Muzak Madness: Day One

Okay, with the highly anticipated Austin City Limits music festival starting this Friday, the elders of Goulash have mandated that I write about music this week. With Octopussy as my witness, I will rise to the challenge. So, until Friday, I'll be writing about a song a day. If you don't like it, you can feed it to the bulldog.

The year is 1995. I'm living one of those summers that only a 14 year old can appreciate, where I stay up all night playing NBA Jam, eating Hot Pockets, and watching Telemundo. At this tender age, I'd made up my mind about a lot of different things. Monty Python: awesome, girls: intriguing but terrifying, Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat: unstoppable. I was still getting music sorted out, though. Everyone could agree then on Nirvana, but where did you go from there? Bryan Adams? Madonna? TLC? In retrospect, it's a minor miracle that any males emerged from that era as heterosexuals.

One night in the middle of that summer, I was up late, most likely doing something dorky. My radio was turned to the only station in Dallas that served as a middle ground between Motley Crue and Boyz II Men: 94.5 the Edge. The radio was on a lot that summer, but I paid very little attention, figuring they were playing Pearl Jam's latest song about manic depressive rural transexual bartenders. This particular evening, something came on that caught my attention. It was distorted, sloppy, and hard to follow, just like the rest of the lame bastard music that was so unavoidable during those years, but there was something else there. The song was ... toe tappin'.

It came on again later that night, and I learned then the name of the song and the man responsible for it; it was "Sick of Myself" by Matthew Sweet. None of that rung any bells with me, but some quick household reconaissance revealed that my dad already had one of his CDs. I took it back to my room and played it nonstop for a few days, like some sort of cult initiation rite. When I emerged, I was disheveled, foul-smelling, and bordering on hallucinatory, but also invigorated because I had finally found something cool all by myself. You need things like that when you're 14, stuck in the suburbs, and convinced that you've been sentenced to an eternity in the company of weinerbiscuits.

In the years since, there've been a thousand subsequent discoveries, most of which followed that blue print. A random snippet leads to a frenzied search, which yields something great. Well, not always great (I'm looking at you, Gipsy Kings), but interesting and unfamiliar. For showing this to me, Matthew Sweet has earned the dubious distinction of appearing on more of my mix CDs than anyone outside of Color Me Badd. Granted, you miss part of the Matthew Sweet experience without a Super Nintendo controller and a plate of Pizza Pockets, but some things are best left to the 14 year olds.

Posted by Cody at September 13, 2004 06:36 PM