Dec. 17: Noise pollution

 Noise pollution.

That's how one of our grandparents described the heavy metal music we kids listened to back in the 1980s. Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Ozzy Osbourne, RATT, and my favourite, Quiet Riot. A friend of mine gave me Quiet Riot's 1984 album, Condition Critical, for my 12th birthday. My mom looked at the cover and told me it was in poor taste.

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I'm of the opinion that music is the closest we can come to time travel. When Quiet Riot comes on my iPod, I am instantly transported back to adolescence. I am 12 years old again, listening to Kevin DuBrow and Quiet Riot sing that Love's a Bitch and that metal health will drive you mad. These are meaningless stanzas, by the way. There is no such thing as metal health, so it can't drive you mad. But Quiet Riot knew that. They knew they were composing an anthem for teenagers. It didn't have to make sense. It just had to be a catchy song that young people could rally behind.

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Heavy metal used to be the music of rebellion. Find an underachieving student in school - one that couldn't be bothered to study and hung out too much at the smoke doors - and you could be reasonably assured that heavy metal was their music of choice. That's not the case any more. Today, it's hip hop. And yes, I am a hypocritical fuddy duddy because that's the music I hate the most. That's the music that I consider noise pollution.

Pardon me, but there's just so much more to sing about than thug life. Banging hos and pimpin in da hood... yeah, no thanks. Maybe the young people can relate, but not me. I ain't playing that on my stereo.

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But hey... generation gap, right? Way back in 2005, the newspaper where I worked had an internship program. One of the interns was a 20-year-old journalism student from the GTA. I took on a tour of Glengarry county one day and this girl, who was not shy in the slightest, started flipping through my CD collection. She found nothing that she liked, even criticized my Prince music. "What's wrong with you?" she asked. "I have good taste in music," I said.

For the record, Prince is better than the Backstreet Boys. Picky Leos everywhere agree.

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Flashback to 1985 or so. I'm watching TV and on comes an ad for these records:

The ad showed young people dancing at a party. The music they were dancing to were old hits from the late 50s and early 60s. Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gary US Bonds, the Animals, groups like that.

I don't know why I decided to save my allowance to order that music. It wasn't hip at all, not by the standards of my friends anyway. I guess I just wanted to jones on some of the music that my parents must have like when they were kids. I used to play it in my room and hope my mom or dad would knock on the door and tell me they remembered when the song I was listening to was a hit. That only happened once. My dad told me he remembered this one song:

 

I wish I still had those old tapes. They're likely somewhere in my parents house in Calgary, probably so old and worn out that the tapes wouldn't play anymore. Oh well. Maybe it's telling that the older music is, the less offensive I find it.

Bill Haley would totally agree.