Monday, October 13, 2008

Yeah, I know what that's all about...

JR, to a friend of his aghast at his music choice for Friday night:

A childhood spent listening to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass has consequences.

*snerk* I can't say that I had the same kind of reaction to what I was raised on — hell, I listen to the classic rockers of my parents' youth on a daily basis — but I can definitely see where he's coming from with that. My forays into rock and metal were a result of a backlash of sorts. I had spent some time in College Station, where I was exposed for a time to the Texas-red dirt country music scene, and I loved it — Pat Green, Cory Morrow, Ed Burleson, and others, it was all a refreshing alternative to the more popish music that was being played on the radio. But after I moved north, it was more or less a return to what had been playing everywhere else, which is to say more of the same old Nashville schlock, with only the Dallas stations providing sporadic relief at best. So, off I went to other genres, finding the harder-edged music of Guns 'n'Roses, later Metallica and the like to be right up my alley. (Again, though, the only Metallica I really remember hearing was the singles off that self-titled black album.) Hell, I even went back to the glam metal of Poison and Bon Jovi. I have Slippery When Wet around here somewhere but haven't listened to it in a long time. And it more or less went from there. When I was living in Bryan-College Station, all six of my radio presets in the truck were country; as it stands today, I have 12 presets on the radio in the truck I have now, and only half of them are country stations. I am sure some would accuse me of being narrow-minded for not really considering Shania Twain, Rascal Flatts, et al. to be all that COUNTRY, but I like what I like — and as you see from my musical choices, it's really not as narrow as some might think.