Friday, 20 April 2012

• Playlist Friday: The Teenage Years

  Greetings Internet!

  Happy Friday! It's time for...

  

  This is feature brought to you by the great minds of (myself), @xplorrn, & @randaness. If you don't know, or you couldn't guess by the title, Playlist Friday is a list of songs that I post on a Friday with a particular theme. Feel free to play along if the theme inspires you. :)

  This week, I continue on my own personal musical timeline. Last week, was Songs From Childhood, and this week we move into the terrible teenage years.

  
  

  To give you a timeline perspective, I'm going to do something that all the wise old ladies warn you against, and give away my age. I was born in 1981. I started high school in 1995, graduated in 1999, and then went on to college, which I went to three different schools before I graduated with a (useless) degree in English in 2005. For the purpose of this blog, I'm going to include my musical memories from about the age of 12 or 13 through my first few years of college.

  Okay, let's get on with it!

   

  1. Pleasant Valley Sunday, the Monkees

  Haha, you weren't expecting this one, were you? Yeah, I was very much into the retro scene in the beginning of high school. I already talked a bunch about The Monkees. HERE is a playlist of nothing but Monkees songs, and HERE is a further musing upon how they affected my life and helped to motivate me to write. Horrid fanfiction at first, but better stuff later. For the short version, I'll just say that someone who was pretty important to me in High School and I were quite into their music for a while. So there you have it. 

  
  

  2. Baba O'Reily, The Who

  I would explain how I got from The Monkees to The Who, but in all honesty I'm not really sure. There was some sort of connection there, and in fact one of my favorite Monkees fanfiction writers (who wrote all about The Monkees with superpowers, a la the Fantastic Four, which I went back and read some of recently so if you're interested I'll give you a link) also wrote fanfiction for The Who. I never read as much of that as I did the Monkees stuff, but it's there. 

  Anyway, this song is not called Teenage Wasteland, it's Baba O'Reily, which you might now recognize because it's the theme to one of the CSI shows (NY, I think?). For some reason or other I purchased a copy of this album, Who's Next on tape cassette and went on to listen to it to death. This isn't my favorite song by them, but it was one that really spoke to me at the time, and I really like it anyway. :)

   

  3. What is Love?, Haddaway

  I feel obliged to post some current music from the time of when I was in high school. I remember listening to the top-40 station, Z-100, but to be honest I don't know what the heck was playing on the radio most of the time. So I tried to think of the most mindless dance music I was hearing in high school and this song came into my head.

  I don't think I really watched Saturday Night Live much in high school, maybe the later years when I had my own TV and I became a night owl. I never saw the movie A Night at The Roxbury, either. And until I went looking for it just now I hadn't the slightest idea of who was responsible for it. I suppose they must have been a one-hit wonder?

  Interestingly enough, Wikipedia informs me that the movie came out in 1998 and this song was released in 1993. That's at least 5 years of "baby don't hurt me." That's like most of my teenage years. O.o

  
  

  4. Lovefool, The Cardigans
  

  I really like this song. I also really like the video, which I suppose was influenced by the fact that I was watching reruns of I Dream of Jeannie at the time.

  So here's an embarrassing story to go along with this. All my teenage stories are mildly embarrassing, to be honest. There was a kid in my first two years of high school that I had a crush on. And maybe he had a crush on me, or maybe he just liked messing with me, because he would tease me a lot. And I don't know if he just guessed or if he knew that I liked this song, because for some reason he would sing it to me at random during classes and whenever he saw me in the hall. So now I can't hear the song without thinking of him.

  Needless to say, nothing happened between us because most of the time nothing happens between me and anyone. Sigh.

   

  5. Don't Speak, No Doubt

  I don't remember the first 30 seconds of this video, so it must have never been played on MTV/VH1 at the time. But this song was kind of everywhere for a period of time in high school. I liked it the first 340 times I heard it. In fact I still like it. But at some point I think I stopped liking it, possibly after the 342nd time it was played on Z-100.

   

  6. Mona Lisas & Mad Hatters, Elton John

  Well, that's about enough of high school, don't you think? :P

  I met my ex in college and we knew each other for about a year before we started calling ourselves more than friends, and then we went on to be together (while being apart from each other) until probably right before I graduated college. So nearly all of my college memories are influenced by her presence even if she wasn't physically there for it.

  She was (is, I suppose) a HUGE Elton John fan. This is one of my favorite Elton John songs. I don't know if I discovered it before or after I met her, but I like it. It speaks to me more that I'm a soulless office drone who knows not if it's dark outside or light (because my cubicle is a fair distance from the windows), but I liked it a lot when I first heard it because it reminds me of the original Spanish Harlem, which is one of my mom's favorite songs and should have been posted in the Childhood playlist but oh well.

   

  7. Kryptonite, 3 Doors Down

  I freakin' love this video. It's creepy sort of but I love it. So watch it or else.

  Also, I love this song. It was sort of a song that the group of friends I had in early college (including my ex) had in common. If go crazy will you still call me Superman? I mean, you never called me Superman to begin with, but that's besides the point isn't it? Ah, good times. I need to stop thinking about them soon.

   

  8. Like A Prayer, Madonna

  That's enough of timely music, don't you think? Yes, I thought so too.

  Madonna and I have kind of a mixed relationship. Some of her music I just love and some I can't stand. This song I absolutely adore. I don't know why, because I'm not very religious and I have never thought of sex as a prayer or anything like that. It wasn't until fairly recently that I somehow grasped what she was trying to say here. But I really love this song anyway.

  When I was in college the school I was at had this room that was supposed to be used for parties and such but wasn't really. I got an on-campus job in which I was supposed to be taking care of this place, but really it consisted of just sitting in the room until the room was closed. Sometimes people would hang out there, but they were mostly my friends who came to hang out with me. Anyway, there was a jukebox there and this was one of the songs that I loved to play on it when I had scrounged up enough quarters. My friends would say, "Why do you like this song so much?" and I really couldn't answer. But I do. 

   

  9. Hard to Say I'm Sorry, Chicago

  Another song from those Jukebox era years. This was one song that I don't know why we all liked it, but we'd play it over and over again on the jukebox, and sing it at the top of our lungs. Why? I don't know.

  This video I picked specifically because it's somewhat extended. Since the jukebox had the album version, when you put in however many quarters it required, you got the album version of the song and not the radio version. Since none of us were huge fans of Chicago, we had only heard the radio version. So imagine our surprise when the song continued after the part where the radio usually cut it off. This video seems to suggest it's another song called "Get Away." We were all astonished, and now whenever I hear the song on the radio I yell at the radio (in my head sometimes) that they should play the ending of it. :P

   

  This playlist ended up containing more contemporary songs than I expected. Hmm.

   

  Thus ends this week's selection. I dunno yet what I'm going to post next week, so feel free to spit out suggestions. :)

   

  What songs remind you of your awkward teenage years?

  What did you think of these songs?

   

  Tomorrow, pictures of curtains or maybe some fiction, depending on my mood. Enjoy your weekend, Xanga! :)
  

  
  

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