The Maiden of Youth

The nice thing about being raised in the generation that I have been is that if I ever get sick of the music that's coming out, I can reach back to a whole load of oldies that I've haven't heard before. And for me, those oldies include Classic Rock.

Lately, I've discovered some local radio stations that play Classic Rock. My purpose here is to divulge to you why this particular style of music strikes such a nostalgic chord in me, why I can't seem to get enough of Van Halen, Bryan Adams, Guns N' Roses, Journey, the Scorpions, Iron Maiden, you name it. The reason why I love dual-guitars screaming shredded riffs against high-pitched melodic wailings and heavy drum beats comes from two parts of my childhood: Nintendo and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

If you look back through most Nintendo games that were good, the music is an integral part of the experience. You're clicking and bonking around on the screen, but with synthesized guitars and flat bass drums bonking around with you. No Battletoads level would be the same if you were bonking and kicking in silence, in those 4-bit frog tunnels. No, you needed synthetic guitars and weird baselines to serenade you.
I credit Nintendo, but I think the evolution of classic rock in video games really reached its crescendo with Doom. Now I know you know what Doom is. And if you don't, it's easy to describe: imagine futurisitc military bases filled with snarling hairy scaly monsters drooling and howling in the darkness, while you're fitted with an arsenal of guns bigger than your arm ready to blow the creatures to smithereens. All this to the tune of... well, have you ever listened to Iron Maiden? Yes? If so, take out the words, and you've got Doom. I didn't exactly make this connection until late into my early twenties. It happened one day when I was re-watching both Bill and Ted movies, after a several-year hiatus. Somewhere in the middle of Bogus Journey, I realized that I had heard the words "Iron Maiden" and "ACDC" hundreds of time in my youth, played air guitar with abandon, and I had no idea what these bands sounded like. So at 23 years old, in the early 2000's, I researched Iron Maiden on a music downloading service. The song that had the most hits was "The Trooper," so I downloaded and played it back through my computer speakers. Instantly I was blown back to Base 1: Level 1 with rocket launcher in hand, swaying back and forth as I ran through military bunkers. I loved it! I'd come across an entire genre of music that brings back those synthesized, repetitive guitar riffs from my video games and puts them to life! It was like someone was covering my favorite music, but better!
I was taken aback. How could I have missed this?

It took a little while to understand. It's not that I had never heard these guys before, but rather that I had never listened to them before. I had never put on one of their albums, and listened to their music. Like so much of the information we process inadvertently every day, I had been indirectly exposed to music from bands like Iron Maiden since a very young age. My parents certainly never popped in old Guns N' Roses albums or sang Journey lyrics during my upbringing, but rather it was from the windows of other cars, radio songs at school dances, soundtracks to movies, stereos of brothers and sisters, friends, even cartoons and video games that gave me all the classic rock experiences that I didn't know I had had. So now I'm in my mid-twenties, listening to music I never actually listened to as a kid, feeling more at home in my skin than if I put on some mellow Iron and Wine or bumped to Flo Rida. You know? It's almost like this indirect exposure has had more impact on my subconscious than the influences I directly focus on and listen to... I mean, why when I hear Journey songs do I feel like I've been listening to them all my life when I didn't even know who Journey was until my second-to-last year of college?

So now I'm on Pandora. Rocking to "Emotion" by Aerosmith. I might be the only person my age who rocks out so viciously to this stuff, but you know it's in you too - that desire to let it all go and revisit every nuance of your childhood dreams. If you can find it in a type of music, what better way to spend a Saturday morning than by listening with pleasure while you clean the kitchen and get ready for another day.

Peace

Mikie