Remember when you first started listening to music? Not talking about Raffi and The Wiggles, talking about that first bit of music that your parents looked at you squirrelly about, “why do you like that?” For me, it was laying on the ugly ass orange carpet of my childhood room with my first boom-box, and putting in a Green Day “Dookie” cassette tape that I got for my eleventh birthday. That carpet stayed the same for years, moms wouldn’t change it out on account of her figuring if she did, I’d just find a way to dirty the new one up. The music that went into the boom box however, that kept growing. Soon it was a Weezer cassette, then Soundgarden, then Nirvana, then Pearl Jam, then Widespread Panic, Phish, Jerry, and on and on. That boom box held it down for me for a long time. Lot’s of mix tapes, lots of “turn that damn music down” thrown it’s way.
When a lot of those cassettes, and later, CD’s, passed through that box, a good handful of those bands were just starting out. These were their first releases, and me, I was just an unsuspecting youth, no foresight as to where this music was going, no insight into what these musicians were thinking or what they’d become. Who knew we’d still be hearing “The Sweater Song” on the radio to this day?
Then of course we graded out of boom-boxes. I-Pods, and pads, and gadgets, and thousands of songs in our pockets and millions on the YouTubes, now it’s even harder to keep up. I remember hearing Portugal. The Man’s “People Say” for the first time on a computer. I Played it over and over again. It was just one song, but if it had been on the boom box I would have worn that sucker out. It’s been a few years since that release, and these guys are still doing it, and doing it extremely well. I’ve still got no foresight on where a band might go when I first hear them, there’s too many bands, I can only guess at who’s going to be great. It’s best to just let time tell how it’s going to play out. That being said, I hope that the kids getting side-eyes from their parents while they’re blasting these tracks enjoy those looks. We’ll all be giving them one day. That’s how it works.