The reason I heard Micheal Jackon's song Beat It is because they were playing it on KZEL. They even had to warn us that they were about to play a new song by MJ. They knew that we weren't going to like it but that we had to listen to it because there was a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. That was the hook for guys like me.
Looking back, there wasn't anything really all that special about the guitar solo. We had all heard him do much better stuff. So we could just dismiss it. But I couldn't. There was something about that song that I liked. I didn't know what it was but it made my foot tap. Each time I would hear it (because everyone always heard it all the time) and my foot would start tapping, I would stop myself, like I was doing something bad, like playing pocket pool while waiting for the bus, or picking your nose in math class.
Did I mention that I was a philosophical kind of kid? Well I thought about this for a while. I even worried about it a little. Then I had an epiphany. I had another one of these kinds of revelations a few year before this point and the logic applied to my present predicament. It goes like this.
When I was a kid a few of the kids decided that they were going to target me for ridicule. No reason for it, that's just how kids work. It bothered me for a bit. I even got into a fight with someone who had nothing to do with it. (long story) and had a near fight with one of the kids who did have something to do with it. (I slammed him against the locker and told him to knock it off...which he did. See how tough I was?) But after a while I did this thinking thing that I do sometimes and asked myself why I cared as much as I did about what those idiots though of me? I found that the more I ignored them, or just laughed at them the less I was picked on. So, applying the same logic, why would it matter to anyone if I liked the Michael Jackson song? And if my toe was tapping then that must mean I like it, right? So then and there I decided that if a song moved me in anyway then it was worthy of my time. (It took longer to apply that to Country and Western, but I got there eventually.)
This started me on re-evaluating all the old songs I had heard and all the old styles. I discovered something. Disco still sucked! But U2 was awesome! And so was INXS and David Bowie, and The Cars! My GOD the CARS! But I still loved heavy metal, but I also liked Neil Diamond and Bert Kaempfert!
No comments:
Post a Comment