Liberties

Since its first episode, I have been a devoted listener of the Blink 155 podcast (yes, I am Original Nation, baby). I was already familiar with Sam through his time in Junior Battles, and vaguely knew Josiah through reading the excellent magazine Exclaim!, so coupling that with my lifelong obsession with blink-182, it was an easy sell.

Let's take this opportunity to segue into some related listening:



My weird, intense obsession with the podcast will be a topic for another time, but it did lead to me checking the episodes of the Myage podcast that both hosts guested on. I think that Myage is a very cool idea for a podcast: The guest goes through a sort of musical autobiography, explaining why certain interests started and how they impacted later listening while giving sonic examples along the way. It's a lot like that scene in High Fidelity. It's perfect for dumb, lame music nerds like me. An example of the format would be the guest playing a song their parents played in the house, then one from the first thing they bought, one from their teenage years, etc.

In the episode above, Sam mentions how grateful he was to grow up in a time when there was so much good music programming, like The Punk Show on MuchMusic (also a favourite of mine) or the glory days of 102.1 The Edge in Toronto. I completely agreed! Before the giant chasm of the internet truly opened up, finding stuff you could relate to through media like TV and FM radio was so exciting. It was private, but also made you feel like you were part of something bigger.

This also made me think. I'm starting to realize that though we are familiar with one iteration of this feeling, it comes in different ways to each generation. I'm sure that my parents got a similar feeling from listening to a particularly talents DJ in the 70's who played new and niche music amidst a landscape otherwise dominated by the products of major labels. Kids younger than me got the same feeling through frequently checking and reading music blogs to find obscure music, which I also participated in, but feel like I missed the glory days of.

I started to wonder if today's equivalent would be someone who puts a lot of effort into curating Spotify (or any other streaming platform) playlists. I'm sure someone out there can't wait for a new playlist from a particular user to come out to discover new things. The entire world of music is truly open to us now and collections are becoming obsolete. Streaming is a raw deal for artists, but if this is the future, let's at least make sure we keep our sense of adventure as music fans.

Through all this, I've decided to start a weekly playlist series called Liberties (I was having trouble thinking of a name, so I scanned iTunes, first checking Bomb the Music Industry!, then Big Star, then !ATTENTION!, before settling on an Attack in Black reference). I'm going to make short playlists, with the cap at 10 songs, and try to release them weekly. Maybe there will be a theme, maybe it will be new stuff I'm into, who knows? I'm just going to place the focus on doing one each week. First though, best thought.

This is the first one, based loosely on the idea for Myage. Starting with a song my mom always played, one from the first CD I bought, a song from my ska phase, from when Bomb the Music Industry! took over my life, from when I started listening to hardcore, from when I only listened to shiny pop-punk for 3 years, from when I moved into emo. I probably could have put many different songs in, but like I said, first thought, best thought.