One sign of aging may be that a person listens to stations featuring music from a certain decade because it reminds him of songs he liked "back in the day."

Lately I've been into listening to launch's 90's rock, alternative rock, and even "hits" station. The hits station gets very little love from me because it does play a lot of crap (though let's face it, just like any time period, many of the hits in the 90's were absolute crap from a true pop music standard, much less from my snobbier point of view). I'm the first to admit that on the "rock" and "alt rock" stations, the song quality isn't the greatest. Let's face it, The Presidents of the United States of America were a fun band, but nothing really all that great. In fact, had they come along within the last 5 years, I probably wouldn't have given them the time of day.

Back then, I made mix tapes by taping off the radio, then splicing my favorite songs together. Not nearly as efficient as today's CD-burning, and the sound quality is much less, but I was still discovering what will always be my idea of a good time.

I'm not sure what it is that makes me want to listen to this. It's not exactly reminiscing about happier or even necessarily happy times. I mean, I had some good friends back in high school and early college, for sure, and we did have some good times, but for the most part I was not necessarily a happy or totally unmiserable person back in the early to mid-90's. Much of what I listened to back then I definitely would not listen to again. I had horrible taste. I'm not even going to discuss much of what I filled my head with, what tapes I bought, etc., but "country" is what I listened to quite a bit. It was kind of a compromise between parents who were in no way going to allow their child to listen to rock and roll and a young man who liked rock and roll but listened to what was "frowned upon," but somehow less bad because country music has this tendency to sprinkle religious elements into music enough that it kept them from disallowing it altogether (unlike straight-up rock). Of course, this was during the birth/rebirth of "hot new country," which is not really country at all, but some sort of horrible twangified cheap pop imitation. Anyway, thank God I got past that.

On the 90's rock, however...one thing that must be understood is that the radio music format is different now than it was then. Back in the early 90's, top 40 stations played quite a bit of rock. Sure, part of the reason does have to do with Nirvana and the whole "grunge" thing, but rock in general was still a part of the top 40 format back in that time. It was not unusual to hear r&b tracks one minute, then the Spin Doctors or Gin Blossoms or Collective Soul or Pearl Jam the next. Guns 'n Roses wasn't at all out of place on a station also playing hip-hop, which was finally becoming commercially viable. We even saw acts like En Vogue, who, on occasion, blended r&b and rock n roll the way it was meant to be. Indie hipsters who adore Weezer probably started doing so when they heard the band's songs played between Boyz II Men and Metallica. Somewhere toward the late 90's, things started changing. There are technical reasons for the loss of rock in the popular format, much of it having to do with a realigning of how billboard's top 100 was being gathered--which brought attention to the fact that rap and r&b was selling much more than anyone had thought or reported to that point. That, blended with the cycle of pop music returning to non-rock-bubblegum, brought about the loss of rock and roll from your average top 40 station.

So why do I listen to this?
I think it's because it's the first rock and roll I listened to, and that's when I fell in love with the rock. Sure, I'd been into the Beach Boys since before that, but then was the first time I was hearing songs that I, not my parents, enjoyed, songs that were about life, songs that made me feel like a human being. I on't really care about "remembering growing up," so it's not about that--it's about realizing there was more to life than a hypocritical existence within the shelter, it's about listening to something and evaluating it for myself rather than being told. It's about having someone -- albeit someone I've never met, someone I hear on the radio -- identifying with me, saying something I can actually relate to, like "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

So...yes, call me old if you want. I criticize many of the popular newer bands as being nothing but cheap watered-down ripoffs of the bands that the old guys were saying the same about eight or ten years ago. I can rattle off a list of rock and roll heroes I've seen crash and burn in my lifetime. I have veins that automatically pulse harder when someone slaps a label on a band that doesn't deserve it. I suppose this is a rite of passage of sorts, and I'm loving every minute of it.