Music and Memory: Surfer Rosa
Oct. 2nd, 2012 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormsewerToday I listened to the Pixies's Surfer Rosa for the first time in quite a while. I had forgotten how much I love that album. But that's not the only thing I was reminded of as I listened to it. As music tends to do, it also brought back a lot of memories from the time in my life when I first got into the album.
College. Junior year. I watched Fight Club, and of course it blew my young male mind, and hey, what's that song in the closing credits? That's how it started.
My family came to visit not long after, and I had my younger sister, who would have been 16 at the time, listen to some of the album. She said, "It sounds like your kind of music, but it isn't very good." (She later got her head on straight and became a Pixies fan, but I still like to tease her about that comment.)
I'd broken up with my high school girlfriend the year before, and we were in the process of figuring out whether being "just friends" was going to work out or not. I made her a mix tape (that admission dates me, I imagine) that contained a number of selections from Surfer Rosa. She gave it to her younger sister (in middle school at the time), who apparently actually liked it (at least somebody did). That's when I started to get the feeling it wouldn't work out for us. (There is no disappointment like a mixtape scorned.) Later we had a big fight when she told me I used music as a "crutch" and proceeded to try and psychoanalyze me (she was a psych major) in great but misguided detail. That was pretty much the end of that.
Five years later I was living in Japan. The day I passed Level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test I saw the Pixies live for the first (and, to date, only) time, in Fukuoka. (I felt like Black Francis was phoning it, but I enjoyed what Kim Deal put out there.) Immediately after that I took a train to Nagasaki and spent a week in a Zen Buddhist monastery, which was my first direct experience with Buddhism as practiced in Asia. That was also something of a watershed event in my life.
Somehow Surfer Rosa is the invisible thread that ties this all together. And every time I listen to it, I remember.
College. Junior year. I watched Fight Club, and of course it blew my young male mind, and hey, what's that song in the closing credits? That's how it started.
My family came to visit not long after, and I had my younger sister, who would have been 16 at the time, listen to some of the album. She said, "It sounds like your kind of music, but it isn't very good." (She later got her head on straight and became a Pixies fan, but I still like to tease her about that comment.)
I'd broken up with my high school girlfriend the year before, and we were in the process of figuring out whether being "just friends" was going to work out or not. I made her a mix tape (that admission dates me, I imagine) that contained a number of selections from Surfer Rosa. She gave it to her younger sister (in middle school at the time), who apparently actually liked it (at least somebody did). That's when I started to get the feeling it wouldn't work out for us. (There is no disappointment like a mixtape scorned.) Later we had a big fight when she told me I used music as a "crutch" and proceeded to try and psychoanalyze me (she was a psych major) in great but misguided detail. That was pretty much the end of that.
Five years later I was living in Japan. The day I passed Level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test I saw the Pixies live for the first (and, to date, only) time, in Fukuoka. (I felt like Black Francis was phoning it, but I enjoyed what Kim Deal put out there.) Immediately after that I took a train to Nagasaki and spent a week in a Zen Buddhist monastery, which was my first direct experience with Buddhism as practiced in Asia. That was also something of a watershed event in my life.
Somehow Surfer Rosa is the invisible thread that ties this all together. And every time I listen to it, I remember.
