Good evening! What songs or artists defined you as a teenager? I know this might be dating some of us, but let’s take a stroll down memory lane.
For some reason I loved this Bryan Adams song.
Hope everyone had a good weekend!
Deadsplinter Up! All Night: Teen Angst
Music was a huge part of my teen life but Patti Smith shook me to my core.
Gloria
Cosigned. Here’s the obvious one:
Note the badges and the buttons on Patti’s oversize men’s jacket.
Did you ever read her memoir, Just Kids, about her early life in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe? So beautifully written.
Yes, grabbed it as soon as it came out.
And a third signee to Ms. Smith. A lot of variety for me, not necessarily from my exact teenage years, but tunes from Marshall Crenshaw to Frank Zappa to CSNY to Talking Heads…but this from Joan Armatrading was eye opening.
what can i say…..nowadays im eclectic and love all music
back then i was straight metal…and i looked the part…combat boots…leather trench coat…midnight blue hair…
Was introduced to the Rolling Stones as a teen. Man, I had another generation’s music as the kickoff to my teen angst but here we are.
More contemporary. Late 80s white boy metal with power ballad thrown in.
Mocked at the time because rap was brand new to me, but this song was closer to my own personal truth than I realized.
Manchu, you are totally of my generation!😆🤣💖
Through the past Darkly (the US version!), the 1985 MCA version of Steppenwolf’s Greatest Hits, and Slippery When Wet were the first 3 tapes i bought, when I got my first tiny boom-box, at Best Buy😉
Tour of Duty was what got me loving Paint it Black, and was why I bought that particular album (I ended up loving the *rest* of the songs on it afterward, too!).
And your mentions of Rap, plus that Poison reminded me of the BBD one😁
I was backwards to you. I got hooked on the Stones the summer before Tour Of Duty premiered, so it was kismet.
Well, I grew up in a similar rural area so I was into metal/hard rock with bits of country thrown in.
Well, the younger kids were into Rap more than big hair metal. I didn’t get Rap at the time, but later on it sank in.
Aside from that *one* BBD song and a bit of DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, I was a LOT like you on the rap–didn’t get into that until *after* high sschool…
Mostly because the more popular stuff was that “White Boy Rap” that was later mocked as much as MC Hammer was.
In my rural area, we were about 5-ish years behind the metro areas, music-wise, if stuff wasn’t driven into the ground on the pop radio stations… so we originally *heard about* NWA and the other “gangster rap” folks because of the scandal-y news stories.
It wasn’t until their songs started getting out to my hometown later on, and I listened to the words, that I realized they were good–and were simply speaking truths to power (powers who HATED that truth being spoken!), and the folks who’d painted them as awful were the same sort who’d complained about Metallica, KISS, Cinderella, Poison, GnR, Slaughter, Slayer, all the other *other* Hair-Metal & Rock bands who’d been complained about as we’d grown up (during that ‘ol “Satanic Panic!” crap!🙄)…
After learning *that,* i just started listening to the lyrics, and determined who I liked by the *words* they said😉
Bell Biv DeVoe! I haven’t thought of them in years. Here they are performing at the 1990 MTV music awards, which was probably the high-water mark of pre-grunge American pop music:
Then, of course, this came along. I can still remember where I was the first time I heard this song, and thinking, “this is something new…”
Cousin Matty, BBD’s Poison will *forever* be a favorite of mine, because it came out the summer I went to “geek camp” (“smart-kid” camp), down in St. Paul, the summer between 8th & 9th-ish grade…
I went to the camp to take Russian, because the language fascinated me, back in the Cold War (Told ya!!!! *GEEK* camp!😉😆🤣), and they also offered things like Video editing & production, airbrush painting, math, science & other things…
It was the place that I learned how *not all* of the Twin Cities was either “suburb” or that awful part of town around St. Paul’s “Midway”/State Fair/Dinkytown neighborhood–and that lots of parts–especially the Hamline-Macalaster region was pretty fucking cool to be in (literally a *handful* of blocks south of Midway, but worlds apart, in vibe & experience!)…
That was the summer we went to a Twins game, saw Dick Tracy, and that I fell in love with Shakespeare–because actors from the Guthrie came out to explain what we were going to see when we went to Henry V the next evening–and they basically word-for-word explained the St. Crispin’s Day speech for us, in *Plain American English* so that we could understand the play, and it’s (stretched/ noooot quiiite accurate!) History.
It’s still one of my all-time favorite plays–and I’ve already told my roommates that we need to go see The Henriad, when it’s back at the Guth next Spring!😉😁🤗💖
The reason BBD’s Poison will alllllways be a fave?
Was because in the days before we left camp, there was a big “presentation” show, where the kids who did art stuff were able to showcase their works–and all the kids in the Video Production class showed us their videos on a big screen…
The kids who’d picked Poison as the song for their music video had done a sort of “Day in the Life” video of being at our camp–and they managed to sync up the line “If I were you, I’d take precaution…” *perfectly* with footage from one day at lunch in the (notoriously bad!) cafeteria–with the word “precaution” occurring juuuuuuust as the kid in the video reached out & picked up *something* deemed “edible” by the notoriously terrible cooks in said cafeteria.
*ALL of us kids* ERUPTED into hoots, hollers, & giggles, at the *impeccable* timing of the song lyrics & action in the video–and the kids who made it became minor heroes & celebrities😉😆😂🤣💖
Tovarich! When I was presented with my “where the hell am I supposed to go to college?” dilemma I had my first choice in mind, and got in thankfully, early admission, but my safety school was going to be Brandeis. They had a ton of Russian-Jewish emigré professors and I thought I might like to major in Soviet Studies. Little did anyone conceive (least of all our crack Foreign Service and CIA bureaucracies) that within a few years the Soviet Union and its puppet states would, in the words of Hemingway, referencing going bankrupt, crumble “gradually, and then suddenly.”
Now, if I want to hang out with Russian-Jewish emigrés, I just need to go to Resort [sic] World Casino in Jamaica, Queens.
The Wall was my entire world for about a year.
Mostly Bon Jovi & early 90’s country, tbh!
But as I was looking for songs, I realized that apparently *Helicopters* were also a large influence back then! (At least, when it came to filming some of the most famous songs’ music videos–as was thunder!😆😂🤣)
The Jesus And Mary Chain
When our high school held our senior prom, they asked for seniors’ input into what the…signature song would be? Or the concluding song? A friend of mine circulated a petition that it should be (and this was a little vintage; we weren’t even in middle school when this came out):
(Connoisseurs will know this as “Baba O’Riley,” not “Teenage Wasteland.”)
I had buddies in student government and they said that the administration had put their thumbs on the scale, and although “Baba O’Riley” was the overwhelming favorite, we ended up going with this gruesome vintage hit:
The principal liked it, we later learned.
This next one didn’t exactly influence my childhood, but I used to have this friend who worked at a record store, how cool was that?, and for one of the only times in my life I got high with her and some other friends out back behind the store, and she gave me a copy of a record. When I got home, flying high, I put this record on and laughed and laughed and a couple of my siblings came in and said, “I guess Mattie’s gotten a taste of the herb.”
Cousin Matty, is this how we learn that *you* are the inspiration for the beloved movie Empire Records, in addition to Downtown Abbey?😉😁💖
Only semi-relatedley, much like your class, my high school had a tradition of a “Senior-Year Song,” except *ours* was played at Graduation.
For *multiple* reasons–economic, genre (most of our class switched from popular music to Country, our Jr & Sr year, because of too much repition on the pop radio stations), annnd literally–almost every town in our district had a road that led “down” into said town, because there are LOTS of rolling hills out there, due to the land there being made primarily of glacial moraines from the last ice-age, the preferred choice, and vote winner after our class was polled, was Garth Brooks’ Friends in Low Places…
Buuuuut *because* grownups can be asshats sometimes, and both our class advisor & the schools’ admin thought Friends in Low Places would be *too insulting* to our parents & our peers’ parents, the admin chose a song *for* us…
A song that they liked, which happened to be a damn decade out of place, and which was *completely un-cool* for 1990’s teens…
And that was how a class which graduated in the mid-90’s, ended up with “Man in Motion” from a movie hardly any of us had seen, as our class song🤢🤮😱
It’s an ok song–the inspiration for it was GREAT… BUT it wasn’t *our* class song, and it was completely inappropriate for *us* 😉