Music is my...

My childhood was all about gangster rap and the best Duran Duran mixtape in all of the Southside of Chicago. My mother was versatile in her musical tastes: she grew up on blues and r&b and funk music in the 60's and 70's. Somewhere along the line, she picked up a strong love for progressive rock and early hard rock: Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon, Led Zeppelin, The Who, etc. The list goes on. In fact, it was this love of rock music that brought her and my father together. Imagine: being two black kids in high school on the south side, in the heart of Englewood, bonding over a "Dark Side of the Moon‟ LP. Pretty fearless, I must say. And I have the two coolest parents to ever step foot in Lindblom High School.

And then they had a kid. A relative joked that said kid would come out “white” because of the parents' musical tastes. Psh. I say that relative was just jealous of my parents' awesomeness.

In 1993, I got my MTV. And it was good. It was all R.E.M. and Blind Melon and Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots. Who needed fresh air and cruel kids making fun of you when you had Kurt Loder and John Sencio and every other MTV VJ from the greatest decade of the 20th century?

Long story short, I have a soundtrack for just about every event in my life. Name any 90's song (preferably a top-40 hit, pop or rock…I was a tween, after all) and I can tell you where I was and how I was feeling. I grew up and went to college and it freaked me out. And I needed a release. When I wasn't drinking cheap vodka or “bitch drinks” I was laying in my crappy dorm room bunk bed listening to music. There were six albums I had on constant rotation those four years of undergraduate studies and whenever I hear these albums, these songs, it takes me back and reminds me of how I was able to keep it together. A big test? No worries: Jimmy Eat World is there for me. Project due yesterday? Just take a deep breath and pop in some Incubus. In no order of preference, those albums were:

Room for Squares- John Mayer
Morning View- Incubus
Clarity- Jimmy Eat World
Gold- Ryan Adams
Is This It- The Strokes
Long Gone Before Daylight- The Cardigans

Yes, at first glance, it is a very mainstream, vanilla mix of music but the impact they‟ve had on my life goes beyond what anyone thinks of John Mayer and his infamous “penis” remarks or Jimmy Eat World and their “emo” label.

Following my breakup from Mr. Always Late Man, I immersed myself in John Mayer, listening to “St. Patrick's Day” on my headphones in the dark until I fell asleep…or until my adorable guy friend Pink came to my door, demanding that he give me a piggyback ride to the campus radio station at 1am.

My best friend mentions that she's interested in the Strokes and by chance I receive a copy of their album in the mail the next day. So it became hers. And it soon became one of our many freshman year soundtracks, along with Ten Yard Fight, “Love Gun” and the “Granola Bar” song. We would also ponder why anyone would go to Wichita while walking to the train station, since Jack Black proclaimed that he was going there in “Seven Nation Army.”

When I had to walk to the train station solo, it was me, Brandon Boyd and his “Aqueous Transmission.” It took me a while to get back on the Incubus train, as an unfortunate encounter with my first roommate ruined their sweet poetry for me. I played “Aqueous Transmission” during the first few days of our living together and she admitted that she liked the sound; several days later, she became the biggest c*** on the planet. Suddenly, I wanted nothing to do with Incubus. But I was glad to rediscover them, as one of the girls down the hall was quite possibly the world's biggest Incubus fan and we now had something to talk about.

Ryan Adams came into my life during my senior year of college but I didn't fully appreciate him until I suddenly found myself spending many weekends alone, even when Mr. Always Late Man and I were still dating. There were some days when I just didn't want to pay for gas just to get him to come and see me. So with my best friend off with her man and my 2nd roommate watching “Third Watch” (which would soon become our show, every night at 9pm on A&E), Ryan Adams and I would make a date, singing “The Rescue Blues” and bidding “Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd.”

The Cardigans didn't come into my life until my junior year. I had discovered a new music service on the interwebs and it was one of the bands recommended to me. “Couldn‟t Care Less” was the first song that I played from “Long Gone Before Daylight” and it's so haunting and beautiful and depressing and soothing that I found any reason I could to listen to it. However I discovered that the absolute worse time to listen to it was while I was drinking, as all of those qualities that made me love it suddenly became my worst enemy. I‟d go from singing along to sobbing uncontrollably, even if I wasn't depressed enough to identify with the lyrics in the song. Halbastram and I were in our first year of dating and everything was wonderful, so the song meant nothing too personal to me. But it has that effect to make you feel it deeply no matter what, and I still feel the same way to this day.

For the remainder of my college days I wouldn't find any music that would have a huge impact in my life, although I still enjoyed discovering new music and rediscovering my old favorites. However, the first few months of Grad School would remind me of the importance of music during some of my most stressful and depressing and even exuberant moments.

To be continued…