Where Were You?
posted by on July 12 at 12:12 PM
Reading today’s Slog on funny tombstones, I was reminded of an old Internet classic:
As the story goes, teenage Harv died unexpectedly in a car crash, and his parents had this made to honor his hard rockin’ ways for the ages.
This raises so many questions.
Were his parents close enough to Harv that they could name his favorite bands from memory? Or did they dig through the recently deceased’s bandanas and roach clips to find his ticket stubs? What if they were wrong? What edits would Harv want to make from beyond the grave? (Was he really way into Elton John and Judas Priest? Was his gay-dar that well-tuned?)
How would you feel about a permanent, posthumous list of your favorite bands, assembled when you were a musically vulnerable teen and associated with your name forever?
When I was 15 I was well on my way to the sophisticated tastes I enjoy today, but I also listened to some pretty crap music. Had I driven a stolen car off a cliff in 1990, my rockin’ tombstone, as compiled from the unsorted pile of tapes in my bedroom, could have read something like:
MINISTRY KMFDM SKINNY PUPPY THE ORB CASSANDRA COMPLEX EMF BRIAN ENO FRONT 242 LORDS OF ACID POP WILL EAT ITSELF PRIMUS CONSOLIDATED ORBITAL CARTER THE UNSTOPPABLE SEX MACHINE REVOLTING COCKS XYMOX MINISTRY
Ugh.
Not to say that some of those bands haven’t stood the test of the time (I won’t say which), but at 31 I would want to apply some revisionist history to my tastes. (I won’t say which.)
Edit: Watchful commenter Snark points out that it would be rather difficult for me to have an Orbital tape back in ‘90, at least in suburban New Haven, since Chime was available only as a limited UK cassette single at the time. Correct. To defend my presicent taste and my slightly hazy memory, I will clarify that I did have some Orbital on tape, at least in the form of Chime’s appearances on the techno mixtapes I bought on day trips to New York, as well as on some John Peel I’d taped off the BBC World Service. This selection might not have jumped out at my parents, especially in their moment of grief, but it was there and hopefully someone will put it on my tombstone, dammit.
um, you def. would not have had an Orbital cassette on your floor in 1990 unless you got one of the few Chime Cassette Singles that were only released in Enlgand.
on a lighter, less assholey note, you and i would have had nearly the exact same pile of cassettes, except take out Primus and sub The Smiths, Take out Skinny Puppy (cuz they scrared me) and add New Order and drop Eno (cuz i wasn't that cool, yet) and add Depeche Mode...a bit more Synth Pop than you but still on the industrial tip...
nice post, but the Orbital inclusion w/re: to 1990 was a major, unnecessary snafu.
I totally disagree. Revisionist history of one's own taste is weak--own your past!
Ah, yes, synthpop was very much a part of my life at the time as well. Depeche Mode and New Order, mainly. 90 and 91 was when I was in the midst of discovering "industrial" (in the Nettwerk/Waxtrax sense) and thus my cassette pile would have been heavily weighted towards the second-tier artists of that era...
I guess my point was about a random selection produced out of context -- without my input, my grieving parents might not have picked the best artists to memorialize my tastes.
Starland Vocal Band? They suck!
With the exception of EMF, all the bands you mentioned rocked! How about the industrial supergroup Pigface.
How about the synth pop supergroup Electronic with Benard Sunmer, Johnny Marr, and Neil Tennent.
And DM and NO are bands that have stood the test of time. Their latest releases are among their best.
We need to reminisce over Consolidated at some point, Matt.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).