This is what makes me and people like me dive headlong for hours on end into vast stacks of vinyl records like an audiophile Scrooge McDuck doing the backstroke through his money piles. We are digging because over and around and under each stack lies the next musical revolution that will play out only in our heads. It is a lost R&B song from a defunct record label out of Greenville, South Carolina or a rare garage rock album from a barely functioning label in the Chicago outskirts. Why? Always why. Here’s why: Years ago when hormones were running free and loose through our bodies, a piece of music galvanized and crystallized inside our ear drums and sent us off whatever course our personal narrative had set. It instead caused us to recoil and launch ourselves at walls and ceilings in cramped basement rooms, our ears covered with the sweaty leather of our headphones. It caused us to throw our arms wide and tilt our heads back like we’d seen so many rockstars do and scream at the top of our lungs all the while measuring our abilities to mimic all-time front man moves in all-falsifying mirrors. We became stage-stalking glory monsters and neo-classical guitar gods without ever actually having to take a stage. We rocked good and long and hard until our ears were metaphorically or even literally bleeding, head abuzz with lingering echo and permanent hearing loss. It caused us to pack ourselves into circus-tower cannons and careen off into the troposphere with cell-splintering velocity. We jerked around our rooms, clothed or otherwise, shaking uncontrollably like manual transmission cars stuck between gears until the chorus kicked and sent us off in search of another gear, always a higher gear - that sound! - that one fucking sound, blistering and haunting, vulnerable and swaggering, that sound that catapulted us across the void from our public persona into the land of make-believe. We were preening boy toys and man-eaters, where we feather boa-clad glam rockers and towering demon gods strutting around on stage capable of conjuring meaty, beaty, big and bouncy riffs from our magical fingertips. We were street-corner freestylists transfigured into diamond-encrusted MC heroes earning five mics a record and brushing dirt off our shoulders. We will never grow old. The stage lights will warm the backs of our necks forever. All these years of digging through the stacks, of finding song after mind-altering song, we’re still searching for that big bang, for that volcanic intensity of discovery that will send us off to the other side once more.
In Search of the Next Big Bang
