STONE IN LOVE/Journey

I used to think I had good taste: unique, individual taste. But round about the time the Cure started getting popular and Robert Smith began appearing in standing silhouette on posters covering the bedroom walls of artsy high school girls everywhere, I guess I felt a little betrayed. I don't know why it mattered that I had to at least think that I’d heard “it” first – “it” being whatever it was that everyone else was only starting to get years later – but it did. My alternative musical discoveries were the one thing that made me feel cool and smart. The fact that nobody else liked what I liked was proof that I was different. But I wasn’t.

When I first met my wife I was amazed to find out that she and I were listening to the same music at roughly the same time, early Fall and Jesus and Mary Chain, despite the fact that at that time I was living in suburban Massachusetts, getting worked up about the Red Sox or something, while she was living under communism in the former East Germany, and her bootlegged copy of “Boys Don’t Cry” had to be bought in Poland for roughly the equivalent of a month’s rent and smuggled back into Karl-Marx-Stadt

I’m sure there’s stuff out there that only a handful of people are listening to at any given time (Thurston Moore’s new coffee-table book about New York No Wave would seem to give proof of that), but whatever it is, it’s not pop music.

This is all a prelude before saying that I really like this song by Journey, although the only other people I’ve heard admit to such a thing happened to be wearing tight denim on denim and had feathered roach clips in their hair.