We've now entered the less-than-three-weeks period before our trip. I have been listening heavily to the music I was listening to during that school year in Luxembourg, and it gives me feelings no photo could ever come close to replicating. What an amazing time we live in that I can suddenly remember a song or an album from then and in three seconds have it on my phone to listen to. I used to walk around the school with a bag strapped to my body carrying a portable CD player and the five CDs that would fit inside it, and there were five bands that were usually in it. When packing I had to decide which CDs to bring. Now I have 15,000 songs and growing on a pocket computer with 370 GB of memory.
The first band, of course, was U2. It was the Pop era. I had seen them twice in Dublin before the school year started, and I would have seen them more in Europe had I the money to do so. (I saw Popmart four times, Columbus being my first ever U2 show and Dublin being the best.) U2 inspired naive hope in me back then; they still inspire hope in me, but it is a well-weathered hope pocked with holes of disillusionment and experience. I have written extensively about my love for U2 and their positive effect on my life and my awareness about the world, so I won't go into it here.
My favorite memory of listening to U2 during that year in Luxembourg - aside from seeing them live in Dublin - was getting out of the Zoo Station on a trip to Berlin with Achtung Baby in my ears. It was only six years after the fall of the wall, and much of the world had a naive hope that we were basically done with conflict and just needed to clean up the rest of the messes left by history. Few saw the rise of white supremacism and xenophobia that has raped the minds of the West in recent times. Those who saw the rise of nationalism as a threat, men like Samuel Huntington, whom I thought ridiculous when I read the Clash of Civilizations, turned out to be more correct than our nightmares could have predicted. It came out the year before I went to Luxembourg; I didn't read it until I returned to the US. Maybe I would have noticed the creeping nationalism in Europe had I read it before MUDEC.
Radiohead was my next favorite band. Ok Computer is a masterpiece and that was in my ears as much as any U2 album. It sparked fledgling feelings of disillusionment that came roaring through my mind like a forest fire later on, especially when we invaded Iraq on false pretenses that any educated person should have known were false. Yellow cake and eat it, too.
Dave Matthews Band was the first band that was fully my own, that I had listened to from the beginning, before they were well known. I bought Before these Crowded Streets somewhere in Europe, probably at a Virgin Megastore or a Tower Records. Dave was in his twenties when I started listening; he was close enough to me in age to feel like he spoke for my generation. The overriding theme of DMB music then was live for today, for you don't know if there is a tomorrow. When you're twenty that seems like sound advice. When you're forty, you realize that if you had only lived for today all your life, you wouldn't have made it to forty.
R.E.M. was another favorite. New Adventures in Hi-Fi was the album at the time. I'd come to R.E.M. through Automatic for the People, when I was starting to discard the shitty music I liked as a child for timeless, serious artists. That was about the time I got my first U2 album - Achtung Baby. R.E.M., like Radiohead, was another kind of wake-up band for me, a band who told me that the world was a messed up place but definitely worth fighting for.
The other band that I loved back then is the only one that I don't still love right now, The Smashing Pumpkins. I have been listening to them recently, having forgotten they existed, and yes, Melancholy and Infinite Sadness and Siamese Dream are albums I can still listen to, if only for the nostalgia. The world is a vampire, for sure.
I was also listening to a lot of women - Sheryl Crow, Sarah Mclachlan, Garbage, Lauren Hill. It was the year of the women, when all the Grammy nominees for Album of the Year were women, another indicator of the naive hope we had in the nineties. I mean, the president was impeached for sexual acts that year. It looked like we were about to start treating women as equals rather than second class citizens to be abused and controlled. None of us could have imagined we'd have a serial sexual predator who brags about grabbing women by the pussy as a president supported by a majority of white people. The #MeToo movement today shows how blind we were back then.
I had a cassette tape of Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing that my roommate Christine "borrowed" but never returned, so I ended up buying the CD on a trip to Bruges, Belgium. I bought Garbage's 2.0 in Edinburgh, Scotland, when I was trying to buy CDs of artists from their country of origin. It's funny the things you remember when there are so many bigger things that slip through memory's cracks.
Also in heavy rotation: Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, Better than Ezra, No Doubt, Blues Traveler, Counting Crows, Stone Temple Pilots, Third Eye Blind, Beck, Weezer, Nirvana, Madonna's Ray of Light, Pearl Jam...a fun memory of Pearl Jam is John P. playing "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" on an out-of-tune guitar in some tiny restaurant in Cinque Terre, Italy after a storm interrupted our dinner on the terrace and forced us inside. It was our first weekend on our own in Europe and many students had taken the overnight train to Cinque Terre to hike through the five villages along the Mediterranean. It was also my first time seeing that sea that has stolen my heart.
Then there were those artists I discovered in Europe, some I had heard of before and never listened to and some who were completely new to me - Francis Cabrel, Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, The Smiths (through Morrissey), The Beatles, Elton John, The Clash, Oasis, The Verve and Richard Ashcroft, Suede, The Charlatans, Travis, Christy Moore, Ash, The Corrs, and even what we called Eurotrash, which was electronic music - house, trance, that kind of dance stuff. I actually liked it at the time.
Then there are those songs that I will forever associate specifically with the MUDEC experience - that Chumbawamba song comes to mind, and Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn," The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," Blur's "Song 2," Barbie Girl," any of those Spice Girls songs, Chemical Brothers' "Block Rockin' Beats," Robbie Williams's "Millennium," Cher's "Believe," "Ghetto Superstar," all of those Aerosmith songs that sound the same where Alicia Silverstone was in the videos, Stardust's "The Music Sounds Better with You," Ace of Base, Fatboy Slim, and as I was recently reminded, Elton John's Di version of "Candle in the Wind."
The pop charts were absolute crap. Check out the Top 100 in the UK in 1997. Crap, crap, and more crap. There was so much great music that didn't chart as high because of the way the tone deaf music industry started tracking "popularity." The nineties were the first Soundscan decade, which destroyed pop music. But I'll save that for another time.
So twenty days until Europe, then another ten until the MUDEC 50th anniversary celebration. I can hardly keep from being distracted. Shoot, I haven't been this excited for a trip in ages, and in the last ten years I've been to Ireland, Morocco, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Spain, Lebanon, Italy, France, and for one brief day, Turkey. This time, I won't have to decide which albums to pack - I'm taking all of them.
The first band, of course, was U2. It was the Pop era. I had seen them twice in Dublin before the school year started, and I would have seen them more in Europe had I the money to do so. (I saw Popmart four times, Columbus being my first ever U2 show and Dublin being the best.) U2 inspired naive hope in me back then; they still inspire hope in me, but it is a well-weathered hope pocked with holes of disillusionment and experience. I have written extensively about my love for U2 and their positive effect on my life and my awareness about the world, so I won't go into it here.
My favorite memory of listening to U2 during that year in Luxembourg - aside from seeing them live in Dublin - was getting out of the Zoo Station on a trip to Berlin with Achtung Baby in my ears. It was only six years after the fall of the wall, and much of the world had a naive hope that we were basically done with conflict and just needed to clean up the rest of the messes left by history. Few saw the rise of white supremacism and xenophobia that has raped the minds of the West in recent times. Those who saw the rise of nationalism as a threat, men like Samuel Huntington, whom I thought ridiculous when I read the Clash of Civilizations, turned out to be more correct than our nightmares could have predicted. It came out the year before I went to Luxembourg; I didn't read it until I returned to the US. Maybe I would have noticed the creeping nationalism in Europe had I read it before MUDEC.
Radiohead was my next favorite band. Ok Computer is a masterpiece and that was in my ears as much as any U2 album. It sparked fledgling feelings of disillusionment that came roaring through my mind like a forest fire later on, especially when we invaded Iraq on false pretenses that any educated person should have known were false. Yellow cake and eat it, too.
Dave Matthews Band was the first band that was fully my own, that I had listened to from the beginning, before they were well known. I bought Before these Crowded Streets somewhere in Europe, probably at a Virgin Megastore or a Tower Records. Dave was in his twenties when I started listening; he was close enough to me in age to feel like he spoke for my generation. The overriding theme of DMB music then was live for today, for you don't know if there is a tomorrow. When you're twenty that seems like sound advice. When you're forty, you realize that if you had only lived for today all your life, you wouldn't have made it to forty.
R.E.M. was another favorite. New Adventures in Hi-Fi was the album at the time. I'd come to R.E.M. through Automatic for the People, when I was starting to discard the shitty music I liked as a child for timeless, serious artists. That was about the time I got my first U2 album - Achtung Baby. R.E.M., like Radiohead, was another kind of wake-up band for me, a band who told me that the world was a messed up place but definitely worth fighting for.
The other band that I loved back then is the only one that I don't still love right now, The Smashing Pumpkins. I have been listening to them recently, having forgotten they existed, and yes, Melancholy and Infinite Sadness and Siamese Dream are albums I can still listen to, if only for the nostalgia. The world is a vampire, for sure.
I was also listening to a lot of women - Sheryl Crow, Sarah Mclachlan, Garbage, Lauren Hill. It was the year of the women, when all the Grammy nominees for Album of the Year were women, another indicator of the naive hope we had in the nineties. I mean, the president was impeached for sexual acts that year. It looked like we were about to start treating women as equals rather than second class citizens to be abused and controlled. None of us could have imagined we'd have a serial sexual predator who brags about grabbing women by the pussy as a president supported by a majority of white people. The #MeToo movement today shows how blind we were back then.
I had a cassette tape of Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing that my roommate Christine "borrowed" but never returned, so I ended up buying the CD on a trip to Bruges, Belgium. I bought Garbage's 2.0 in Edinburgh, Scotland, when I was trying to buy CDs of artists from their country of origin. It's funny the things you remember when there are so many bigger things that slip through memory's cracks.
Also in heavy rotation: Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, Better than Ezra, No Doubt, Blues Traveler, Counting Crows, Stone Temple Pilots, Third Eye Blind, Beck, Weezer, Nirvana, Madonna's Ray of Light, Pearl Jam...a fun memory of Pearl Jam is John P. playing "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" on an out-of-tune guitar in some tiny restaurant in Cinque Terre, Italy after a storm interrupted our dinner on the terrace and forced us inside. It was our first weekend on our own in Europe and many students had taken the overnight train to Cinque Terre to hike through the five villages along the Mediterranean. It was also my first time seeing that sea that has stolen my heart.
Then there were those artists I discovered in Europe, some I had heard of before and never listened to and some who were completely new to me - Francis Cabrel, Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, The Smiths (through Morrissey), The Beatles, Elton John, The Clash, Oasis, The Verve and Richard Ashcroft, Suede, The Charlatans, Travis, Christy Moore, Ash, The Corrs, and even what we called Eurotrash, which was electronic music - house, trance, that kind of dance stuff. I actually liked it at the time.
Then there are those songs that I will forever associate specifically with the MUDEC experience - that Chumbawamba song comes to mind, and Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn," The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," Blur's "Song 2," Barbie Girl," any of those Spice Girls songs, Chemical Brothers' "Block Rockin' Beats," Robbie Williams's "Millennium," Cher's "Believe," "Ghetto Superstar," all of those Aerosmith songs that sound the same where Alicia Silverstone was in the videos, Stardust's "The Music Sounds Better with You," Ace of Base, Fatboy Slim, and as I was recently reminded, Elton John's Di version of "Candle in the Wind."
The pop charts were absolute crap. Check out the Top 100 in the UK in 1997. Crap, crap, and more crap. There was so much great music that didn't chart as high because of the way the tone deaf music industry started tracking "popularity." The nineties were the first Soundscan decade, which destroyed pop music. But I'll save that for another time.
So twenty days until Europe, then another ten until the MUDEC 50th anniversary celebration. I can hardly keep from being distracted. Shoot, I haven't been this excited for a trip in ages, and in the last ten years I've been to Ireland, Morocco, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Spain, Lebanon, Italy, France, and for one brief day, Turkey. This time, I won't have to decide which albums to pack - I'm taking all of them.
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