Winamp Wednesday: Time is the Season
On unusual Halloween melodies and the essence of cool.
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Blue Öyster Cult, "Burnin' for You"
There is some part of everyone that desperately yearns to be cool.
But then again, cool to whom? Your classmates? Your friends? The editors of the zines you read whom you will never ever meet? I'm no expert. There's every chance that I was never cool. Sometimes I was hip, ahead of the curve, even in the know. But I could never keep up with being cool. There was too much else. That's how I found myself heading towards Halloween in the year 2000 blasting a song from 1981 on my bedroom speakers.
If Napster was good for one great thing, it was excellent for letting someone make their own canon. Every song you chose was divorced from any context save for the one you made when downloading it. You heard a song on the radio and loved it, you wanted to know more about a band, you were searching for a word and took a flier on something new. Once it was there it was simply part of your personal jukebox. You were free to let the music become anything at all to you.
When you're sixteen everything is still sensation. You feel so grown up but if anything has happened to you habitually it's still only happened to you a handful of times. You don't have enough experience to create averages and act accordingly. No thought, as the kids say, just vibes. You're handed some music from a friend and it sounds amazing and suddenly your life is changed. That's where a lot of my Halloween music came from in 2000. With a direct line to a guy who knows a guy at Pitchfork we were all listening to Kid A in mid-September, and "Idioteque" had quickly become my go-to song for horrific existential dread, a simulation of the sadness that would become all too real as I aged. We were dealers in emotion for each other, passing music back and forth in school hallways like they were scheduled and sectioned. I see your Radiohead and raise you Jesus and Mary Chain's new one, how about decksanddrumsandrockandroll or maybe Mass Romantic. It's all still sensation but it was guiding us towards something wholly new.
We were playing at being cool, and we were paying for it with the only currency we really knew.
But I couldn't always be in the avant-garde and sometimes I had to have my guard up. It was Halloween and I needed something that centered me, that was eerie without being too horrifically unsettling. Every Halloween needs music that lands just south of Tubular Bells on the sliding scale, just north of Bobby "Boris" Pickett out of the cheese. Losing yourself in melodic terror is easy, but finding something that's spooky enough to fit your narrative is much more difficult. After all, the girl I really liked had invited me to a Halloween Weekend party at her house, so I didn't have time to dwell in the deep dark corners of my own soul. I needed to be cool and I needed to be cool quick.
Dear Reader, I was not cool. Not realizing that teenage rules for Halloween costumes were wholly different, I went to the party as Sam Spade. Everyone thought I was Columbo. (I should have gone as Columbo.) And in my attempt to hype myself up I did not pick any current band, and certainly didn't pick any one that had any kind of street credibility in that halcyon start to the Willennium. "Burnin' for You" became my theme song for a little bit there, despite the fact that it was nineteen years out of date and the kind of proto-metal rock-n-roll that was listened to exclusively by dudes in ringer tees who have small parts in movies set in the late-70s. BOC had found a small renaissance a few years prior when "Don't Fear the Reaper" was used by every movie and one deranged Christopher Walken, but when Pitchfork went out of their way to call "Burnin' for You" one of the worst guitar solos of all time I knew I wasn't listening to any great hidden hip gem.
Then again, just vibes. My team was in the World Series and I was mainlining horror movies and I had a computer in my room and I finally had my driver's license and I could commandeer the family Jeep to drive from the city into the infinite abandon of Upstate New York. I didn't need the other guys in my class to tell me that BOC wasn't cool. What I needed was that amazing opening drum fill to kick in as I hit the speed limit and escaped into the exploding vibrant colors of autumn. I needed lyrics about never feeling at home, about adventures in the great unknown, about being dangerously in love, and then a couple of mentions of The Devil for good measure.
It was Halloween, after all. We could play at being someone else. It's the best time of the year to cloak yourself in coolness.
Getting older strips us of our need to be cool, or at least that's what we tell ourselves. Really it just shifts into new avenues. In a lot of ways we become weathervanes rather than the weather, and we pivot rather than roll forward. I still talk about music with my friends, still try to track down new eerie bits of Halloween weirdness for the season. (Check out this cover of "Bloody Tears" my brother passed me the other day!) But this year I find myself more concerned with making sure the kids of the neighborhood know that we're a Full Bars house, giving away Snickers and Milky Ways that are three times the size of anyone else's bounty. We can be thought of as cool in new ways, small ways, bringing joy however we can.
But always there's a part of me back in the driver's seat of that Jeep, even though it eventually became a clunking deathtrap, driving on a Halloween weekend to a bit of wailing classic rock. As every bad memory of being teenaged falls away, all you can see is the possibilities and those desperate yearnings to be cool...