What I'm listening to right now

Thursday, April 17, 2014

2004

So, I've been reading The AV Club's awesome Fear of a Punk Decade series with earnest over the past few months, as it slowly gets released, and I realized what has bugged me about the articles so far. The series concerns itself with many of the most important albums, bands, and movements of 1990s punk, but, unfortunately, I view all of these albums as a relative outsider.

Yes, I grew up with the albums and bands, and I cherish them just as much as (or maybe even more than) the people who were conscious of their existence in the '90s, but they aren't really mine. Even though the songs have racked up thousands of plays in my CD player, iTunes library, and Spotify over the years, I didn't live the albums. I wasn't there when they were being released. I didn't feel the hype of the artists and the excitement of their shows. I didn't have my life changed by these bands in the same way; more accurately, they just calibrated and corrected my taste in music as it worked its way off of training wheels.

Property of Zack did a great job examining the cultural and musical impact and legacy of albums released in 2003, but their tastes seemed to skew toward the pop/emo side of things. In 2004 was regularly subjected to the likes of Incubus, Lostprophets, and even Courtney Love due to their ubiquity on Fuse, but I always found them to be thoroughly dull and uninspired. I was also bombarded with the aforementioned pop/emo, from bands like Hawthorne Heights, Armor for Sleep, and My Chemical Romance. Although I found myself enjoying the occasional song by these bands, I never took to them like I did so many other artists.

So I decided that I wanted to write about the albums I truly grew up with, since no one else seems to be doing it at the moment. The first album I bought (besides my regrettable boy band purchases in the late '90s/early 2000s) was Good Charlotte's The Young and the Hopeless, a few months after its October 2003 release, so 2004 was about a year or so into my musical journey. I feel that a decade removed is a decent perspective from which to view music, so now seems as good a time as ever to look at what 2004 meant to me and what it means to me now.

I'll do my best to write solely about the albums and artists that I was listening to at that time, ignoring great albums released that year that I later discovered, like Descendents' Cool to Be You or The Hold Steady's debut, Almost Killed Me. I also will do my best not to exclude artists that I quickly abandoned or shunned, instead choosing to explore when and why I moved away from them when they once meant so much to me.

So that's it. I don't have a timetable or a schedule or anything. I'll just write when I feel like it, and I'll try to keep it short-ish, as I tend to ramble when talking about music and/or reminiscing, which could be a lethal combo in this setting. That's all for now. Bye bye.