With my fundraiser show coming up this Friday, I'd already been doing some serious delving into the recesses of my memory well before Idolator's Jess Harvell posted this. But when I clicked on the video to see what song he'd picked, and I heard that unmistakable crescendo of sound that brings the track in, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck just the same way they did the very first time I heard it.
I was a sophomore in high school, attending the annual Junior Classical League convention at University High School in Irvine, and after a tough day of declension contests and chariot races the Latin nerds were cutting loose at the Saturday night dance on the floor of the UCI Bren Events Center. I had just begun to feel stirrings of interest toward fellow classicist Andy Rice, who had appealingly floppy hair and very strong opinions about music. I myself was just starting to emerge out of the damage seven years of private Christian school had done to my psyche, where I thought I was being pretty rebellious by listening to Petra and Michael W. Smith's more, erm, experimental songs.
At the dance a bunch of us were grouped in the safety of a circle, and I was slyly edging closer and closer to the cute boy. All of a sudden I heard what sounded like an airplane headed straight for us, and Andy fucking wigged out and started twisting his arms this way and that, singing along at the top of his lungs. I turned around and looked up at the video screen, where jagged images of modern life cut quickly to bodies trampolining across a tranquil blue sky. The lyrics spoke of love and melancholy, feelings just out of reach, set to a pounding electronic beat. All I knew was that I wanted to hear music exactly like this for the rest of my life.
That was the moment that sealed my musical fate. Later that night, after the DJ played Just Like Heaven, I asked Andy to slow dance with me, and then for weeks afterward refused to wash the top I had been wearing because it still smelled like his cologne. He would go back to barely acknowledging me in class while I stole moony glances at him, and I would eventually transfer my affections to another floppy-haired boy named Rio who listened to the Smiths and admired the patchwork Docs I saved my allowance for three months to purchase. But the weekend after the convention I went straight to the Wherehouse near the Orange Mall and dug out their single cassette copy of Substance. My brother and I took turns listening to it until we had every single word memorized. And on KROQ and on Rodney Bingenheimer's after-school public access video show I started discovering all the bands that had come before and learned how to look out for all those that came after.
When I play New Order at 1 in the morning on KALX, spinning in my chair with the audio cranked up as loud as I can bear, I can almost recapture the pure joy of first bouncing up and down to the track on that night long long ago. Bizarre Love Triangle, my heart will always belong to you.
I was a sophomore in high school, attending the annual Junior Classical League convention at University High School in Irvine, and after a tough day of declension contests and chariot races the Latin nerds were cutting loose at the Saturday night dance on the floor of the UCI Bren Events Center. I had just begun to feel stirrings of interest toward fellow classicist Andy Rice, who had appealingly floppy hair and very strong opinions about music. I myself was just starting to emerge out of the damage seven years of private Christian school had done to my psyche, where I thought I was being pretty rebellious by listening to Petra and Michael W. Smith's more, erm, experimental songs.
At the dance a bunch of us were grouped in the safety of a circle, and I was slyly edging closer and closer to the cute boy. All of a sudden I heard what sounded like an airplane headed straight for us, and Andy fucking wigged out and started twisting his arms this way and that, singing along at the top of his lungs. I turned around and looked up at the video screen, where jagged images of modern life cut quickly to bodies trampolining across a tranquil blue sky. The lyrics spoke of love and melancholy, feelings just out of reach, set to a pounding electronic beat. All I knew was that I wanted to hear music exactly like this for the rest of my life.
That was the moment that sealed my musical fate. Later that night, after the DJ played Just Like Heaven, I asked Andy to slow dance with me, and then for weeks afterward refused to wash the top I had been wearing because it still smelled like his cologne. He would go back to barely acknowledging me in class while I stole moony glances at him, and I would eventually transfer my affections to another floppy-haired boy named Rio who listened to the Smiths and admired the patchwork Docs I saved my allowance for three months to purchase. But the weekend after the convention I went straight to the Wherehouse near the Orange Mall and dug out their single cassette copy of Substance. My brother and I took turns listening to it until we had every single word memorized. And on KROQ and on Rodney Bingenheimer's after-school public access video show I started discovering all the bands that had come before and learned how to look out for all those that came after.
When I play New Order at 1 in the morning on KALX, spinning in my chair with the audio cranked up as loud as I can bear, I can almost recapture the pure joy of first bouncing up and down to the track on that night long long ago. Bizarre Love Triangle, my heart will always belong to you.