kid fears

a song from a band/artist you hated as a child
(topic altered to: a song you hated as a child)

One could hope that with age our standards become loosened from experience, our interests become wider, and our pursuits become more mature and full of more depth. As a child I only had the chance to become exposed to everything that funneled through the cultural siphon of the other people in my house. From them all I got a decent sense of what existed outside of the household walls and perhaps even beyond that stop sign down the block, but this was in a time before the internet and when a kid's only real resource of musical discovery was the local radio, bins of vinyl at the public library, and this sweet 1970s album reference guide with a laminated cover he nabbed at a yard sale.

None of that fully accounts for the fact that I was born in the late-seventies and really only started to discover music around 1981 or 1982 in a post-MTV culture that I consumed through Friday Night Videos that consisted of timely acts like Toto, Survivor, Men at Work, Laura Branigan, and Culture Club. This sort of easy to digest music pervaded through the eighties and really became my most formative musical impression. So much of this music still prevails in my day-to-day listens on the iPod in a way that a different generation would harken to a whole other set of songs that hit them deeply.

What this means is that even while I was reaching to discover music that came before and visited my birth and those hidden treasures hiding out on college radio, when I was a kid Journey, Stevie Nicks, and Tom Petty were still the center point of my musical compass. At the time I didn't have the patience for a lot of stuff I listen to now. I would say some of it was too adult for me, dealing with themes far beyond my years or sonically textured in ways that took too many listens to grasp. I will admit that I was much quicker to link myself to Led Zeppelin whereas the original blues they ripped off didn't get much spin. I loved the Eagles, but it took me through my teens before I could stomach much traditional country. And I sometimes thought ballads were just boring. Case in point - loathed the song then, love it now.