How My Teenage Years Would’ve Been Better If I'd Had Access to Alternative Music

My life as a teenager pretty much sucked. Bad hair, bad skin, family issues (some things never change) and absolutely no idea where I belonged in the world. I was smart, but I had a distaste for the effort required to do well at school and preferred irritating teachers to listening to them; plus, I spent most of my spare time reading lackluster fantasy novels (fortunately, some things do change) and hanging out and playing similarly lackluster RPGs with my all-male group of friends.

I can imagine that, after reading that, words like ‘nerd’, ‘geek’, ‘dweeb’, ‘wonk’ and ‘spaz’ are coming to mind – all as precursors to the biggie: ‘loser’. And I can’t argue that it isn’t an apt description.

As you can imagine this didn’t make me a well-regarded figure at school – especially when you consider we’re talking about a small town in northern Queensland where not playing rugby league is considered sedition (or, at least, it would be if anyone in the local rugby league community knew what the word meant). I wasn’t exactly picked on - since there were people on lower rungs of the ‘loser ladder’ than myself - but it wasn’t exactly a fun time.

Thing is, it could have been so much different. I wasn’t really a role-player, or a fantasy-novel-reader. My laziness, antisocial tendencies and anti-authoritarian mindset would have made me completely at home with any number of the subgenres within the amazing world of alternative music.

But there wasn’t an amazing world of alternative music – at least not where I was. Instead we had the underwhelming world of mainstream music.

There were, if I remember correctly, two commercial stations, and up until 1995 both were AM and all-but identical in content. The music was the typical AM fare – bland, safe, pop-rock and top forty drivel with lots of oldies; nothing for the aspiring misunderstood teenager to relate to so much he'd constantly annoy his parents and siblings by playing it at obscene volumes at inappropriate hours of the night.

In the years between 1986 and 1991 I went from 13 to 18; in that time there were any number of bands who I could have fallen in love with – I mean, I was the target market for The Smiths. R.E.M. were churning out albums and what was I listening to? Def fucking Leppard. What about The Cure? I may well have braved the tropical climate (and the beatings) to look like Robert Smith. The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and They Might Be Giants appeared, and all I had time for was Phil bloody Collins.

What is also important is that I was at least a little interested in performing music; I’d been forced into learning an instrument and had spent a few years playing the drums, but never been motivated to join or form a band. Why would I? Music was just something to have on. It didn’t drive me, it didn’t inspire me, it didn’t give me anyone I wanted to emulate - no idols or ideals; the things are musicians made of. I can’t imagine too many of today’s successful bands have members who took to their garages determined to play like Huey Lewis and The News.

Missed opportunities to be a mediocre drummer in the worst kind of derivative eighties alt-rock band aside, I think the major casualty of the absence of good music was my social life. A shared taste in music would have brought me into contact with people with whom the mainstream radio me never even knew the name of, and vice-versa. A band t-shirt would have been a uniform, a symbol of shared authenticity. We’d have saved our money to buy imported music magazines (rather than the execrable local rubbish, like Smash Hits) and absorbed the details for long, late-night discussions. Mix tapes would have been a form of currency and record stores our stomping grounds.

And maybe - just maybe - I’d have had an actual conversation with a girl before my eighteenth birthday...