the doors | "spanish caravan" | waiting for the sun | 1968
my freshman and sophomore high school years were spent in rigid self-imposed indoctrination on what was and was not good music. with many bands like the cure, the smiths, the dead kennedys, siouxsie and the banshees, the pixies, etc. i got to the point where i could not only sing along with all their songs, but also name the album, the release date, and describe the cover art. and i had applications to my personal life for many of the obscure and indecipherable song lyrics.
this was due partly to the outward social pressure to choose a clique and identify myself to the rest of the school population as a ____ to facilitate the student body’s compulsive drive toward categorization and hierarchy. (i blame aristotle for high school’s most serious unpleasantries. queue nerd laugh.) it was due in part also to my own drive to formulate an independent and authentic identity using the dysfunctional tools of my culture, i.e. selecting which of the mass-produced items i would consume. it basically came down to the question of which brand i would choose to label myself with for the convenience of society. lastly, it was also due in part to my tendency to get into something that interests me deeply, sometimes too deeply.
this strange and contradictory combination led me to a fierce loyalty to my alt-pop brand and the identification of classic rock as the great nemesis. the kids that were unkind or indifferent to me in high school liked the dead and zeppelin, and therefore i would not even listen to that entire genre. i drew imaginary battle lines on the flimsy ideology of musical taste.
it was a noble endeavor at identity and independence and authenticity largely thwarted by my ignorance, but c’mon, i was 15. and to my credit, i never abandoned my own tastes to conform to my selected genre. (well, maybe that’s not true all of the time – i did buy a violent femmes tape, to my nearly immediate shame and regret. but i never liked erasure or the stone roses just because they fit within the genre.) i knew what i liked and what i didn’t like. but i had foreclosed myself to entire genres based on my clique identity.
having friends tends to force one out of the craziness of ideologies that are well-reasoned only in their isolation [queue mighty boosh milky joe episode music]. in the summer of 1990 i went camping with four friends – dave bradstreet, matt smith, jonah harrison, and justin ririe – in myrtle beach. we had a week on the beach to swim and meet girls. and we all had to take turns with the stereo on the looooong drive from new york to south carolina. that is when friendship broke the barriers of ideology and i learned to like the doors. crossing the battle line was even tougher because i think that was the year the val kilmer movie came out and it was suddenly trendy again to like the doors. not only did i have to betray my genre, but i had to appear to be hopping on the bandwagon. that was probably the thing that terrified me most in high school: the appearance of going along with the crowd.
but i always have known what i like, and i liked the doors. bandwagons and ideologies had to give way. behold my favorite doors song from the summer of 1990 and my first step toward social fulfillment!
