Tag: Hair Metal

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Hot for Teacher

If you looked at my buying habits, as a kid, you’d be fooled into thinking I was a huge fan of Van Halen. I owned a copy of 1984 on cassette by the age of twelve, acquired primarily ’cause I thought the smoking cherub on the cover was kinda awesome. My first CD – acquired, begrudgingly, when cassettes ceased being available – was a copy of the Van Halen. We were deep into the nineties by this point, long past the age where the distorted guitar of Nirvana had put hair metal to death, and there was something deeply uncool about liking Van Halen at that point. And, if I’m honest, Van Halen, as an album, did nothing for me. I’d picked it up ’cause I was collecting guitar magazines at the time, and kept coming across references to Eruption and the rest of Eddie Van Halen’s solos. I learned something really important from that CD: don’t front load your album.The three

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Makin’ a Racket

I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me. ‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games. Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music