You know those times when ephemeral moments aren't? When a sliver of time is so resonant that it stays with you your whole life? They're the cultural touchstones you talk about at work picnics because everybody from the same generation can instantly recall precisely where they were, what they were doing and how that one event directly or indirectly brought them to that very function. Pearl Harbor, the Berlin Wall, September 11, John Stocco's quarterback draw to beat Michigan in 2005—all of them the same.
Well, here's another one for you. I was riding in my mother's Grand Am going South on 57th Avenue, just leaving Pick 'n Save on a summer afternoon with some groceries—we were having tacos. Traffic was casual, the sky partly cloudy, temperature comfortable. I rolled the windows down and turned the volume on the radio up. It was the first time I ever heard Interpol.
The song was ""PDA,"" and I didn't understand why it didn't sound more like the Walkmen. They were from New York, so why weren't they angrier? ""We have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight""—what the heck was this guy talking about? An offer of hospitality in one of America's most hostile cities? Is that even what that lyric meant? Who was he kidding?
I cast it off as another low-ball buzz band that Q101 got paid to promote, and waited another two years before realizing how criminally wrong I was.
Of course, bad first impressions aren't usually so damning—hell, how else would someone as awkward as myself ever score a single date in high school, let alone three whole dates—and I'm sure the likelihood of any of you reading my column next week depends less on how well I've written this one than whether it was next to the Humanities toilet when you got there.
That's the way this stuff goes. No, I wasn't crazy about Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf on first listen—but you'd better believe when I was driving home from high school with the windows rolled down, that was the album I was blasting. For the longest time I used to swear that Dizzee Rascal was a wreck of an emcee. You know, one time I really thought At the Drive-In could save rock 'n' roll.
It all seems grossly ignorant now, but so do most of the ideas I had in ninth grade. Because, in the end, first impressions say as much about us as they do the songs or artists themselves.
You live and you learn, they say, and all those adolescent ideals I held can be linked to a lot of the music I still listen to—same songs, different ideas. So what's more interesting to me is not intra-human, but inter-human disparity. Political scientists have tracked these gaps in viewpoints to such a science that they can predict voting behavior based on demographics; and we see the same thing in music. It's the reason my grandmother never bought a CD player until she heard that personality-less hunk Josh Groban; and also the reason my uncle has so many posters of those riot grrrls Sleater-Kinney hanging around his house.
There's a margin for error; and that's certainly not to say there isn't crossover, but even that is relatively predictable. Guess which album all three generations of attendees at Sparks Family Thanksgiving Dinner 2008 could agree on. Why, the one modern album that best recreated the dime-store-and-a-sundae poptimism of the '60s—She & Him's Volume 1.
So I've got a different story. This one's about the first time I ever heard the band Pavement. It was right in the middle of February, 2004, and the Sparks Family loaded up the mini-van for a trip to visit the eldest sibling while he was attending this very university. His house was just off Broom Street on Dayton, and after lunch he took me to B-Sides and bought me Slanted and Enchanted as a birthday gift. In the car on the way home that night, I slipped the CD into my Discman and leaned my head against the window. ""Summer Babe (Winter Version),"" ""Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite At :17,"" ""No Life Singed Her""—it wasn't a catastrophe attack or a ballsy game-winner, but it may as well have been.
Want to tell Kyle what your first impression of him is? E-mail him at ktsparks@wisc.edu.
