The waiting is the hardest part

I was going to do a post just now, but Rapidshare is being terribly slow, Megaupload is usually pretty slow and I don't have time to wait at the moment. So I'm going to talk about myself a little bit as if anyone is actually reading this.

-I am 22 years old.

-I live in Indiana.

-I am currently a sophomore college student going into Telecommuncations which will lead to
film work if I have my way.

-I am an avid music fanatic, so much so that it overwhelms me sometimes. What I mean by that is that I have amassed an insane collection of CDs, just because I always want to hear new stuff. I have burned a lot of CDs that I've not listened to yet, just because I know I want to listen to them eventually. I definitely will get into moods where I listen to one genre or one artist constantly and then I move on to another.

-I listen to all kinds of music from punk rock to classical to blues to rap to folk to country to jazz to rockabilly. I don't get into techno, though, that's the exception. Other than that, I love hearing new things.

-I am much more likely to listen to an old artist than a new one. I don't know if it's that I like the way older albums sound or if new stuff tends to suck. It could be both.

-My most listened to music to, no question, has to be punk rock from the 1976-1980 era. It's my favorite, I can't get enough of it. Most of my favorite albums came from those years.

-My introduction into punk rock came when I was about 12 years old and my older brother told me about this music video he had seen on MTV at 2 in the morning. He was so excited about it, he couldn't contain himself. He had watched a video for the song "Ruby Soho" by Rancid. He went out that day and bought the album. He loved it right away, as did I. He dove into it a little more intensely than I did... at first. A few weeks later, MTV was playing some music videos from the "underground." I didn't realize it until years later that MTV using the term "underground" to describe anything they played was laughable. They played a bunch of the more well known punk bands. Two videos I remember, very vividly, grabbing my attention like a brick to the face. The first was Dropkick Murphys' "Ten Years of Service," and the other was Black Flag's "TV Party." I was hooked immediately. The energy, the unity, the distortion, the riffs, the anger. It was taking the first hit off of a drug that was so addictive that I would sooner die than give up. I bought Black Flag's Damaged and Dropkick Murphys' The Gang's All Here. And for a while (since we didn't have the internet yet), all of the punk I knew was stuff on MTV or on the radio, or stuff that my older brother heard from people at school. That was how I got into Operation Ivy, NoFX, Bad Religion, some crappy pop-punk radio crap, and damn near anything on the Epitaph label. That went on for a little while until I finally heard the Ramones, my gateway into that bliss that is true punk rock. That set me up for when I would later on hear the compilation that I posted a week or so ago that finally did me in, where I could no longer listen to my other records the same way again.

-Believe me, I am well aware of the fact that I crammed nearly ten years into a paragraph, but there it is. Basically I went from radio rock music to semi-underground punk rock to radio "punk" to classic punk to true underground music in all of its various forms. I was a music snob for quite a long time until I realized that the more you learn about music, the more you see how little you know. Just like with anything really. When I finally realized that, I felt fully comfortable to embrace anything, whether it was a mainstream band or the obscure amongst obscurity. Since then I've discovered all kinds of wonderful music because no matter what you like, music is music, and to be snobby about it in any way is counter-productive in my opinion. Forgo the snob factor and embrace mainstream with underground, and you will be much happier, I assure you.

Here are some albums that have, at one point or another, changed the way I think about music and listen to it, in no particular order:
Ramones - Ramones
Misfits - Walk Among Us
Wire - Pink Flag
Dropkick Murphys - Do Or Die
Black Flag - Damaged
Black Flag - The Process Of Weeding Out
John Coltrane - Ascension
Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
Robert Johnson - Complete Recordings
Pixies - Doolittle
DIY: The Modern World
The Pogues - Red Roses For Me
Suicide - Suicide
Desmond Dekker - Rudy Got Soul
Johnny Cash - The Essential Johnny Cash
Tinariwen - Amassakoul
The Fall - Live At The Witch Trials
Woody Guthrie - Dust Bowl Ballads
The Sun Records Story

Those are the main ones. There are countless albums that I love, but each one of these did something unique to me that opened my mind up to many new things. I may be forgetting one or two, but that's the bulk of it. If you haven't heard these albums, go get ahold of 'em somewhere! A couple of them are compilations, but they're great compilations!

Check back in a little bit for a new music post.