It probably should be said, that in the swirling constellations of music that guided my adolescent life, none shone as brightly nor guided me as faithfully as the brilliant Triangulum of the Police, Rush, and the Cars. Perhaps an odd mix of genres, but that didn’t matter: when I wanted to chill, or jam, or […]
Content
Random thoughts, settings, characters, situations, perhaps leading somewhere
Tagged: 1980s
A quick snippet: senior year in high school. A milling mass crowded into a cul-de-sac of blue steel lockers, some intent on getting their books and packs for the next class, some proceeding more leisurely. Lunchtimes were staggered in my school, with the student body split between early A Lunch and later B Lunch. There […]
The excitement was palpable: my friend’s teenage brother had scored the deal of a lifetime. From the early fall heat he and his friends carried in the prize: a wood-paneled console stereo that must have been six feet long and could have held a small buffet and a sideboard of decanters on its immensity. My […]
It was fall, the summer heat was fading, and there was a family of toads living in the rock garden under the windows behind the patio in our first house in Texas. It was the perfect time to be out in the backyard tear-assing around with LEGO spaceships blowing things up, even though you really […]
Another scene set here: summer of 1986. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. Halley’s Comet had been something of a bust, but there were interesting things happening in the summer sky, and I was tracking Mars, Jupiter and Saturn on a huge wall map of Wil Tirion’s Sky […]
Let’s start off with a truism: for anyone who grew up in the 1980s, the Beastie Boys’ album Licensed to Ill was a seminal piece of work. For those in the know, it was the commercialization of a culture that had been building and evolving for at least ten years. For those far from the […]
The first impression that comes to me is heat. Heat and the sound of a Diesel engine. This was the soundtrack of a late summer, a summer in the cusp of the 90s, an era I spent quite a bit of time driving around in a ’81 Diesel VW Rabbit. That particular model of automobile […]
Perhaps it is a truism, but people tend to forget: children remember things. They also understand more than you expect. Perhaps their understanding has gaps or naivetes, but the basics are usually there. I say this because of my memory of one of my favorite songs from the early 1980s. I was all of eight […]
2013-01-05 ::
Edward Semblance //
Snapsongs
Snapsongs: “Spirits in the Material World” by the Police
Snapsongs: “Spirits in the Material World” by the Police
The word that comes to mind when I think of my first reaction to this song is: unearthly. Why? I’m not sure. I was in fifth grade. On first thought one could say, What would a fifth-grader know about unearthly? But it’s not like nine-year-olds never hear music. By that age I’d had a long […]