Bully For Me (Fall 1994 – Spring 1995)
So, in my last post, I included a playlist preserving songs that I was listening to in the 3rd Grade, but…now I’m skipping ahead to more interesting times. You’re welcome!
From kindergarten to 6th grade, my brother and I attended a private Christian school. But for the 7th grade onward, our parents had us attend the local public school.
Little did they know, my local middle school was…quite terrible.
Most middle schools are terrible, in truth.
It’s perhaps the peak years of hormonal spiking, and when emerging teens gather in large numbers, nastiness abounds.
But this middle school, which brought together the blue collar toughs from the neighborhood with poor kids bused in from North Philly…this school was a nightmare.
I saw fights pretty much every day.
Tufts of ripped hair blowing around the schoolyard was a common sight. And it wasn’t even strange to see blood spatters in the cafeteria following a fight. Fighting was absolutely everywhere.
Teachers played the role of babysitters to loud and rowdy kids, and usually very meek babysitters. Kids would shout and argue and vie for dominance every opportunity they got.
The good news is that my brother and I only had to be in this school for one year. Because our education had been so far ahead of the school’s curriculum, we got skipped a grade. So after maybe three weeks of school, we were suddenly 8th graders.
The bad news is that bullies took to us pretty-boy nerds like flies to spoiled meat. It was only one year, but it was a really tough year to get through.
Some more good news is that we made a few friends there. They were considered freaks by everyone else, and they listened to weird underground bands that I had never heard of.
Not only did they help us cope with the madness of that year, they steered us to some life-changing music.
A transformation had begun.
So here’s the mix for this year:
Plenty of radio tunes at this point, but I was starting to dabble into other territories.
Ah, This Mix Is Really…Fresh: (Fall 1994 – Spring 1995)
Fall of 1995 was when I first entered high school.
Unlike my middle school, which was just a few blocks from my house, this was a magnet school that accepted the top students from all around the city. It was thus my first leap from a small pond into much bigger cultural waters.
When we attended the welcome night, we were greeted with lovely music from the school’s orchestra. I almost cried with joy and relief at this most welcome contrast to the horrors of my year in middle school.
I had no trouble finding friends in this new environment, though they tended to be of the more countercultural variety.
At this point, radio and movie soundtracks still held some sway over my tastes, but not much. I was too busy digging into bands recommended by friends, and even going to a few live shows.
Despite some edgy attitude, most of my favorite music was still fairly accessible. Radio-adjacent if not actually played on the radio. That makes it a lot of fun to listen to!
Here’s a link for your listening pleasure:
Enjoy!
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Middle school sounds, what’s the phrase… I think ‘character forming’ is the positive spin.
Quite the progression from last week musically. There was something about Mmm mmm mmm that I couldn’t stand at the time and it hasn’t improved with age for me. On the other hand I only discovered People Who Died a year or so ago and loved it.
Yeah, there is something perversely enjoyable about some of the intermediate entries, when stuff like Nirvana plays next to the Aladdin soundtrack, but I figured it best to keep such joys to myself.
Fair warning for this and all other mixes henceforth:
Some of the picks will be NSFW. Especially in my teens but pretty much always, I’ve got a soft spot for the lewd, the crude, the rude, and the full of ‘tude. Band names and album art included.
Have fun!
Oh, looks like Mix # 1 is missing its final track:
Face to Face by Siouxsie & the Banshees.
This was featured in Batman Returns, which came out in 1992, but repeat viewings helped spark some interest in the song and the band who played it.
(Just re-watched Batman Returns, by the way. A perfect Christmas pick!)
Shoutout of admiration for our author’s original artwork.
Speaking as someone who can’t draw their way out of a paper bag, I marvel at those who can put pen to paper and create something amazing. I really love it.
Thanks mt. I drew those around 2007, and even then I was out of practice. I used to draw all the time as a kid. As for now? I’m pretty sure I could accurately depict a paper bag, but not much else.
Your Abraham Lincoln looked like Abraham Lincoln.
And kudos to mt for use of the word eidetic in the teaser on the home page.
I will admit I had to look it up. Great descriptor for Phylum and this column.
Thank you. We strive for good words using.
Phylum, your ’95 list totally puts you in the exact same vein as a couple of my fellow trumpeters my senior year of HS (the ones who first hit on me when they thought I was a freshman, then took it upon themselves to be my ‘bodyguards’ when they found out I was a senior and a year older than them and the ONLY senior trumpeter in the entire band, at a school of over 2,000 students… they were such sweethearts!)
Interesting to see how your musical evolution totally resembles the ideal 120 Minutes episode on MTV in 1995. 😁
Certainly interesting, especially since my family didn’t get cable TV until a few years later!
Phylum, did you hear Skinny Puppy are breaking up after 41 years as a band? Nivek Ogre and cEvin Key going their separate ways…
Pour one out for these geniuses of grime!
https://youtu.be/nnbVmJ4NmCg?si=QTR1Qt7JASUUVzUO
I did not! They’ve broken up before, so who knows, maybe they’ll be back. I haven’t heard much of their later stuff to be honest, but I did enjoy Ohgr’s solo albums Ritalin and Devil In My Details.
Middle school is the crucible of cruelty we all have to pass through. It sounds like yours was of the XXL variety — sorry dude, sounds like hell! However, passing through that torture can lead you to some great music and great friends who share the experience. I think age 13 is when I really became a music-oriented person, my friends and I exploring forbidden genres. From radio-friendly “metal” to actual heavy metal. From “alternative” to indie. From radio rap to underground rap.
A lot of what you were listening to at the time was *similar* to what I was listening to at that time… some direct overlap and a lot of adjacency. Good stuff!
As JJ said, such adversities do build “character.” It just took me a decade or two for that experience to actually manifest as character rather than an irrational fear of crowds and potential mobs.
I knew just about everything on list 1 and a good amount of list 2. Interesting to see the progression in taste as exposure to more off the beaten path artists increased.
Junior High was difficult for me as well, but that one year experience you had sounds like much more of a hellscape than anything I had to go through. Glad you survived it and that it at least set you on a course of finding your tribe and the good music that comes with it.
No better way to set someone up for outsider music than treating them like an outsider! Thankfully I did find a tribe with whom I could try out this new role in style.
My middle school experience was quite a few years before yours, and there was much less literal blood. Figuratively? Much the same. So much depends on finding your tribe, sooner rather than later. I was in middle school in the earlyish days of the environmental movement making it to small town America. I found a core of like-minded “green” people. We founded the Ecology Club (that’s what we called it in those days). This fixation had the advantages of allowing us to be virtuous in at least one way while still allowing us to drive our parents insane by listing all of the ways that they were doing absolutely everything incorrectly.
Hallmarks of the ecologically minded in those days were listening to John Denver records and embracing all of the “herbal” goodness available to us while doing very little to actually improve the environment. But it did keep me safe through middle school, so there’s that.
I grew up listening to John Denver. At some point in high school I decided he was punk rock enough to listen to. Don’t ask me to lay out the rationale for that one.
I was delighted with Return of the Rentals, the unofficial follow-up to The Blue Album. Pinkerton was such a claustrophobic album, Rivers Cuomo should have released it a solo artist. I like to imagine Matt Sharp literally smacking his forehead while watching Cuomo laying down the vocals to numerous songs. Sharp probably would have left Weezer, even if the lead singer decided to shirk a concert date on Oahu in order to attend Harvard. “Friends of P” sounds like a subtle dig at Cuomo. You can write about your potentially underage international pen pal, while I wax poetic about a full-grown woman, presumably with the late Rik Ocasek’s blessing.
The other song I really love from your list is “Peek-A-Boo”. Peepshow was my Siouxsie and the Banshees starter album. Crap. I should’ve gone up to Pasadena by myself. I don’t think Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie ever put out a bad album. People ridicule the RRHOF, but it means something to me. After Devo and New Order, Siouxsie and the Banshees, in my opinion, is most deserving.
I live on an island. It’s pretty much “reggae or die”. We even have an alternate state flag; it’s green and yellow. It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me, but a lot of people mount in on their trucks.
Maybe you can get people on your island to jam to The Slits, who sometimes sound like (early) Siouxsie doing reggae. And Budgie played drums on their first album. I wouldn’t find out about them for many more years though.
did you go to Masterman?
I also think it’s pretty funny you bounced from a Christian school to public, and Lords of Acid’s “Rough Sex” made the playlist! Your parents must’ve been so proud!!!
(I owned the whole CD, but I was a bit older…)
Central High. My parents recommended Central over Masterman because they felt it would offer the full high school experience.
Given that those “extracurricular activities” came to distract me from my studies, I do sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I had chosen Masterman instead. But then I wouldn’t have met the friends I made, some of whom I still keep in touch with. And maybe my playlists wouldn’t be as good…