Nov. 22, 2007 - Thursday

--- if you believe there's nothing up my sleeve ---

I wouldn't say that REM's Automatic For The People is one of the most important albums of all time. But I will say that REM's Automatic For The People is the most important album of all time... for me. This isn't my favourite album of all time, nor is it my most nostalgic album of all time, nor is it the album with which I have the most profound understanding of, or identification with... But it is the most important.

tightly based on a true story

This is the story of how I found music. (If I was being really pretentious, I could've said: "The story of how music found ME." And now that I've mentioned it, I'm pretty much pretentious.) My earliest memory of music was at my grandfather's funeral when I was in grade 3. This certainly wasn't the first time I had been exposed to music. I know I must've sang "The wheels on the bus" and my ABCs and numerous Sesame Street songs and the theme song from Wok with Yan prior to that day. But I don't really remember those experiences. They're not really vivid in my long-term memory, maybe because I was truly innocent and free at that age and lived only in the moment. So the earliest song I can remember that gave me some kind of emotional response aside from the overly happy, naive and kiddish way I felt every time Wok with Yan came on, was a song being sung at my grandfather's funeral. Somewhat ironically, that day also marked the first time I ever rode in a limousine.

That hymn was the first song I really HEARD. I couldn't really listen to it, nor could I understand it cause it was in Korean ... but I could HEAR it and feel it. You know how everyone always says: "you're hearing me but you're not listening?" ... or how people try to say profound things like: "you can only hear the waterfall right now, my son ... but soon, you can listen to it, and then you can listen to it's story..." ... Well I dunno why they always draw the profundity on the "listen" aspect of it. I think the "hear" part is so much more important. When I say hear, I really mean you hear it differently. Maybe differently than other people do, or maybe even differently than how you heard it previously. But that day in the funeral parlour... I really heard music for the first time.

This brings me to the 80s.

I have cousins that lived in the boons. I'd like to say that growing up in Kitchener-Waterloo was the boons, but not compared to my cousins. My cousins lived on a horse farm near Oakville. They had no streetlights on their street, they got 8000 times as much snow as we did and they had a barn... We'd visit them semi-frequently, usually on special occasions. It was here that I discovered 80s music. Every time we'd go to their house for dinner, all the kids would inevitably end up on their home made dance floor (complete with actual disco ball), dancing to Depeche Mode, Cure and Salt 'N Pepa. The songs that rang out most true to me were "Blasphemous Rumours" and "Push It"... This was my first real delve into pop music. I was hooked. I had no idea what the bands were talking/rapping about, but it moved me… quite literally too. I tried my hand at doing backspins to the tune of Sugarhill Gang's “Apache” on that basement dance floor. We even made use of the Frankenstein machine: a giant Korean monstrosity of metal and slate that wiggled your legs or head or hung you upside down or something. (My uncle is an acupuncturist. He was into holistic medicine and sleeping on a board with a wooden block pillow and, apparently, using massive hydraulic devices to wiggle your body.) All in all, going to my cousin's place was good for my soul. It was in these semi-frequent visits that I discovered music was something I really liked.

Unfortunately, I was a pretty big loser from grade 6 to grade 10. I'll save that story for another time, but I owe a lot of my loserishness to a man named Matthew Hrysyshyn. I met Matt in grade 6 when he was a loser and I was new to the school but destined for great loser heights... errrr I mean lows. Matt and I parted ways after grade 7ish, when our loser-dom had reached too epic a level for us to be in the same place at the same time without the space-time continuum imploding from loser-overload. Matt, if you by chance somehow read this, I'm not ragging on ya, I'm just telling it how it was.

We were nerd outcasts together, but Matt was weird. He was wildly unpopular at school, but he still insisted on trying to be cool with everyone who was cool. And that's not cool, at all. Matt liked to boast about how his last name didn't have any syllables. I think that's pretty funny, even now. But back in the early 90s, saying something like that would be really uncool. Matt was also really good at math, in true nerdular nerdance form. We were both in French Immersion so half our day was taught in French. Math happened to fall into the French half. I remember our class used to have team Math games, in French, where the teacher would give us a simple arithmetic expression and the team that announced the answer the fastest would get a point. Matt would always carry his entire team on his own. He'd answer every single question. It became a game of the teacher announcing the problem, Matt answering in French and everyone else in the class watching. It didn't seem so funny at the time, but it's fucking hilarious now. This earned Matt the nickname: "Mathew-matiques" ... You're supposed to say it with a French accent like you're saying mathematiques. I think that's how you spell it. Anyway. That was Matt… but back to the music.

Matt put me onto music like Bryan Adams, the Crash Test Dummies and 90s-era Genesis. Why did I like these bands? Cause Matt liked them, and he was the only friend I had and the only gateway to understand what cool was about. Never mind the fact that he was bottom of the social chain and I was right there with him. I guess I just didn't think about that while we played Street Fighter II in his den, listening to the Crash Test Dummies' "Superman Song" and talking about chicks at school that might (but totally would NOT) dig us. "Waking up the neighbours", "The ghosts that haunt me" and "We can't dance" were the first three albums I owned on cassette. (Well, aside from old Raffi tapes and, to my recollection, a very old tape of the Mini Pops' eponymous debut.) Rather tragically, all three of these albums came out in 1991. (This was the same year that Nirvana's Nevermind, U2's Achtung Baby and Smashing Pumpkins' Gish came out. ... It would've been so much cooler if these were the first bands I ever really listened to... but they weren't.) So. I guess my musical tastes were a little "crappy" and I wasn't really liking what I wanted to like because I liked it. I was liking something because someone else liked it. Which is usually harmless, unless it sucks.

And so it happened that in Grade 8, I finally discovered music when my teacher, Mr. Winkler, played Automatic For The People for an album appreciation class. Mr. Winkler, in hindisght, was awesome. This was a music teacher I should've had in high school. The music class was actually band class; we all played an instrument. I played Alto Sax, but looking back I really should've chosen the Tuba... just for fun. There was another side of the class too. Mr. Winkler would take time out once in a while during certain units or different parts of the class to talk about popular music from a historical, political and cultural level. We did album reviews, he gave us rock n' roll family tree diagrams and rambled on and on about Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, Joplin, Cream, Deep Purple and Zeppelin. He'd give projects where he forced us to all write a song on our instruments and perform it in front of the class. He told us to be as creative and psychedelic as possible. (My song, if you're interested, was a direct rip off, note for note, from a jazz trombone riff I saw on an episode of Reading Rainbow.) Mr. Winkler let us play popular songs of the day (once we even got to play the theme song from the Simpsons) and he openly wanted us to embrace: "rock 'n roll and all that goes with it", inadvertently turning half our class into potheads… He even brought out a drum set every term and taught a lesson for one class where everyone took their turn to play the drums to a looped music sample. The whole class would sit and watch a single student play for about a minute, soon finding out if they sucked or rocked. And then the next student would get their turn and we'd all turn our attention to them. I always rocked. It was one of the outlier blips in my loser, juniour high career. Sadly I only had Mr. Winkler as a teacher for 2 years in middle school. My music teacher in high school? ... Mr. Peter Smith. He sounds boring already eh? No joke, that's his name. And yes, he was BOH-RING!

So anyway... After listening to Automatic for the People I was at first scared to have any opinion of it at all. It was too new to me and I wasn't sure if the rest of the class liked it. I was pretty sure Mr. Winkler liked it, but my designation as the friendless loser-kid necessitated approval and acknowledgment from my cooler classmates before I could possibly have an opinion. However, almost immediately after that class, one of the cool kids in my homeroom, Adam Johnston, asked me what I thought. I had to be cool. So by default, I thought I had to say it sucked and that i didn't like it. ...So I did. But then Adam shrugged and told me he loved it. This threw me off, but in a very good way.

Later that week when no one was around after music class to see me, I asked Mr. Winkler if he could make me a copy of Automatic on tape. He happily obliged and I spent the next week listening to it over and over to understand why it was cool. I started listening to the radio (570 Chym, an AM radio station in Kitchener Waterloo) and "Man on the Moon" was getting lots of airplay. I had no idea who Andy Kaufman was... but that single made so much sense to me. And that was it. After R.E.M., I discovered many bands through my piece of crap-static radio. It started with U2 and Queen and then moved on to the Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Radiohead, just in time for my quiet, moody, self-absorbed-in-my-own-sadness teen years. What an amazing time it was for music...

The sky was the limit from then on. I listened to whatever tickled my fancy. (aka whatever I could afford... ... aka whatever my mom would allow me to buy.). "Everybody hurts and everybody cries". Michael Stipe speaks the truth, but everyone also comes to a point in their life when they start listening to music. I'm sure music would've permeated my bones at some point in time... but REM was the catalyst.