Gus's Top 100 Bootlickin' Nonce Anthems
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sus
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(8/100) Mozart, K622 II. Adagio
In 5th and 6th grade I explored classical music alone—just me and the Ross department store budget CDs—and then starting in middle school, I finally found a friend M who listened as well. I've always been a peasant of simple taste, and Mozart was my guy, with some Bach and Beethoven and Saint-Saens and Haydn on the side. M to his infinite credit was progressing through Schubert and Rachmaninoff, taste that I found difficult to understand. I've since come to appreciate more difficult / modern / romantic composers, but Mozart will always be special to me and I won't apologize for that. Like I said, peasant taste.
(9/100) Mozart, K626 Requiem Lacrimosa
I loved the film Amadeus around this age, couldn't get enough of it. Some juicy sex-approximately scenes for a mid-pubescent still figuring things out. Salieri, the film's narrators, describes music as something sacred, a communing with god, and that was the kind of profound meaning/transcendence I desperately wanted in my own life, which felt so banal and profane. Gas stations and KPIG radio and American Idol. Modernity, clearly, was something degenerate—how did we go from symphonies to Garth Brooks? My parents who wondered if Franz Liszt was "on tour" that season. When my best friend B. was still around, we'd ruled the elementary school quad: we were creative enough inventing new blacktop games, and dominant enough at Suicide ("Wall Ball"), to bend social reality to our will. But once he left, I was at the mercy of lesser boys—forced to be a follower or live in exile. I chose misanthropic exile.
Then in middle school every Friday, students could bring in their own CDs to play on the cafeteria quad, and the popular kids always played this terrible Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift type country-pop. It all felt so ridiculous and absurd, these basic-ass country club kids with their awful hick music taste somehow the top of the social ladder. More evidence of a fallen society. What had gone astray? Me & M. & our group of outsider friends mostly kept to ourselves. K. listened to Car Talk and went sailing. A. loved the Beatles and Runescape. N. played clarinet and was a band geek. We read Frank Herbert and John Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury. I left them behind in high school because I had a crush on a girl, and hanging out with them was starting to feel like social death and celibacy, and because suddenly I had other options via athletics. I felt guilty about that for a long time, but also I think the guilt was a way of masking the regret at leaving behind friends who I'd become so close to. I wouldn't find such good friends again for a long time.
(10/100) Mozart, K550 Symphony 40
I've never found another piece of music with the mood and energy of 40's first movement. Everyone knows those opening bars, but they're still thrilling. I would embarrass myself trying to describe the mood—we all know what the mood is so I'll leave it be.
(11/100) Rachmaninoff, Op 43 Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
(12/100) Saint-Saens, Carnival of the Animals
I started trying to write my own music around this time, including a short piano sonata inspired by "The Swan." I was fascinated by how Saint-Saens had developed his own instruments, and pioneered the orchestral use of several others. Not just trying to get the most out of the tools at hand, but an interest in swapping out and experimenting with those tools. I stayed over at M.'s house late one night, we were writing something together, it felt like I was finally able to do exactly what I wanted to do with my life—make music with people. But it was late and curfew came and I had to go home and by high school we had drifted apart as friends.
My parents had pushed me into athletics, they were big exercise nuts, and if I was gonna dedicate dozens of hours a week at something—going to competitions on the weekends, in a community of practice—I couldn't stand being mediocre. So I started going all in on competitive swimming, was at the pool 30 hours a week by 9th grade, plus lifting and eating and running on the side to maintain conditioning. Everything else in my life dropped by the wayside. My social group became the varsity swim team—which in many ways was lucky, because I wasn't well-socialized, and there's nothing like the trauma of locker-room fraternity to socialize you. And being a freshman with upperclassman friends had its own benefits—I got exposed to new worlds, got social credit out of it. When you're the "baby" on the team, 14 around a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds, they adopt you and set you up with girls and haze you into their world, and there's a lot to be said for that. That's what I liked about Dissensus in the early days, before good old-fashioned hazing started becoming endless, inescapable, repetitive harassment.
But it also meant I left so much stuff I'd come to love behind. A lot of it—reading & writing, trying to write my own music, taking culture seriously—I wouldn't rediscover until college, after a bad shoulder injury ended my swimming career. The phase of my life from 10-14 looks a lot more like my life from 20-27, but the years in between isolate it, makes those earlier years feel island-like.
In 5th and 6th grade I explored classical music alone—just me and the Ross department store budget CDs—and then starting in middle school, I finally found a friend M who listened as well. I've always been a peasant of simple taste, and Mozart was my guy, with some Bach and Beethoven and Saint-Saens and Haydn on the side. M to his infinite credit was progressing through Schubert and Rachmaninoff, taste that I found difficult to understand. I've since come to appreciate more difficult / modern / romantic composers, but Mozart will always be special to me and I won't apologize for that. Like I said, peasant taste.
(9/100) Mozart, K626 Requiem Lacrimosa
I loved the film Amadeus around this age, couldn't get enough of it. Some juicy sex-approximately scenes for a mid-pubescent still figuring things out. Salieri, the film's narrators, describes music as something sacred, a communing with god, and that was the kind of profound meaning/transcendence I desperately wanted in my own life, which felt so banal and profane. Gas stations and KPIG radio and American Idol. Modernity, clearly, was something degenerate—how did we go from symphonies to Garth Brooks? My parents who wondered if Franz Liszt was "on tour" that season. When my best friend B. was still around, we'd ruled the elementary school quad: we were creative enough inventing new blacktop games, and dominant enough at Suicide ("Wall Ball"), to bend social reality to our will. But once he left, I was at the mercy of lesser boys—forced to be a follower or live in exile. I chose misanthropic exile.
Then in middle school every Friday, students could bring in their own CDs to play on the cafeteria quad, and the popular kids always played this terrible Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift type country-pop. It all felt so ridiculous and absurd, these basic-ass country club kids with their awful hick music taste somehow the top of the social ladder. More evidence of a fallen society. What had gone astray? Me & M. & our group of outsider friends mostly kept to ourselves. K. listened to Car Talk and went sailing. A. loved the Beatles and Runescape. N. played clarinet and was a band geek. We read Frank Herbert and John Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury. I left them behind in high school because I had a crush on a girl, and hanging out with them was starting to feel like social death and celibacy, and because suddenly I had other options via athletics. I felt guilty about that for a long time, but also I think the guilt was a way of masking the regret at leaving behind friends who I'd become so close to. I wouldn't find such good friends again for a long time.
(10/100) Mozart, K550 Symphony 40
I've never found another piece of music with the mood and energy of 40's first movement. Everyone knows those opening bars, but they're still thrilling. I would embarrass myself trying to describe the mood—we all know what the mood is so I'll leave it be.
(11/100) Rachmaninoff, Op 43 Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
(12/100) Saint-Saens, Carnival of the Animals
I started trying to write my own music around this time, including a short piano sonata inspired by "The Swan." I was fascinated by how Saint-Saens had developed his own instruments, and pioneered the orchestral use of several others. Not just trying to get the most out of the tools at hand, but an interest in swapping out and experimenting with those tools. I stayed over at M.'s house late one night, we were writing something together, it felt like I was finally able to do exactly what I wanted to do with my life—make music with people. But it was late and curfew came and I had to go home and by high school we had drifted apart as friends.
My parents had pushed me into athletics, they were big exercise nuts, and if I was gonna dedicate dozens of hours a week at something—going to competitions on the weekends, in a community of practice—I couldn't stand being mediocre. So I started going all in on competitive swimming, was at the pool 30 hours a week by 9th grade, plus lifting and eating and running on the side to maintain conditioning. Everything else in my life dropped by the wayside. My social group became the varsity swim team—which in many ways was lucky, because I wasn't well-socialized, and there's nothing like the trauma of locker-room fraternity to socialize you. And being a freshman with upperclassman friends had its own benefits—I got exposed to new worlds, got social credit out of it. When you're the "baby" on the team, 14 around a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds, they adopt you and set you up with girls and haze you into their world, and there's a lot to be said for that. That's what I liked about Dissensus in the early days, before good old-fashioned hazing started becoming endless, inescapable, repetitive harassment.
But it also meant I left so much stuff I'd come to love behind. A lot of it—reading & writing, trying to write my own music, taking culture seriously—I wouldn't rediscover until college, after a bad shoulder injury ended my swimming career. The phase of my life from 10-14 looks a lot more like my life from 20-27, but the years in between isolate it, makes those earlier years feel island-like.
yyaldrin
in je ogen waait de wind
(7/100) Green Day, "When September Ends"
Growing up my best friend lived just down the street, which was unusual and lucky. Let's call him "B." Everyone else in the district seemed to live in the country club gated community at the edge of town, or the Arbors, a suburban development near the airport pictured below. Very Malvina Reynolds "Little Boxes" area. But we lived downtown, with not a lot of kids nearby.
View attachment 14250
B and I were inseparable most of grade school, playing with Legos on the porch, watching Star Wars movies together. When he was 7ish he ended up changing his name, after one of the Star Wars characters, and went by it for years. Then his dad got a job in Germany, and he moved away at the end of fourth grade, and there was a very Roman emperor style coup where, having lost my wingman, I was deposed of all blacktop power and replaced by a bully with a Napoleonic complex. That's its own long story, a real rise and fall epic complete with showdowns, duels betrayals, and figurative gang violence.
I think B was going through a Green Day phase and emailed this song to me from Germany and it stuck with me. We were probably 10 or 11. The official music video has a field scene that's very similar to Anakin & Padme on Naboo in Attack of the Clones, which would've come out right around this time, and I always associated the two.
(7B, honorary mention) Daniel Powter, "Bad Day"
When I was 11 I went to visit that friend in Germany for two weeks, and we traveled around a bit. Our family would watch American Idol with Paula and Simon and Randy every Tuesday night; the only TV was in my parents' bedroom, and we only got the public broadcasting service, PBS, the national broadcasting company, NBC, and FOX. So my TV growing up was pretty limited—I'd watch PBS's NOVA science series on Sunday nights, and join the family for Idol on Tuesdays. (Nor were we allowed to own gaming consoles—video games were played strictly at friends' houses.) For some reason "Bad Day" was a big part of the 2005/06 Idol run, and the music video was a big part of early YouTube—Wikipedia tells me it was briefly the eight-most-watched music video online with about 10 million views, which is pennies today. So that's how it probably entered my life.
(7C, honorary mention) Jason Mraz, "Lucky"
In 5th or 6th grade, deposed of social power and without my best friend, I turned to some notion of "high culture" as a refuge. I went to the budget department store Ross with my grandma and spent allowance money on a Claude Monet print and an ornate faux Chinese porcelain vase. I got obsessed with Egyptology. I'd always collected code books detailing different cyphers and semiophore systems, had always loved British spy books like Alex Ryder, but now I felt inclined to reject everything everyone around me loved, everything legible, everything childish. I asked for Shakespeare's complete works at Barnes & Noble for an eleventh birthday present, and I spent my lunch hour reading it under a small tree on the corner of the field. I fell in love with the film Amadeus and bought all the Collected Mozart CDs I could find on sale at the Ross department store. I wrote a book report on Saint-Saens. I'd already been playing trumpet in our school's band for a few years, but now I picked up the piano and ground away at Moonlight Sonata. One completely ridiculous moment I remember clearly: I'm with my family on a road trip, we're stopped at a gas station, "Lucky" is on and someone maybe my mom is gushing over it. I snarkily invent: "This melody is actually ripped off from Bach." A bizarre claim to make but my parents were uncultured enough not to second-guess it. I remember I told my mom once I wanted to see a Franz Liszt concert at the local Performing Arts Center; she asked if he was "coming through on tour."
what happened to B? what became of him?
sus
Moderator
(13/100/) Katy Perry, "I Kissed A Girl"
"Hot'n'Cold" and "Waking Up In Vegas" were getting a lot of radio play around this time. (I still stan for the slot-machine intro to "Waking Up In Vegas," but "Hot'n'Cold" feels incredibly dated.) I think at the time, listening to Perry on the radio, I think I found these tracks catchy but annoying. Profane, no question. Trash music to be dismissed. But when I saw the video for "I Kissed A Girl" something clicked inside of me. Sexual machinations that had long awaited awakening awakened. I had a thing for brunettes—Natalie Portman was my fuckin girrrrrlllll—and the combination of sugary pop hook and Perry's sex appeal was undeniable. I remember watching on repeat in the attic.
Anyways, the timing was right. I was migrating friend groups. I was starting to become interested in normalcy, or at least, in discovering a version of normalcy I could stand to be. I started getting curious about pop. A year earlier I'd borrowed and downloaded a buncha A.'s Beatles CDs. They hadn't clicked then, but I was ready to re-explore.
"Hot'n'Cold" and "Waking Up In Vegas" were getting a lot of radio play around this time. (I still stan for the slot-machine intro to "Waking Up In Vegas," but "Hot'n'Cold" feels incredibly dated.) I think at the time, listening to Perry on the radio, I think I found these tracks catchy but annoying. Profane, no question. Trash music to be dismissed. But when I saw the video for "I Kissed A Girl" something clicked inside of me. Sexual machinations that had long awaited awakening awakened. I had a thing for brunettes—Natalie Portman was my fuckin girrrrrlllll—and the combination of sugary pop hook and Perry's sex appeal was undeniable. I remember watching on repeat in the attic.
Anyways, the timing was right. I was migrating friend groups. I was starting to become interested in normalcy, or at least, in discovering a version of normalcy I could stand to be. I started getting curious about pop. A year earlier I'd borrowed and downloaded a buncha A.'s Beatles CDs. They hadn't clicked then, but I was ready to re-explore.
sus
Moderator
Post some favs in this thread! I will listen and read
sus
Moderator
He came back to the States a few years later, but both of us had changed. He fell in with a different friend group in high school. I was with the nerds—hanging out with me in 9th grade would've been social death. By 11th grade, that had changed, and we were in overlapping friend groups, but reconnecting was hard. He went to uni in Northern California, got into forestry and forest management, then ended up off the African coast cleaning up oil spills. (I believe—not positive.) We still talk every few years, less than I'd like, but it's hard to know how to close that distance again. His dad passed just last year, and I fumbled condolences—I'd been close to his dad as well growing up, was like an uncle to me, so it hit me hard as well. Anyway.
sus
Moderator
He was living in Stuttgart IIRC, since that'll mean something to you. Lovely little lake district, it seemed like when I visited. His dad was an engineering professor at the university. He'd send me care packages with rittersport chocolate and haribo gummy bears; I'd send back Annie's mac'n'cheese. I remember loving the Antikensammlungen Museum, they had a massive replica Trojan Horse out front.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
It's not that they're talking about Green Day, it's that they're not even talking about the good Green Day.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
OKAY THAT'S TOO FAR
sus
Moderator
Lil bonus vid on hand ball. (A variant with a tennis ball was called "suicide.")
We played against walls just like this, erected in the middle of the blacktop, but typically 1v1, instead of in pairs. There'd be a queue that assembled at one side of the wall, and the kid at the head of the line acted as judge. He called outs, and would set the rules for the current players. Those rules might be "no fists" (i.e. you had to hit the ball open-handed), "no darts" (i.e. the ball had to hit the ground before it hit the wall), etc. Then there was a whole syntax for trying to establish your rules and make them stick, which was creatively adjudicated. You might say "period" or "double period" (or "infinity period") or "no change-backs," "no take-backs," etc. "No redos" might be called to prevent second chances. Etc. This was a vibrant part of gradeschool culture! Perhaps other Americans my age remember other phrases and norms.
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