Pixies and Pump Up the Volume

When I was a kid, a movie came out called Pump Up the Volume. It was the best movie Christian Slater made, and it really spoke to me. I loved it so much, I had to have the soundtrack on this new thing called a CD. My mom must have bought it for me.

That CD came in one of those really huge cardboard boxes they were wrapped in in the beginning. And I put that CD into my little boombox in my room and maybe my whole life changed at that point.

I was already very much into music. I loved the Beastie Boys and Run D MC, and Guns n' Roses was definitely a mainstay in my ears. But I had never heard of Concrete Blonde, Leonard Cohen, the Pixies, or Cowboy Junkies. My life would be shit if I never heard of them, and I have this movie to thank.

My musical taste is broad. I often wonder how it got that way. It seems that I have one of those minds that isn't satisfied with the mere consumption of anything. I have to know everything's origin. I want to compare what's out now to what came before. I want to hear what's next because I'm so familiar with the tools and inspirations that will have brought the artists of the future to those brand-new things.

People who are older than I am are amazed I know their generation's music. I've read books about music to make that happen. I've checked CD's and records out of libraries. I've burned lamps to their ends in deep conversations with people who intensely love this or that genre or artist. I'm a vulture of culture and I'm voracious. I'm weird and intense like that.