My Sonic Time Machine

“Just another bunch of torn-down college graduates

trying to find a place to set down for a while

too pumped up to fake it

too belligerent to take it

sitting down, early town.”

--Lloyd Cole

Making requests of Definer seems unfair if I am not going to share in the burden of creation. Thus, I give you Thesaurus at 19 via my sonic time machine.

Take yourself back a few years. Well, take yourself back a few more still. The period in question is the early Nineties and Thesaurus is a skinny kid desperate to be cool in the large city where s/he is studying. This sprawling suburbia (Los Angeles) was a revelation of sorts. Hair gel was a necessity for everyone, not an accessory for fraternity pledges. The modern SUV was neither ubiquitous nor desirable. Instead, people with sufficient funds drove European and Japanese sports cars, while the rest of us made due with cheaper American copies or sensible sedans.

Los Angeles was a long ribbon of asphalt, unfolding its secrets through the lenses of our sunglasses. While being cool often meant being in the right place, what I remember most is the effort to get there. We always seemed to be in motion from one spot to the next, as if the traffic of the freeway system for which the city is famous had parked itself in our own lives. Coffee shops had just come back in vogue, and ripped jeans were a new style. Melrose Avenue was a cool street with great shopping, not a television show in syndication. We were trying so hard to be cool, when not caring would have been the coolest quality of all.

More than all these things, however, was the constant feeling of failure. The confusion of diminishing hormones, beautiful co-eds, and many privileged peers made the welter of activity on and off campus disorienting. All the while the sound of what we now call alternative music was the background for my transition into more adult discomfort and angst.

I have been able to return to the Los Angeles of my adolescence via some tracks that I downloaded from Emusic (www.emusic.com). Lush, that lovely British band that sounds so sweet singing about unhappy experiences (really, what British band doesn’t) has transported me back to a period that I recall for an excess of opportunities and a singular sense of self-disappointment. Hearing certain songs pulls my memory westward, and these Lush songs are temporal anchors for my disaffection. This makes my music collection a time machine of sorts, and I am beginning to feel like an extra from High Fidelity.

Some talk of the transformative power of music; right now I am interested in the transportive power of music. I wonder if I were to act as a DJ for my memory then what order would I arrange the playlist of my life. Better yet, maybe I could experience my past in a different way than I lived it. For instance, maybe I could skip the ex’s mix-tape and just leave the soundtrack for the early weeks of relationship on repeat. Weirdly, however, I think I like the depressing tracks best.

Let’s be honest, Voice of the Beehive, Morrissey and Lloyd Cole were much better friends than the vapid pop of the Lightning Seeds. Moreover, the memories are stronger when the songs or feelings attached to them are sad. I actually liked being depressed to these songs, if that makes sense.

Well, fellow bloggers, I gave my sonic time machine a whirl, but where will your own take us? Open the road map of your youth, switch on the radio, and play it.