Music: AVQ&A: Art at the exact right time

Jul 21, 2011 Music Avenue

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question youd like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at .

Amid a general discussion of things the participants appreciate, last weeks Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast touched on pop culture that came into their lives at precisely the right moment. Weve previously talked about art we came to too late in life, but what art did you encounter when you needed it, whether its an angry song that helped you as a frustrated adolescent, a mopey movie that made you feel understood after a breakup, or a book that suggested a point of view you needed to hear from?

Jason HellerUntil age 27, I had a love/hate relationship with Led Zeppelin: Some songs I loved, others I hated. Overall, though, I was never able to fully commit to even one album by the band. That changed in 1999, though; after a bad break-up, the disintegration of my own band, and a belly-flop into the bottle, Led Zeppelin found me. The bands 1969 debut suddenly made sense; Id heard it, or at least all the songs on it, a zillion times before, but the albums murky majesty and primal snarl sunk its hooks into my skull. Maybe it was Robert Plants opening verse from the discs first song, Good Times Bad Times, that did it: In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man / Now Ive reached that age, I try to do all those things the best I can / No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam. Granted, thats some pretty hackneyed shit. At that point in my life, though, I could painfully relateand the fact that Id resisted going whole-hog on Zeppelin for so long meant it hit with the accumulated weight of decades of denial.

Keith PhippsI didnt care for the movie SLC Punk,but I did like one scene: a flashback toward the end, when one kid shows up at the other kids house. (Hey, its been a while, and it isnt that memorable a movie I think one of them was played as a grown-up by Shaggy from the Scooby Doomovies?) At any rate, he shows up for a scheduled session of playing Dungeons & Dragonswhile listening to Rush. Then the one kid swaps out Rush for a punk album, explaining Its new. And then Rush doesnt sound the same anymore. I never had that sort of punk epiphany, but that scene resonated for me. It captured what I felt when I saw 8 1/2 for the first time, or Blue Velvet,or any other movie that became an obsession while making me look at movies differently. But in keeping with the musical theme, heres my Its new moment:When I purchased my first Talking Heads cassetteI believe it was the Stop Making Sensesoundtrackin junior high, it was pretty clear that the stack of cassettes that included Bruce Hornsby, Falco, and 5150-era Van Halen might have to go.

Noel MurrayIt was the summer of 1990, I was 19 going on 20, and the woman Id been dating fairly seriously for a year had just left me for another guy. I needed a distraction, and found it in the form of an article by Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stones annual Hot issue. He wrote about the new wave of comics emerging at the start of the 90s, and mentioned some names I knew from my younger comics-reading days (Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Los Bros Hernandez, Dave Sim), and some Id never heard of in the years Id been away from the medium (Chester Brown, Paul Chadwick, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman). I found my nearest comic shop and used the last of my selling-back-my-spring-semester-textbooks money to buy a Concretecollection, a few issues of Animal Man, the Blood Of Palomartrade, the first Sandmantrade (which was The Dolls House, not Preludes And Nocturnes), and, because of the approving Matt Groening quote on the cover, a collection of Peter Bagges Bradleys comics. I hadnt read comics regularly in three or four years, but in the months to come, I got back in deep, spending whatever I had on old and new undergrounds, and on the edgier DC and Dark Horse fare. I was poor and lonely, and the snarky angst of alternative cartoonists like Bagge and Dan Clowes were like dispatches from my own subconscious, while the imaginative fictions of Gaiman, Morrison, and Chadwick were like comfort food, taking me back to when I was a 10-year-old boy with a stack of comics by the bed. I became an evangelist for the form, sharing my favorites with my roommates and friends, and reading them over and over myself, in the same way that Id re-watch my favorite television episodes and movies, or listen to my favorite albums on a loop. The funny thing is that one of the reasons that girlfriend broke up with me was because she thought I was irresponsible with my paychecks. And given how much cash I dropped on comics over the next few years (and decades), she probably got out at just the right time.

Nathan RabinWhen I was 15 years old, my social worker enrolled me in a class on Film Noir And Gender Roles at Chicagos Facets Multimedia. So I was in a prime position to have my brain blown to smithereens with pure adolescent joy at the genre-riffing and meta-textual playfulness of Quentin Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs. For a teenage boy in love with film noir, Stanley Kubrick, and the French New Wave, it was like a feature-length orgasm, a tour de force of attitude and fierce intelligence that rewired my DNA and set me on a path to becoming a film critic. I was so deeply infatuated with Reservoir Dogs that when Pulp Fiction came out, it couldnt help but feel like a terrible disappointment. Then again, I was a teenager, and teenagers have all the leeway in the world to be wrong, and exercise that right frequently.

Claire ZulkeyThis ones more about time and place than an actual state of mind, but it seemed entirely appropriate that I got introduced to the Indigo Girls and REM while at summer camp. My friend Nora made the best mix-tapes when I was in my early teens, since she had the optimal resources you could ask for at that age: older siblings. Left to our own devices, wed just be doing the Kid N Play and singing Do Me, which have their merits of course, but YMCA sleepaway camp in Michigan requires somewhat subtler, if not crunchy fare. Noras tapes were where I first listened to Peter Gabriel and Carly Simon, but I specifically remember hearing Shiny Happy People and Near Wild Heaven on the bus ride up to Camp Echo, and playing Galileo and Closer to Fine on my Walkman on my bunk, thinking This is the perfect music for this place. It was the kind of music that complemented, not blocked out, the wind in the trees, the waves on the beach, and the screen doors slamming. And of course it was perfect for singing along to with your friends, summertime-only or otherwise.

David SimsI saw Donnie Darko in 2002 (in Britain, where I grew up, it came out about a year after its brief, limited release in the U.S.), and like many of my friends, was immediately enraptured. A paean to teen alienation and the creeping fear of mortality, it struck achord with stuff I was grappling with at the time. But I think the films real appeal to 16-year-old me was that it also struck plenty of chords with stuff I had no handle on at all. Teenagers are often nostalgic for times worse than their own, wishing they could be growing up even more disaffected and iconoclastic. I certainly was. So the movies caustic/nostalgic references to pop culture, politics, and New Agey fads from the 80s was irresistible. Who doesnt want to grow up in a time where you could go see The Evil Dead with your bunny-rabbit friend and talk about Michael Dukakis at the dinner table to piss off your parents? Aside from some groaningly on-the-nose pseudo-philosophical material, Donnie Darko holds up pretty well when I watch it now. But whenever I do, I mostly wince and think about what a twerp I was for pretending to understand it on a deeper level than I actually did back in 2002.

Will Harris Im not sure how many people can say they first discovered Americas favorite gap-toothed talk-show host via print rather than TV, but when I stumbled upon a copy of Late Night With David Letterman: The Book on a family expedition to Waldenbooks, it only took a cursory flip through its pages to know that Id soon be trying desperately to stay up until 12:30 a.m. on a nightly basis, high school be damned. Its a remarkably rinky-dink operation as officially licensed books go, with some blurry screenshots that were clearly taken by holding a camera in front of a television screen, but it still introduced me to Daves Sentiment Shoppe (which featured a mug emblazoned, You dont have to be crazy to work here but a lot of the people have serious emotional disorders that I find really depressing), Daves Toy Shop (Id still like to get my hands on a Mahatma Gandhi Passive Resistance Punching Bag), and The Late Night Book Mobile, which offered such titles as Touch Me On The D-Train by Leo Buscaglia, and Boy Oh Boy, Im Actually Sleeping With Jessica Lange by Sam Shepard. For my money, though, the greatest moment was They Took My Show Away, in which Dave helps a young boy through the trauma of Voyagers! being cancelled. Thanks to David Letterman, Id found someone else in the world with a sarcastic, off-kilter sense of humor, and it made me far less afraid to show my own. The other major discovery came the following year, when my buddy Tom Nuckols invited me to attend a screening of Sid And Nancy at the Naro Expanded Cinema, in Norfolk, Virginia. Yes, in retrospect, I know its a terribly cartoonish and not entirely historically accurate look at the history of the love story of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Yes, I know it supposedly glorifies the use of heroin. But I entered into the film without knowing the first thing about punk rock, let alone the Sex Pistols. I was a Top 40 boy, pure and simple. You want to talk about a Hallelujah, I have seen the light moment? That was mine with music. It was a gateway drug to sounds and styles of song that I hadnt realized existed, and I quickly found others who dug the same kind of stuff, resulting in new friendships which have arguably stood the test of time better than some of the music that brought us together in the first place.

Phil NugentCollege marked the first time I not only let a girl know how I felt about her, but asked her out. When she rejected me, I wasnt prepared to deal with it, so at an embarrassingly advanced age, I was marooned in my dorm room, miserably depressed and convinced that things were never going to get any better for me, and also convinced that if I stepped outside, everyone on the campus would be looking at me and snickering under their breath. In that condition, and unable to relate to anything in the record collection I knew so well, I dipped into my dormmates tiny cache of cassette tapes and discovered Neil Youngs After The Gold Rush. As soon as I put it on and heard Young moaning Don Gibsons country classic Oh Lonesome Me from the depths of the suicide ward, I knew this was not just a sad record, but the very voice of my misery, and Ive tried to never be without a copy since. I just hate to describe the mood I have to be in before I want to hear it again.

Another one in 2000, my mother was dying of lung cancer. It was a harrowing experience for everyone around her, and one night I decided to get my mind off things by checking out the new movie by the writer-director of Boogie Nights. I knew nothing about it except the director, the stars, and that it was called Magnolia, all of which led me to half-expect an evening spent watching Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jason Robards dressed in white suits, sitting on the veranda of an antebellum mansion and sipping mint juleps while crickets chirped in the background. If Id known going in that it featured not one but two parental figures dying of cancer, I probably would have taken my chances with something more uplifting, like Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo. But the longer the movie went on, the more I got into it, and all the things in it that turn off a lot of peoplethe consistent devotion to reaching for the highest imaginable pitch, the naked ambition, the surreal touchesmade perfect sense to me. It cleared my head and gave me a lift, which is a funny reaction to a movie with so much throbbing despair. But I felt as if P.T. Anderson had piled on so much excess, in such a spirit of good faith, that hed somehow gone through the other end of his pretensions and arrived at something cleansing. Since then, Ive met other people whove reported that they saw it during a personal crisis and had a similar reaction, and I think something about it really speaks clearly to people in a certain frame of mind. Its not a frame of mind I recommend seeking out, but if youre there, you may be glad this movie exists.

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