AudioBiographyMy life, told through music.
I was born in 1986. Music has been a big part of my life from the start, to the degree that perhaps the best way to tell my life’s story is through music. I started by making some mixtapes, each 90 minute cassette covering five years of my life. Later on I turned these into a YouTube playlist, unhindered by time limits. For my 40th birthday this year, I’m going to write down my audiobiography. The playlist is currenly 348 songs long, so I’m going to break this up into chapters. Obviously I’m not going to write an essay about every song, but I will write a minimum of three sentences explaining the song’s inclusion and what it meant to me.
We will start with the first decade of my life. You can follow along with the playlist here.
Early Childhood - Ages 0-9:
When I liked whatever was playing on MTV, or whatever people in my family listened to, as well as video game music and cartoon themes. It was before I ever recorded mixtapes, so all I have to rely on is my own memory for these. I’m going to be honest, and not steer clear of the old shame and guilty pleasures. Not all of these are going to be songs I still enjoy to this day.
Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
One of my earliest memories is watching the music video for “Sledgehammer” on MTV. Its stop-motion animation was appealing to my younger self, maybe even my first exposure to such things. The song was released exactly one week before I was born, so in a way it heralded my entrance into this world (granted, my earliest memories were formed when I was three so I barely remember the 1980s, but the video was still getting a bit of airplay in 1989). It’s a song about life; the video begins with an egg being fertilized and ends with Peter Gabriel becoming one with the stars; a death, if you choose to interpret it that way. The rest of the video could be seen as how one reinvents themselves throughout their life.
Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
The music video to this song is another of my earliest core memories. Although one of the earliest songs I can remember, it’s a song that I didn’t really begin to understand and relate to until my 30s. As a kid, the video amused me, with the singer doing these strange dances and such. The midlife crisis aspect was lost on me, of course.
Billy Joel - For the Longest Time
Sometime in the year 1990 my mother helped me record a VHS tape of music videos from MTV, called “Mikey’s Music”, and this was one of the videos on it. Hearing it again brings me back to my earliest days, when I still had my innocence, when the world didn’t yet seem like such a cruel, unforgiving place. Like an old lullaby. I still get a chuckle at the befuddled janitor at the end of the video.
Tom Petty - Free Falling
This is a song I remember liking and singing along to as a toddler. My mother is a big Tom Petty fan, thus so was I. I had no idea the song was about someone jumping off a building of course.
Modern English - Melt With You
This evokes similar feelings to “For the Longest Time”. It feels like a soothing lullaby from my earliest years. One of my earliest introductions to the New Wave genre, which would shape my tastes in years to come. It’s another song that’s just always been there from the start of my life.
Michael Jackson - Leave Me Alone
I loved Michael Jackson growing up. I remember liking “Thriller”, “Beat It”, “Bad”, but I had to choose one song from him as a favorite in my early years it would be this one, mostly due to the stop-motion animation in the music video. These days I actually prefer his later music, which has a similar angry energy to it as this song.
The B52s - Love Shack
The video to this song was also on that aforementioned VHS tape “Mikey’s Music”, and it got a lot of airplay on MTV too. The B52s were a band I listened to a lot as a kid, particularly after we got a “Best of” CD sometime in the mid-90s. “Planet Claire”, “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho” would surpass this song for me by then.
Paula Abdul - Opposites Attract
I remember being excited whenever I saw this music video, with its blend of live action and traditional animation. Paula Abdul was probably my first crush too, insofar as one can have a crush before age 7 or so. As far as her songs go, I now prefer “Cold Hearted” to this one. Pop music was just better in the 80s.
Aerosmith - Janie’s Got a Gun
This was a song that got played on MTV all the time when it came out, to the point where I remember it from when I was three. It would be many years before I understood what it was about of course.
Guns n Roses - Sweet Child of Mine
My dad was a huge fan of Guns n Roses. I remember him wearing a t-shirt of the band. This song and “Welcome to the Jungle” were my favorites. I clearly remember both music videos.
Faith No More - Epic
This song really foreshadows the type of music I would eventually gravitate towards in my teens, moreso than any other song this early in the list. It’s a song that’s very ahead of its time. It could have come out ten years later. The music video has some very memorble visuals too. I used to feel bad for that fish flopping out of water at the end, before the piano quietly explodes. “It’s in your face but you can’t grab it!”
Billy Joel - We Didn’t Start the Fire
It’s the “don’t blame the boomer generation for the state of the world” song. I liked it when I was a toddler. Something about the singing style appealed to me back then. I’m a bit too cynical for this song now.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987 cartoon theme)
I was a huge Ninja Turtles fan. This song will be forever embedded in my brain. Probably one of the best cartoon theme songs. These days I don’t think the show really holds up past the third season. But I like it better than any of the later adaptations.
Partners in Krhyme - Turtle Power
Continuing the Ninja Turtles topic, the 1990 live action film was the first movie I saw in theaters, at age four. I don’t have a lot of memories of that, but I had it on VHS for most of my childhood. It’s the only one of the old Ninja Turtles movies that really holds up to this day in my opinion. This song was one I liked a lot too, I remember my older cousin Jon had the soundtrack on vinyl and played it for me a few times. Jon was a fan of hip-hop, and a key influence on my musical tastes early on, while his sister and my cousin Michelle was into pop and introduced me to Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson and New Kids on the Block. I ended up going down neither path ultimately, but I have some songs from back then I have some nostalgic attachment to.
Super Mario Bros. 3 - Underground Theme
Super Mario Bros. 3 is the first video game I ever remember playing, and to this day is still my favorite Mario game. In World 1 Level 5 we first hear the remixed underground theme, which first showed up in the original Mario game. There’s a point in the level where you can find a hidden bouncy block with a musical note on it, which you can use to get up in the clouds for some free coins and a 1-up (makes sense in context), and if you bounce on it at the right moment, it adds to the beat of the level music. I recorded myself doing this when I was 14, if you want to hear it.
Digital Underground- The Humpty Dance
Another hip-hop song my cousin Jon got me into. The lyrics are pretty funny. To do the Humpty Dance, you’ve got it down if you appear to be in pain. It’s supposed to look like a fit or a convulsion. It’s something anyone can do. I had the music video on “Mikey’s Music” the VHS tape I mentioned earlier.
Janet Jackson - Escapade
And this was a song my cousin Michelle must have introduced me to. This song reminds me of my long-lost innocence. I like Janet Jackson in general, her music is a lot like that of her brother Michael, very catchy, the way pop music ought to be really. The music video for this was on “Mikey’s Music” too. I didn’t listen to this song for years but when I finally did watch the video again in my early 20s it was a nostalgic tidal wave.
Tom Petty - Don’t Come Around Here No More
This song is on here due to the music video, which is Alice in Wonderland themed. Tom Petty made a good Mad Hatter, but the scene where they slice Alice up like a cake creeped me out, and lingered in my subconscious for a number of years before I remembered what it was from. It was probably my first exposure to the story though.
Telly Savalas - There’s No Way Home
Speaking of Alice in Wonderland, this song comes from the 1985 TV musical version. Obviously before I was born, but I had it on VHS, maybe by age 7 or 8, I don’t remember. Telly Savalas was known for his role in the show Kojak, but here he played the Cheshire Cat. The scene where Alice meets him seems perfectly set up for a jolly musical number about never giving up on your dreams, but instead the cat decides to lay some hard truths on Alice. “The world’s immense, but sad to say, it makes no sense in any way. So what care I if you should cry? There’s no way home.” By adulthood, I would realize how true this song was. It wasn’t my favorite song from the movie as a kid but it is now.
Phillip Glasser and Christopher Plummer - Never Say Never
From the film An American Tail. I have a long history with the first movie in particular. It was one of my favorite movies as a child. It's the reason I've always been into wearing hats. Perhaps even back then I was attracted to darker and depressing things, and An American Tail is a dark, depressing movie. A movie about a cute, innocent young mouse boy being thrown into a cruel world. No wonder I related to it. I like that it doesn’t sugar coat the world for kids. They could easily have made it some patriotic drivel that makes America out to be some kind of paradise. In fact the immigrant mice who are moving to America think it is going to be a paradise, but instead it turns out to be every bit as awful as the countries they came from, ruled by extortionists, full of sweatshops and gangs exploiting the working class immigrants. But this song is about optimism and never giving up. It motivated me for years, through many trials and tribulations. I guess now though, after a few decades of disillusionment and being forced to let go of my unrealistic aspirations, I do find myself saying “never”, because I’ve learned how rigged this society is.
The World of David the Gnome (TV theme song)
This song can bring tears of nostalgia to my eyes sometimes. It was a cartoon on Nick Jr., following the adventures of a gnome named David, who was a doctor to the animals and loved inside a tree in the woods. This show made me a lifelong environmentalist. At the risk of sounding like an out-of-touch geezer, it makes the children’s shows of today seem brainless and vapid by comparison. The final episode even deals with death, a topic few kids shows dare touch on.
Sonic the Hedgehog Theme (SATAM cartoon)
“Blue streak, speeds by. Sonic the Hedgehog. Too fast, for the naked eye. Sonic the Hedgehog.” There was only one Sonic cartoon that was truly good, and it was the one with Princess Sally Acorn. But Sega really hates it and wants to bury it for some reason. It was this and “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog”, the more comedic counterpart that aired at the same time, which got me into the video games. I may have gotten into Mario first, but by 1993, I was firmly on Sega’s side of the console wars. And I still have my Sega Genesis.
Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition - Cargo Ship
Another video game level theme. Say what you will about the Sega Genesis sound chip, but there were some bangers on that system. I was obsessed with Jurassic Park, and this remains my favorite video game adaptation. You play as either Dr. Grant (who now is a weapons expert) or a Velociraptor, fighting dinosaurs and military personnel. The Cargo Ship theme often pops into my mind on rainy days, it being a rainy level.
DeCap Attack - Level 2
A very underrated game, DeCap Attack. They took a cutesy, childish side-scrolling game from Japan and gave it a spooky Halloween aesthetic in the US import. You play as a headless mummy brought to life by a mad scientist. Could its soundtrack be the root of my love of goth music? Perhaps it is.
Weird Al Yankovic - Headline News
Weird Al was always there in the background during my childhood. I remember when MTV would occasionally air blocks of his music videos. I was even one of the few who watched The Weird Al Show during the original airing of its only 13 episodes. I think the very first album I ever owned was “The Best of Weird Al Yankovic: Volume II” on cassette, which I still own. And this song was on it. The lyrics retell some top news stories from 1994 in a hilarious manner, which is still funny to this day, but as a child, it was the farts and burps in the background during the kazoo solo that cracked me up. Which come to think of it is something only a Weird Al song would have, let alone be able to pull off.
Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone
I mentioned the Sonic cartoons were what got me into the games. It was my good old cousin Jon who got me a Sega Genesis, after our house was burglarized and my Nintendo stolen. We lived in a really bad neighborhood in Fresno, California at this time, and it was pretty traumatizing having our house broken into. A few months later the Sega got stolen too, so I got a second Sega for Christmas (I think from Jon again, he was a great cousin), and that is the one I still have to this day. My first Sega came packaged with the first Sonic game. To someone used to the NES, the graphics seemed incredible, as did the music. So the theme of the first level always brings back those memories of playing it for the first time.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Mystic Cave Zone
The second Sonic game introduces his two-tailed fox sidekick, Tails. As a kid I always saw myself in Tails, a smart, nerdy kid who got picked on by his peers for being different, before joining forces with a big brother figure in Sonic. The music in the game was great too, with the Mystic Cave Zone being my favorite. You could use that beat in an industrial metal song, it would sound badass. Like something off The Kovenant’s SETI album, which we will talk about when we get to the music I liked at age 17.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - Ice Cap Zone
This song is legendary within the Sonic fandom. There were longstanding rumors, later confirmed to be true, that Michael Jackson worked on the soundtrack to this game. It was theorized that the Ice Cap theme came from “Smooth Criminal”, or a more obscure Jackson track, “Who is It?” But later it was revealed that the song is actually based on “Hard Times” by The Jetzons, an obscure 80s New Wave band whose keyboardist Brad Buxer went on to collaborate with Michael Jackson. We will get to that song much later. Because of all this, Sega has to pay extra to use the song, resulting in it being replaced by bland and generic level music in later rereleases of Sonic 3.
Sonic & Knuckles - Flying Battery Zone
Sonic & Knuckles was basically the second half of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and came with a special lock-on cartridge that enabled you to join the games together and play as the new character Knuckles the Echidna. The Flying Battery Zone is the second level, and has perhaps the best music in the game, rivaled only by the Lava Reef Zone. Someone did a mashup with this theme and “Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer, and it turned out better than either song is by itself. Would have blown my mind when I was nine years old.
Tim Curry - Toxic Love
The movie FernGully: The Last Rainforest was another favorite of my childhood. If David the Gnome made me an environmentalist this film only solidified it. In it Tim Curry plays a sexy personification of pollution and simgs “Toxic Love”, a so g that sounds like it could have been on the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The version on the actual soundtrack is a bit better than the one in the movie. Robin Williams’ “Batty Rap” is a close second best song on the soundtrack.
Polaris - Hey Sandy
This was the theme song to the Nickelodeon sitcom The Adventures of Pete and Pete, a favorite show of my childhood. I never heard it on the radio, but I found the full song much later online. It just takes me back to the 1990s, the good old days when I still had my innocence, before Middle School scarred me for life. One of those songs that awakens my inner-child
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And that covers my early childhood. Next time we will focus on my next five years, ages 10 to 14. A time when I became less influenced by the tastes of those around me, and began developing my own musical tastes and with it, my own identity.
