The Candyman Cometh.
We, all of us, have people we rely on to be our musical drug dealers. Sure, there are friends we share music back and forth with, but, and this is if you’re lucky, there’s that one person from whom you take an awful lot more than you give. That person who knows just exactly what you like, what you need, baby, and doles it out little by little till you’re begging for more.
Something like that, anyway.
I am not too modest to admit that a lot of friends have told me I’m that person for them, and that’s great and that’s nifty, but you know what? I’ve got an even purer source. At least one. And that’s where I get my personal stash.

My new discovery is not my new discovery, but one that my Musical Drug Dealer heard first, and knew would be right up my alley. I'm not saying you would like it, only demonstrating my MDD's uncanny ability to get inside my brain. Anyway, the band is from Ohio they call themselves Wussy, and they play nifty lo-fi (low-fi? lo-fih? Har) style rawk that makes my little heartstrings vibrate all crazylike.

La Musica-!
I love the music, but I’m pretty damn picky with it. This is something my MDD understands. He knows I like acoustic music, but only when it’s kind of unprocessed and that I prefer the minimalist-sounding stuff. He knows I like the poppish rock, but only when it contains this particular brilliant originality and cutthroat lyrics. Same with hip-hop. I mean, but seriously: Did that just make sense? Probably not, and I probably left a lot out. This is what is great about a musical drug dealer: He(or she) gets you in a way that can’t be articulated. It is greatness in the world when some other person can do that with any part of who you are. Trying to explain my taste to you in words, Henshaw, is like trying to tell you what a poem “means.” This poem means: screw it.

“Oh, you’re a ‘Music Person.’ Do You Like Coldplay?” and other frustrations.
I resent people assuming I’ve heard of certain bands or that because I like music, that I like it in that competitive asshole, Chunklet magazine, record-clerk way (though the above heading may belie that fact.) To take that a step back, I resent people taking a look at me and assuming any thing about my general aesthetic or what kind of person I must be. (An aside: Just because a person has a couple tattoos doesn’t mean she wants to sit around for hours or even minutes and talk about them, not hers or yours. Do-! Not-! Trap such a gal at a party with someone who does this-! Please?)

The fact is that I care for the music I love with a ferocity that embarrasses me; at times there persists a not-very-still, small voice within me that says: Hey! What’s the deal? You’re not supposed to be this way outside your teens, you odd duck, you. That voice is biznullshit and to be ignored, though. It’s just Self-Doubt saying Hello. Mostly, I just feel lucky to have this force available to me that affects me so strongly any time I want it to. And so, conversely, there is just so much music that I hate. I hate more than I love, just because I love what I love so much. I feel completely indifferent to just about every new band that I hear, because there are just too many of them, now, and I'm just not interested anymore, in keeping up. I'm feeling lazy, lately. I'm willing to rely on people who know my specific tastes to recommend things; otherwise, I'll just sit at home and listen to Guided By Voices some more.

Just Another Teenager at the Doc Martin Sock Hop
Because it's changed.
I came of age at a very lucky time. When you expose a music-spazzy, in many other ways spazzy, adolescent girl to 1990s culture, she just might explode. Zines! Wacky dress that's purely inventive! That has nothing to do with fashion (Whee flannel and Doc Martins and Kool Aid dyed red hair)! There was this Brand New third-wave feminism thing; there was this Sassy magazine-thing (forever a sigh deep inside now, an RIP now.) There were these rock shows, and if you went to these shows, you’d meet other creative freaky dorky people like you. For a time, my teenage friends and I completely lost our heads over it all.

Then of course you grow older, and a wave of underground music becomes commercially co-opted and fast-forward to today, when a whole lot of forces—the aforementioned commercialization being one, the widespread availability of all information, music included, being another—and of course the loss of shine that comes with time; all these have worked together to make finding inventive music an activity more akin to flipping through cable channels than excavating for shiny diamonds. You don’t have to work hard to find anything anymore, and with online saturation, some small band from Ohio, maybe, blows up and becomes huge waaay before it probably should. Before it’s ready to. And there are copycats way too soon and it’s confusing, too, because everyone’s heard that rare Pavement EP and it doesn’t mean that they feel the same way about it as you do.
And nothing’s rare, really.

This is why I keep my passion a bit private. This is why I don’t like to make it competitive. I don’t like every new band that comes along, and the ones I do like, I tend to think of as my secret life soundtrack. I still try to allow myself that privilege, even if it’s a lie. I like to sit down with you and see if you feel the same way, not by talking about this band versus that one, but by hitting play, by whispering, “Listen.”