band’s influence on my life beyond the music itself is how much I associate specific albums with important moments in my adolescence, and since so many of their albums have very distinct styles, it makes them even more poignant as a snapshot of the events occurring at the time. Californication was the next album of theirs I purchased, from a Virgin Megastore in my local town whilst out shopping with my dad. It was a new album I had been allowed to buy that would accompany me as we left my childhood home to move to an entirely new part of the country. Discovering the until-then unheard tracks as we sped away from the place I’d once called home was so aggressively bittersweet, it carved itself into my memory forever. That initial trip up, hearing the strains of songs such as “Scar Tissue”, “Otherside”, “Easily”, “Road Trippin'”, etc. attributed an indelible sense of loss to the music that I cannot to this day experience without feeling the pang of displacement, the sting of nervous energy that had made its home at the base of my young soul. A year or so later, I began cycling to school, a 9 mile round trip, and decided to treat myself to a new album — this time bought from iTunes and channelled through my second generation iPod Nano. The album was Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and every day for the best part of a school year I had the album on a constant cycle. It made the sweaty summer days feel high-energy and exciting. It made the wet, windy days feel optimistic and mysterious. It added an indefinable sense of fun to every trip I made, and before long it became another album irreversibly embedded into my brain. The backwards transition for me between Californication and BSSM served as a strange progression of sorts; a graduation from a cleaner-cut sense of contained energy to a freer, more explicit and raunchier aesthetic. As a youth starting to crest the midpoint of my teenage years, it’s not difficult to understand why the topical preoccupations found in Blood Sugar Sex Magik particularly resonated with me.

The last album that I’d like to mention is also the last time I really felt affected by new music by RHCP — and it’s perhaps fitting that, for this reason, the album may be the most important in explaining what the band means to me. Stadium Arcadium, the overstuffed double-disc epic, is an album that I still struggle to listen to from beginning to end. I listened to the record when I was around 14, but only really ‘listened’ to it a year later, as a 15 year old doing a paper route on a nearby residential block. At the time, it didn’t mean a great deal to me. I was just a teen living life, and to my young brain it was a catchy album loaded with slick, memorable riffs and singalong lyrics. In the years since, though, the album started to represent the loss of my youth. If By The Way was my soundtrack of innocence, Stadium Arcadium would surely be my soundtrack of experience. That paper route was my first job. I didn’t rely on the money I made — I still lived at home — yet, looking back on the pleasant, unhurried nature of the job and its foreshadowing of my future working life held too much of a bitter contrast once I had finally graduated university and had to start paying my way in the world. The spectrum of moods on Stadium Arcadium seem to encapsulate that era for me, and the confusion that a teen gradually ascending to adulthood experiences. The dizzying highs, the depressive lows, the baffling in-betweens; every aspect of the record seems to hold a mirror up between my life in the moment I first truly heard the album, and where I’ve ended up in the present day. The track that stands out to me the most after all these years is “Wet Sand” — sentimental, melancholic, overwrought for sure. Yet the heaviness of the emotion in the cut and the simple yet undeniably rousing solo during the finale captured my emotion during that time, and I still view it in much the same way today — where before I related to it through my angst and obliviousness, now I relate through my experience and perspective. It feels like a genuine link between who I was, and who I became.

RHCP became very much my musical obsession during high school as my first real favourite band, and I purchased as much of their music as I could. They illustrated to me in many ways what music could be, because of their variety of sound and blending of funk with alternative, infused with an almost hip hop-centric vocal and occasional sombre melancholy. They ticked all of the boxes for me musically, and I knew that no matter what sort of headspace I was in, they would have a song that suited the mood perfectly. They’re not a niche band in the least, but to me they represented a rebellion against the more conservative tastes of my parents, and the charisma, enthusiasm and energy of the outfit as a unit reflected my own passion for music. I credit the group heavily with not only opening the door for me to alternative rock, but also for introducing me to hip hop, funk, punk, and even heavy metal in new, meaningful ways. The rousing tirade of Mother’s Milk, the funky eroticism of Blood Sugar, the melancholia of One Hot Minute, the focus of Californication, the dilettante nature of By The Way, the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink appeal of Stadium Arcadium — these were the albums that shaped my musical taste; a varied banquet of stylistics and dynamic songwriting that instilled in me an appreciation for a wealth of musical directions. Even though their more recent output has lost the spirit that I associate with the band at the peak of their endeavours, I still skate to RHCP when the mood takes me, and every time I do, I’m reminded of the eras in my life that they unwittingly soundtracked for me, and of the heavy emotional weight that I’ve attributed to them. –PumpBoffBag

R.E.M.

At night there was always a darkness in our lounge, hollowed out by the comforting blue glow of our monolithic CRT TV. And it was there, at age 11, that I saw the video for “Losing My Religion”. There was this pit and the pendulum desperation about the song — I understood this wiry, lost figure was struggling with something internal and massive by the sound first and the visuals second. Still, I was struck by the aesthetic — the band dressed in ascetic white shirts and black trousers, isolated except for a small gesture of sympathy from Bill to Michael. Every scene was so composed and so clever — I wasn’t used to cleverness in videos.

My family were oblivious to the song until I pointed it out, but I was transfixed by the latticed cat’s cradle of the mandolin, and the pervasive urgency of the drums mixed with the stop/start strumming. As a boy moving through a highly religious schooling system (while having atheist parents) in a very conservative country, I knew innately that this song was raising big topics (I did not understand at the time that it worked as a personal confessional as well). But it was pretty, too — this is when I truly internalised that a song can be intense without harsh language, or being loud, or most of all, aggressive. The video is to this day one of the best I’ve watched, but at the time I particularly loved the scene where Stipe crosses the floorboards while bringing his arms together in time to the deceptively fast music — seeing someone be awkward, and somehow beautiful and cool as well. This is how I felt — after school, I would hop from stone to stone in our garden, unable to verbalise my thoughts to anyone, exorcising them through ungraceful movement.

But snapping out of this, I had to play it cool in front of others. No-one was talking about R.E.M. at a boy’s school. You were listening to hair rock, early techno, that sneaky copy of N.W.A., or maybe even Sepultura if you were ‘out there’ enough. But I was a serious kid, and I remember begging my grandmother to buy Out of Time for my birthday. When I at last got my copy, I didn’t want to let on to everyone that I had some buyer’s remorse — I didn’t get songs like “Low”, “Belong”, or “Near Wild Heaven” — why was the other guy singing the lead? But there was enough to persist with — I found “Me in Honey” would hum from my brother’s old Blaupunkt speakers, Kate Pierson’s mantra-like vocal levitating me while the underlying music became like a river pulling me forward by means of surface vapour tendrils. When everything worked, I truly understood the power of serving the song — R.E.M. didn’t believe in whipping you out of a track to admire a solo — the most you could expect in that department is the restart of “Shiny Happy People”.

I took quite a bit of abuse for liking something so ‘soft’ — my brother’s friend would use slurs to describe the music (and anyone listening to it). I grew hesitant to openly endorse it. The laughable thing is R.E.M. was by that point a massive commercial band, taking on water for going digital and major label, but in South Africa, they were seen as a bit weird by my peers. And the few kids privy to the secret world of college rock and who had relatives eventually sending them Pavement tapes saw R.E.M. as not nearly weird enough. To my great shame, I had no idea they existed in the ’80s until about 9 years later.

Perhaps my biggest eventual takeaway from R.E.M. was the lyricism. I was not necessarily a stranger to acts with a lyrical focus — my dad got me into Paul Simon, and my mom loved pointing out the more surreal turns of Bob Dylan. But R.E.M. had a different, contemporary perspective — using a line like “Consider this” seemed so foreign, like this man is breaking the fourth wall pitching his case using a word that is so ordinary and yet has such duality. He’s inviting me into this place of despair caused by overthinking, describing things, setting the scene, then having a direct discourse with me, aging me with that cutting, defeated “That was just a dream” at the end. I’ve grown to love their lyrical style more over time — if I had to pick artists who produce lyrics which could read as poetry just off the page, R.E.M. would be among a small select group. R.E.M. would follow up with Automatic for the People, and it surpassed any expectation I had for linking the punch of words and delivery. I still get annoyed when something distracts me from the final verse of “Man on the Moon” — that “Here’s a little ghost for the offering / Here’s a truck stop instead of Saint Peter’s” is one of my favourite moments in any song, ever.

1991 was a lifetime ago, but I’ll never forget what R.E.M. represented to me, an over-sensitive boy in the provisionally safe, but somewhat unforgiving setting of an all-boy, all-traditional school. While I initially backed down and pretended to agree with others, the quality and resonance of this music (by then I secretly embraced most of Out of Time, particularly “Country Feedback”) made me want to defend it — and it made me want to defend other things I thought. R.E.M. made me see the possibilities for expression: how I perceived the world could sound powerful, like nervous doubt manifesting as an unseen poltergeist force. If you found the right words, you could describe the constant abiding melancholy of your heart — and allow someone else to feel a tearful glance backwards after a parting in the string light of a fair. It could be beautiful sharing a bit of myself, and maybe someone would recognise that, one day, it did happen eventually. R.E.M. are now a greatest hits band in South Africa, but to me, they’ll always be that special act that I chose to follow because they normalised the nervous poetry of my psyche. They were my band. –fog

blink-182

An interest in music was always present in my household growing up. While neither of my parents were musicians, their passion for listening to music was passed on to me alongside keen encouragement to learn instruments — something for which I will be eternally grateful. I was sent for piano lessons at the age of five, learned to play the trombone in my school band and taught myself to play the guitar (badly) after receiving a Squire Stratocaster for my twelfth birthday. Thankfully, I was not often subjected to commercial radio; instead, my parents preferred to provide exposure to their favourite artists from yesteryear. On my mother’s side, this was mainly ’60s & ’70s easy-going rock such as The Beatles and The Eagles — with a bit of Kris Kristofferson thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, my father had a passion for classical music and progressive rock — his favourite band being Emerson, Lake & Palmer. As I approached my second decade of existence, I had taken influence from the musical tastes of my older brother — which, at the time, were mainly classic Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur, more recent indie bands such as Idlewild, Travis, and The Libertines, and a stylistic outlier in the form of Red Hot Chili Peppers. The artist who represents the turning point and the start of my own personal journey was blink-182.  Obviously, I was familiar with the hugely popular “All the Small Things”, but the pivotal moment came in 2003 at the tender age of fourteen when I first saw American Pie — specifically the famous webcam scene featuring the track “Mutt” from the iconic album Enema of the State. Upon hearing that catchy riff, the playful bassline, and the screechy whine of Tom DeLonge, I immediately sought to source the full track from Limewire. After impatiently waiting aeons for it to download on dial-up internet, I was hooked instantly.

Over the next year or so, I made it my mission to spend any available pocket money I had on collecting the entire blink discography in physical format, the most elusive of which wasthe live album The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show — which was apparently out of print in the UK at the time. I was ecstatic to find it one day a few years later in an independent record store in Glasgow, which left the 1996 EP They Came to Conquer Uranus as the only release left to completing their current catalogue. My best friend was kind enough to complete it for me by purchasing the 7″ vinyl for my birthday, and it remains one of my most prized possessions to this date — at least from a sentimental perspective. Throughout this time and the years that followed, that same friend and I basically treated blink like gods. We regularly rented space in rehearsal studios to crank out shoddy covers of their songs, wrote and recorded our own material heavily based on theirs and tried to emulate their sense of fashion by adorning Dickies shorts, skate shoes, band T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. With their promise of perpetual summer, blink was such a contrast to the bleak, drizzly Scottish climate that I was entranced by images of sunshine, half-pipes and The Warped Tour. blink had become a way of life and a gateway to the world of alternative music. One can imagine my distress upon the announcement of their split in 2005 before I’d had the chance to catch them live.

A huge factor in my obsession can be attributed to timing.  As a lovestruck and not overly popular teenager, blink provided highly relatable lyrical content in comparison to most music I had been enjoying previously. At 15, I could hardly relate to Oasis’ numerous references to drug binges or the overtly sexualised dialogue of RHCP, but stories of unrequited love, hating the other guy who got the girl and a disdainful rejection of adulthood were all concepts I could empathise with greatly. Songs such as “Dysentery Gary” and “Waggy” and “Apple Shampoo”, although not too relatable in the present, were reflective of my life at the time to the point of being anthemic.

Despite my musical taste now expanding far beyond the realm of pop punk, my love for this band — at least all output up to 2011 — is undying. Dude Ranch remains my favourite album of all time and will likely never be topped. A high point of my 2023 will be spending my 34th birthday in September seeing them play — complete with Tom Delonge — in my home city. Sometimes, life is capable of dealing you a good hand and for me, that particular hand is unbeatable. –BitterJalapenoJr

[Part I] // [Part II]