Whatever it was, I put on the album and was immediately transfixed. Maybe I had heard “Ants Marching” too many times on our local Top 40 station, Mix 106.5 (it was the only radio station we were allowed to listen to when my mom was driving) maybe I remembered seeing the incredibly beguiling video for perhaps their biggest single to date, “Crash Into Me,” or maybe it was the memory of the first truly great guitarist I ever knew at age 11 playing the same song at my Jewish sleepaway camp and getting a standing ovation. I’m not exactly sure what made me put on that album. I went looking through the relatively sparse CD collection (we had more CDs cluttering up our puttering wood-paneled minivan) and found the only thing that had any name recognition, which turned out to be the all-acoustic recording Live at Luther College, by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds. But after the funeral, we went over to my cousin’s house for the reception and I was told to put something light and inoffensive on the stereo. No, this isn’t one of those stories where the death of a treasured family member caused me to have some deep epiphany and change my ways we were never very close. When I was thirteen, my grandmother died and we traveled to upstate Pennsylvania for her funeral.
#Logic mixtapes not playing on spotify full#
Less proudly pumping through the stereo were bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn, Insane Clown Posse, Slipknot rappers like DMX and Eminem were in full effect.
By age 12, the walls of my room rumbled with the sounds of Rage Against the Machine as I proudly echoed their hatred of the system by playing along on my bass guitar at full volume through as much distortion as my shitty 30-watt amp could handle. The music I had been listening to in my early adolescence was a lot of piss-off-your-parents music, basically anything loud and obnoxious.
My brothers grew up listening to Michael Jackson and Biggie Smalls and TLC I started my musical career being classically trained on upright bass.Įven then, it was still odd how I came to like the band. The neighborhood I grew up in was not a mile from the Baltimore City limits and we were the only white family on the block. It probably shouldn’t have happened, either. Shameful, I know, but being white and growing up in the suburbs in the 90’s, it was almost unavoidable. I may not have been a super-fan of anything like I once was of Dave Matthews Band. My parents once asked me why I played a particular album so often (at least daily), and I told them it was because I would be listening to it once a day for the rest of my life. The whole world is about you and everything you love will go on forever you believe this with every part of your soul. And you certainly can’t do that as a teenager. But that’s the core issue of being a super-fan – you can’t rationalize the idea that their art isn’t for you, it’s for them. This feeling is wildly irrational, obviously – the band is making music they want to make (presumably) and, as much as I think it might be, their music is not for me. It feels like a betrayal, like the creator came over to my house and spit in my face and punched my mom in the stomach. But what happens when it finally comes out and it’s terrible? Logic and reason fly out the window, compounded every day by having to wait for more. This is what it’s like to be this kind of obsessed. That was the first thing that came to my mind. If I had a time machine, you know, cuz I’m really into history, would I go back and witness something, find out who Jack the Ripper was, or stop the Kennedy assassination, and the first thing I thought of doing if I actually had a time machine is I would go back to about 1993 or ’94 and kill George Lucas with a hammer.
The comedian Patton Oswalt, on his 2007 album My Weakness is Strong, put this kind of obsession into perspective for those of you who haven’t ever been a super-fan: Have you ever been hopelessly devoted to a band or a show or a book series, so much so that you debate its merits in every medium you can? Have you ever been so obsessed that you read every bit of news about it the instant anything comes out? Do you rush to defend every mistake made, and rush to show off every triumph as proof of its greatness, and by extension, your greatness?Īt some point, your support becomes so ingrained into your personality that any slight someone makes of it you take as a direct insult and you wait with baited breath for the next instance of this thing-in-question to present itself to the world.
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