Five Musical Artifacts I Thought Would Make Me Look Cool If A Girl Knew I Was Into Them

I'm shallow. And a little pretentious. I confuse musical taste with personal value and as such, I've often tried to manipulate people's opinions of me through my record collection. It's lead to some alienating experiences and some shitty records. Here are five musical artifacts I thought would make me look real cool if a girl knew I was into them. Each failed.

There comes a time in every suburban teenage boy’s life when he decides to cast off the bling-laden shackles of the rap world and immerse himself in the murky waters of experimental hip-hop. I hit this stage like a bag of balls. No longer would I pretend to be interested in all that guns and hoes nonsense! Oh no! I was going to care about serious lyrical invention married to avant-garde takes on the tired tropes of East coast boom-bap. Buying this album from the Norwich HMV’s post-Christmas sale felt like a turning-point: I was about to become part of something weird and underground--something my friends didn’t know about. And that’s the important thing to remember about music: a supposed sense of superiority over your peers. That I’ve never managed to listen to the thing the whole way through and remember nothing about it now other than the first track beginning with a circus-organ sample, I think, is a damming indictment of something or other. Largely, no doubt, of my own inadequacy as a listener and as a person (Look! A weird album you’ve never heard of! Kiss me!). But, also, possibly, of underground hip-hop largely being really boring guys droning on about "trans-human transplants in Benzedrine dreams/Acid-laced tea with metaphorical Custard Creams" or whatever.

We all remember where we were when the Queen Mother died, right? I was lying on the floor of my Aunt’s house praying that the newsflash would be over so I could go back to making everyone watch Kerrang! TV. In my defense, the video for "Control" by Puddle of Mudd was great and Bowling For Soup clips were, and always will be, a Laugh.

I first bought Kerrang! a few weeks into high school. I was seeking some kind of escape from those HORRIBLE and AWFUL confines of a small market-town, and the easiest to do that was to read badly written articles about Dani Filth. I voluntarily bought "Starbucks" by A, not because I wanted to get one over the man and his wanton late-cultural capitalist desires, but because it got five "K!"s and was the single of the week. I would have swapped a nut for a seat at Slipknot’s table at the K! Awards.

Me and Kerrang! split up after a babysitter read a copy I’d left lying around the lounge that featured a rather racy interview with American Head Charge. It was complimented by a photomontage of hell raisin’ rockers Hieronymus Bosch wearing very little apart from spiked-collars and simulating drug abuse in a Premier Inn. In the ensuing humiliation, I realised bloodletting and endless make-up was never going to be me.

By the age of 13 you feel like you know a bit about the world, you’ve tired of your parents' company, and you’ve realized school discos suck. You're tired of life and you need a release. Enter: the internet. Everything is OK now.

It was back then that Kazaa struck. It blew my mind and I began compiling mixtape masterpieces which I thought would impress my classmates accompany coach journeys on school trips.

The problem was that with so much choice and so little knowledge, I developed the tastes of a madman. I was listening to grainy MP3s of "Every Day" by Slade next to B.B. King’s "The Thrill Has Gone" and "Power Lunch" by Har Mar Superstar on my blocky, green "Bass Enhanced" Ministry of Sound walkman. At that point, "This Boy" was my favourite Beatles song (largely because it was the only one I'd ever heard).

I was a weird peninsula of music taste, separated from the world by an ocean of pretension.

Before moving to New Cross, I’d been to London about six times. One of them was specifically so me and my mum could go to a branch of Virgin Megastore and splash some birthday gift cards on albums I couldn’t find in Norwich. I came back with Ben Folds’ weak as piss solo debut Rocking the Suburbs and Burned Mind by Michigan-based noise dudes Wolf Eyes. That’s just how eclectic I was; even back then, before YouTube existed, before Spotify, before everything.

Obviously, the Wolf Eyes record--apart from being "totally brutal" and mum-scaring (which, surely, sadly, is the only transgressive thing about noise, a genre of otherwise pretty much zero worth and zero invention)--was pretty toss. I felt 20-feet-tall as I sent my mum to the counter to pay for it (the Ben Folds CD had a Parental Guidance sticker on the front and she wanted to check whether or not it was appropriate for me to listen to). I ended up talking about it a lot rather than listening to it, so I let my best friend’s girlfriend borrow it and eventually swapped it for CDRs of Michael Mayer’s Immer and Kompakt Total 4 with a guy from the internet who lived in Wakefield and knew someone who’d killed a prostitute with a brick. True story.

I also asked Father Christmas for an Old Man Gloom album once, got it, turned it off after 30 seconds of a distorted voice warbling "THIIISSSSSSSSS ISSSSSSSSS AAAAAA GIIIIIIIIIIFFFFFTTTT" and eventually swapped that for some microhouse too.

We were kidding ourselves. It’s just shit, right?

@bain3z