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Tim Wilson, May 10th 2010
Submit a playlist! The goal is to have a new playlist and story everyday. You can also follow The Playlist Project on Twitter and Facebook!
This playlist is made of as many songs as I could fit from the years between 7th and 9th grade—the songs I would come and listen to in the days when you couldn’t drive, when you didn’t have a girlfriend, when there was nothing to do but walk to the town center, hang out in the parking lot of a strip mall, and wait for your mom to be off the phone so you could dial-up to AOL.
These are definitely not the songs that defined that time musically. There’s nothing here off Nevermind, or off Ten, or Weezer’s Blue album, or even Dookie, because those songs belong to bands that you would listen to over a span of years, bands that would revisit you with new albums and songs at different points in your life. Everybody knows those, and they don’t need memorializing.
Instead, these are songs that attach themselves to one specific year in your memory, songs where the title and band name are always said together because you never heard of the band outside of this one song, because you would never see or hear them again after. But they are also songs that, if you grew up during that time, form a common vocabulary that you can share with almost anyone that age, with anyone who spent the hours after school each day sitting on the floor of their room with the door closed, listening to the radio and thinking about all the things you think about in 7th grade. They’re the songs that you recorded off K-Rock or Z-100, crammed back-to-back on a blank tape that you had ready when you listened to the radio, with the first 10 seconds cut off and the DJ’s voice cutting in at the end. And after you caught one and recorded it, they’re the songs that you would play hundreds of times again and again for a month, and then would never listen to again.
Everybody has those songs, even if they can differ completely within just a few years of age difference. I’m 28, and these are mine.
Tim lives in Chicago where he specializes in adult fraternity life. He doesn’t have a blog. He is sorry. http://twitter.com/twilson22
