Rebirth Of the Cool (version)

A couple of days ago, I happened to meet a woman through MySpace (online community) named Michelle. I quickly found out that she's in the band Shesus. I like that band. So, we started talking, and I found out why she introduced herself in the first place. My screen name on MySpace is I, Fuzzbot. Its the title of the first song on the first Brainiac record. I'm not fanatical about the band, but I like them a lot, and they were seriously, seriously underrated and overlooked in their time. Their time came to an abrupt end when the enigmatic singer Tim Taylor died in a car accident in 1997. The band was from Dayton, OH, which happens to be where Shesus and Guided By Voices are from, too. We talked a bit more, and it turns out she was in the band for the first record, and earlier EPs, then she was briefly in the Breeders, then Omatic, then Shesus.

All this talk of the musical past got me thinking. So, today I went to one of my older CD wallets. Its one of those big fuckers that hold 256 CDs. Most of what's in it is the stuff that I was really into when I first moved here. Some of it was pre-1997, and some of it was post-1997. That's the year I moved to Detroit.

I pulled out several different CDs that I felt like listening to in the cube today: Aphex Twin's "Richard D. James Album," "Strong Reaction/Three Chord Monte" from Pegboy, Sleater-Kinney's "The Hot Rock," "Selector Dub Narcotic" by various artists, Majesty Crush's last release, the EP "Sans Muscles," and finally, the big one..."Congregation" from the Afghan Whigs.

I can't believe how old some of this stuff is. I can't believe how long I've been listening to it. It's not like these CDs have sat somewhere untouched since 1997. That isn't the case, but usually I just pull out one at a time, listen to it to death, get over it, put it back in the wallet. I had forgotten about Pegboy. Last week, when DJing, someone asked me to play something from the "Richard D. James" album, and I seriously couldn't remember where it was. Glad I know now. I forgot how bland "The Hot Rock" is, and how much I love Majesty Crush. Shoegazer fan for life, I guess.

Okay, I have to admit, part of this interest in the past comes from my present explorations of the Twilight Singers and the Afghan Whigs (both involving Greg Dulli). I first heard them on MTV's 120 Minutes (when the show was still worthwhile) in 1991. It was the video for "Conjure Me" from the album Congregation. And it still sounds so good.