February 17, 2012

It looks like I'm long overdue for another blog. Well, I just finished a midterm exam in music theory and even though I still have some unfinished homework to hand in, I think this weekend I just need to relax, de stress, and have some fun. To start that off, I thought I should write another blog entry.

This is the story of my rock and roll awakening. I wasn't always a rocker, let's be honest. Shocking isn't it? When I was really young, my mother would play Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Pachelbel, Vivaldi, and other classical music. By the time I was starting grade school however, I thought I should listen to something more modern.
I unfortunately thought boy bands were for boys, so I wanted to listen to the Backstreet Boys all the time. It was safe and enjoyable and catchy music. Even back then, I found rap music boring and my parents hated it for the message and the lack of actual singing. Techno went from cool to annoying very quickly. My mother also played a lot of Beatles music for me, but it wasn't until I was 11 years old that I started to get into them. I discovered Elvis then as well. He was the first true rock and roll artist that I really listened to.
I started listening to a lot of older music, especially 80s music and found myself particularly fond of anything with electric guitar. Once I turned 13, I was becoming less interested in pop music and more interested in the music of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I was also becoming less interested in video games and being a nerd, and more interested in learning about good music. I'll admit, glam metal and hair metal and even cheesy lite rock played a big part of getting me into rock and roll and heavy music, but something happened on my 14th birthday that changed my life.
I played an acoustic guitar earlier and said to myself, "Self, you should learn to play this." I asked for a guitar for my birthday and my half brother Andrew promised me something that I'd like. That night I couldn't sleep and my sister took me downstairs to show me what my parents bought me and it looked huge. When I woke up, the huge package was presented to me and I opened it and saw a electric guitar and an amplifier. My brother then gave me his gift; it was a CD of Van Halen: The Best of Both Worlds. I listened to all the tracks over and over and I loved it! The first song I wanted to learn was Panama and I eventually wanted to play guitar solos the way Eddie Van Halen could! I said to myself, "From this day forth, you will be known as Wesley the guitar player, and you will appreciate hard rock and learn to play hard rock as best as you can." So you could say Van Halen was my true rock and roll awakening.
I've come a long way since then. I went through several phases. I went from liking anything with guitar in it to being weaned off of pop punk and modern rock because classic rock had that much more passion. I went from considering heavy metal a mess of noise, mostly from what my brother was listening to, to realizing a lot of bands I started to like were considered heavy metal at some point. I went from listening to what my parents listened to or let me listen to, to developing my own tastes. Most importantly, I learned to accept and live with my nerdiness and I transformed from a scared and shy little kid, to a confident, more socially active teenager, to an intelligent and ever learning adult.