Being the youngest child in one's family affords you some interesting opportunities. I took mine up from the darkened corners, constantly observing and absorbing all of the pleasures, travesties, and events of my elder siblings. It can teach some surprising life lessons before you're prepared for them if you take on too much. And even though I know I had a precociousness about my maturity and plan of attack at life, ironically my parents always got on me for dragging my feet.
For me, if there's one thing that I most appreciated about being the youngest was the chance to peel my way through the other music collections in the family - whether it was my parents classic twang, harmless sixties pop, or Air Supply and company or my brother's affinity toward guitar driven rock and peculiar diversions like 2 Live Crew and David Allen Coe or my sister's tastes which always seemed heavily influenced by her cool best friend who brought along Depeche Mode, the Smiths, and Love & Rockets.
I aurally ate it all up and added the fuel of my own interests in Top 40 radio, hair metal, classic rock, and odd nighttime voyages to the Adult Contemporary end of the dial. I started asking for cassette tapes as gifts as early as the fourth grade, and the wonky way in which all of these early reels were heard was from a radio/tape alarm clock combo that I equally cherished and loathed.
These days I thoroughly adore my iPod, and I love my 135GB of iTunes, but there was something very direct about actually handling those records and tapes that I grew up using. I remember the intense worry that followed getting the tape incidentally wound up in the player, causing these threats of something irreplaceable being lost. There was sacredness to the whole matter.
I cherish these early listens, whether they were merely my favorites from the Casey Kasem countdown, Bryan Adams' "Reckless" album, tapes by INXS, Survivor, Journey, Heart, Ratt, or the Cars, these were the formative musical ideas I was digesting with great frequency. And I can say unashamedly that all of these are either replicated or represented on my iTunes nowadays.
But I am not sure if these fully encapsulate the era for me. If there's one band whose break-up truly upset me at the time and would ultimately inspire my taping over their tape that I bought with my hard won money, it would be Wham! I am a tad surprised that after all of these years, George Michael's poppy little musical project that briefly could still sound quite good, especially Everything She Wants.
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