This week I am doing a little soul searching. Well, maybe it’s not soul searching, but the revelation that I know way too much about music and way too little about practically everything else. Lately, I have been realizing that while I have the vast music knowledge on the level of someone who lives in their parent’s basement and has never been laid, I know very little or at least the bare minimum about other things in life.

All my life, when I have a passion, I pour my heart into it with admittedly mixed success. As a child, I loved drawing and I enjoyed reading and was always pretty good with those things because I was encouraged by my parents. Then I loved skateboarding, and was OK with that. Then it was basketball, I am 5”7, so you can be the judge of how that went. After that, I pursued girls and for the most part, bombed miserably. All along the way, music has been a passion as well. Not the playing of and creating music (because I tried that and it went about as well as basketball and the pursuit of girls), but the listening to, and concert attending of music.  

I don’t know where my love of music came from. My parents aren’t really into it, but my mom did see the Beatles in Atlantic City in 1964 and also tells us a story that someone attempted to pass her a joint at a Jefferson Airplane concert. Although she did see Frankie Valli on Steel Pier a bunch of times, and my dad took her to see Michael Buble’ recently. But it wasn’t like they were sitting around telling me about music. I think my cousin Kevin was a big influence because we always did and still talk about music, and also MTV which was brand new when I was a kid. I can’t pinpoint it exactly, but something set me off with music.     

I particularly like “indie rock”. Some people think my music is “out there” or “weird” just because it’s not played in nauseating rotation on terrestrial radio. That’s not the case at all. I think the music I listen to is rather accessible. More and more, I am noticing that commercials and TV shows are using tunes from some of the lesser known bands I like. And I have been told I am a trusted source in my advice on new bands to check out, something I always enjoy being told. However, my pride has been bruised lately courtesy of satellite radio. Apparently, stations on satellite have introduced some bands to my friends. It really stings when I tell someone they need to check out a song and they say, “oh, I heard this song on satellite”.   

I am also not one of those hipster nerd music snobs at all – I like a wide array of bands. You can find rock, pop, indie, hip hop, R + B, oldies, jazz, and reggae on my iPod. As I have mentioned in this blog before, I was a huge Duran Duran fan as a kid- they are like the Smirnoff Ice of 80’s bands. But sometimes I ask people what music they like and it’s like you asked what their salary is. People will recoil and almost get defensive. Please realize I am just curious and if your taste sucks, I will be the judge of that. I joke, but music is the only time I am opinionated. I just don’t like country music and angry music. And I will fight to my noble end against those genres!   

Music is the soundtrack to a life. Most major moments in my life have a song attached to them. And when you hear that song, the memory comes pouring back, good or bad. I have made lifelong friends through music. My friend Dennis and I bonded instantly in our dumpy Enterprise Rent A Car office when I heard him mention Dinosaur Jr. I also once stopped my pursuit and crush on a girl because she liked country music. She was a pretty girl and very nice, but It just would never work out. (My heart recently shattered into a million pieces when my girlfriend Cailin asked me to put Zac Brown Band on her iPod)

The one problem with this (rambling) passion for music of mine is that I either don’t know, or don’t care about many other things. Believe it or not, outside of all my Philadelphia teams, I don’t know much about sports. I don’t play fantasy sports, and I rarely read the paper or watch SportsCenter so I can be shockingly clueless with sports information. I guess I do know a few things, like the fact that Drew Carey is probably carrying a pitchfork and torch leading an angry mob to execute LeBron James for leaving the boring, “mistake by the lake”, wasteland of Cleveland for the hot, sticky, wasteland of Miami. I also know that Baltimore Raven’s star Ray Lewis has more than likely killed a small army of people. But trying to keep up with who is playing where anymore is overwhelming thanks to free agency and other sport ruining practices.  

I don’t know much about politics. I am not really sure if I am technically a Democrat or Republican.  I liked Ralph Nader years back because he was always sticking it to the man.  But other than me thinking that Newt Gingrich has a funny name and reading somewhere that Obama has Lil’ Wayne on his iPod, I am pretty clueless with the political talk. My brain capacity is meant for music and useless pop knowledge of things that interest me, like 80’s movies and skateboarding videos.

While most suits and working stiffs my age have a Starbucks coffee cup seemingly affixed to their hand, I always have my iPod. I don’t have a stock portfolio, but I do have my 120 gig iPod filled to the brim. Part of why I love working in higher education now is that I never fit into the corporate world. It wasn’t Iike I raged against the machine, I was just bitterly unhappy against the machine. Because the zombies “at the water cooler” talk about last night’s game, their cookie cutter McMansions in a faceless development, and their 3200 square foot SUV’s. I didn’t want to hear about all that, and I am sure they didn’t want to hear how good the rock show I saw the night before was. Amen to that, and keep on rockin’ in the free world!

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