Oh 1980s, how you happened!
Coming of age in the suburbs of New Jersey in the 80's was to be caught in a pop-cultural eddy while the rest of the world whooshed along. Alerting us to the outside world were the bad kids and their M.O.D. and Anthrax tapes, blaring from the back seat of the school bus at 7:15am. Early Nickelodeon presented Canada through the unforgiving lens of You Can't Do That On Television and our audacious contempt for those dorky cast members, never seemed ironic. I dreamt about owning suede Pumas but stitched leather LEE jean patches on the tongues of my TRAX sneakers bought at Caldor or Bradlees instead.
It's certainly not the Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, but if anything, it proves to me that no matter the style or substance, people are driven to make things for seemingly no other reason than for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Who knows what 15 might have been like in Oslo, or Prague, or Rio, or Phuket? Fortunately (or otherwise) we have a record of my subjective creations, drawn from the experiences of a relatively sheltered white kid whose dad recorded the theme to the TV show TAXI. It's taken a long time to square myself with this cosmic dorkiness.
While everyone else that I now know was out skateboarding, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, gettin' lucky, listening to Zeppelin, The Dead Kennedys or Metallica, I chose to repair to the sanctuary of my stusstudio, where my machines understood me:
- IBM 5150 PC with amber Amdek monitor and MPU-401 midi interface, graciously given to me as a birthday gift from my idol at the time, Mr. Bob James, author of the TAXI theme. Running on this computer was a not-so-official version of Roger Powell's TEXTURE program, no doubt coded in assembly language. A far cry from Ableton Live or ProTools.
- Yamaha DX7 with E! Grey Matter Response modification which worked most of the time.
- Yamaha DX100 synthesizer. It was when I got this synth that I learned that the higher the model number was, the more limited and lamer the unit. The DX7 had full size keys and velocity sensitivity, while the DX100 had mini Casio-size keys and no velocity sensitivity. *sigh*
- Yamaha RX15 Drum Computer. Not as cool as the RX11 or at the time, the ultimate, RX5!
- All running through the Yamaha DMP7, a digital mixer that a friend of my pops who worked for Yamaha let me borrow and try out. This particular friend would bring lots of cool gizmos by the house for both me and my dad to fiddle with.
Set the wayback machine to the late 1980s... Ollie North, Tomkins Square Park Riots, Chet Baker, Heather O'Rourke and Andy Gibb leave this dimension, Sonny Bono is elected Mayor of Palm Springs, The Pixies' Surfer Rosa and NKOTB Hangin' Tough records come out...
If music made by a lanky pimply guy wearing black leather reeboks, shiny houndstooth pants, big red glasses, and an oversized pink oxford shirt with repeating geometric emblems sounds like a party to you, then shotgun these:
Bwoline
Uncertainty
Pastelve
Monmouth Mall Romance
Springtime From My Bedroom
Junkyfunk
Maybe it's because Obama is President and it's finally cool to care again, or that I'm in my mid-30s and am able to see the path of my life from a much different vantage point. Whatever the case may be, it's a good thing to own the past - it helps the future.
I've heard the age of Obama as being described as Post-Irony. I'm down. The irony that I cultivated in the 90s and the Oughts damn near killed my ability to love.
Love,
MJ
It's certainly not the Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, but if anything, it proves to me that no matter the style or substance, people are driven to make things for seemingly no other reason than for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Who knows what 15 might have been like in Oslo, or Prague, or Rio, or Phuket? Fortunately (or otherwise) we have a record of my subjective creations, drawn from the experiences of a relatively sheltered white kid whose dad recorded the theme to the TV show TAXI. It's taken a long time to square myself with this cosmic dorkiness.
While everyone else that I now know was out skateboarding, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, gettin' lucky, listening to Zeppelin, The Dead Kennedys or Metallica, I chose to repair to the sanctuary of my stusstudio, where my machines understood me:
- IBM 5150 PC with amber Amdek monitor and MPU-401 midi interface, graciously given to me as a birthday gift from my idol at the time, Mr. Bob James, author of the TAXI theme. Running on this computer was a not-so-official version of Roger Powell's TEXTURE program, no doubt coded in assembly language. A far cry from Ableton Live or ProTools.
- Yamaha DX7 with E! Grey Matter Response modification which worked most of the time.
- Yamaha DX100 synthesizer. It was when I got this synth that I learned that the higher the model number was, the more limited and lamer the unit. The DX7 had full size keys and velocity sensitivity, while the DX100 had mini Casio-size keys and no velocity sensitivity. *sigh*
- Yamaha RX15 Drum Computer. Not as cool as the RX11 or at the time, the ultimate, RX5!
- All running through the Yamaha DMP7, a digital mixer that a friend of my pops who worked for Yamaha let me borrow and try out. This particular friend would bring lots of cool gizmos by the house for both me and my dad to fiddle with.
Set the wayback machine to the late 1980s... Ollie North, Tomkins Square Park Riots, Chet Baker, Heather O'Rourke and Andy Gibb leave this dimension, Sonny Bono is elected Mayor of Palm Springs, The Pixies' Surfer Rosa and NKOTB Hangin' Tough records come out...
If music made by a lanky pimply guy wearing black leather reeboks, shiny houndstooth pants, big red glasses, and an oversized pink oxford shirt with repeating geometric emblems sounds like a party to you, then shotgun these:
Bwoline
Uncertainty
Pastelve
Monmouth Mall Romance
Springtime From My Bedroom
Junkyfunk
Maybe it's because Obama is President and it's finally cool to care again, or that I'm in my mid-30s and am able to see the path of my life from a much different vantage point. Whatever the case may be, it's a good thing to own the past - it helps the future.
I've heard the age of Obama as being described as Post-Irony. I'm down. The irony that I cultivated in the 90s and the Oughts damn near killed my ability to love.
Love,
MJ
posted by Mikael at
12:14 AM
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