30 Years, 30 Days: An Introduction

Sept 1st, 2010

I have an old and dear friend (let's call her Suzie, because that is her name) who says we belong to a special little club based solely on the random day of the month that we were born on: the 30th. She was born on January 30th, I was born on September 30th. She texts me on the 30th of each month to wish me a "Happy 30", referring of course to the day of the month and not my age. However, by the time we reach September 30th this year, I will be 30 years old. Which is a milestone, I'm told.

Another friend, whom we will call Rocco for the same reason, asserts that when you turn 30, you say goodbye to "a decade of bullshit" (he plastered it all over his 30th birthday invitations, we all had a good chuckle). His point is that all through your preceding ten years, no one really takes you seriously because you're just some 20-something punk kid. But once you hit your 30 mark, you get to remake yourself as the adult you want to be. He says at midnight, you slam the door to your 20s behind you and open the door to your 30s, and brother, it's glorious. I like his approach, particularly because large parts of my twenties (hell, large parts of the last month) have been rife with bullshit. Also, because it's optimistic and very take-charge, none of that "Woe is me, I'm 30 and blah blah blah..." stuff that TV and magazines posit as the "normal" reaction to turning 30.

But this isn't what any of the following is going to be about.

I was at work today, thinking about my approaching 30th, and mulling over what I was going "to do". And when I say "to do", I am not referring to the grand scheme of things, as in what I'm going to do with my life. I was mostly wondering what I was going to do for my birthday, as a celebratory day, with friends and loved ones. I said to myself "I have thirty days to come up with something." And with it being 30 days to my 30th year, and it being slightly later in the morning and having had a couple of cups of tea, the numeric correlation was not lost on me.

How could I sum up my 30 years, including the ones I was barely cognizant for? What do I love right now, and have loved my entire life? Easy answer: music. Songs. Records. Bands. Hearing music. Talking about music. Hearing others talk about music. Collecting bits and snippets of trivia and anecdotes about all things music. I was going to sum up my 30 years in terms of what various pieces of music, genres, albums have come along in my lifetime and what they've meant to me as a listener. And probably as a musician, too, although that doesn't come about until almost halfway in.

So that's my plan. 30 days to write about 30 years of music. Now, to establish some ground rules. The songs and artists that I choose to speak about over the month, I choose for one reason: they mean something to me. Or, they meant something to me. They set something fluid and ineffable into a context, they conjure a memory of a moment, or a series of moments. I will most likely skip many things that have been deemed "important" in terms of "Modern Music History". It is simply because those things were not important to me. I have no interest in delving into the accepted canon of pop music. I have only interest in exploring my own personal canon, based solely on whether or not I still carry it with me, whether or not it still informs my listening landscape. To ask me why I write about that band instead of this band is as silly as asking a painter why he didn't choose to paint whatever was behind him. The answer: because I wasn't looking over there.

Okay, deep breath, here we go. And as a closing note, I am very aware of my "on-again-off-again" relationship with blogging. Let's just say that I won't promise I'll make it all the way to September 30th and the year 2010. But I will promise to try. As long as I can keep coming up with something interesting for each year (interesting to me, at least), I will keep writing. And anyone is welcome to chime in with their own memories and recollections of a year and what they were listening to. Just remember the ground rules. And feel free to write your own personal canon, I'd look forward to reading it.

Off we go, to begin at the beginning, which is 1980...