I am sitting out in my treehouse balcony, where I am supposed to be blue-pencilling the diss. I am, however, having trouble concentrating because the eighth graders of the neighborhood are celebrating their graduation from middle school with a dance at the barn up the hill. The party itself isn�t so distracting as the musical choices which are, well, the same things I listened to when I was their age over twenty years ago. To give you an idea of what we�re dealing with, Queen�s �Bohemian Rhapsody� has just been replaced with Van Halen�s �You Really got Me.�

This is not the first time I�ve noticed this musical phenomenon. I don�t remember listening to music of my parents� generation when I was a kid, with the exception of The Beatles, I don�t recall having listened to the music of my parents� generation when I was a kid. I got into 70s bands in college, but otherwise was totally wrapped up in French and American New Wave. So I guess I find it odd that the party up the hill is now emitting the sounds of �Lady Marmalade.� I admire their taste, but I wonder if it comes with a cost � a generation without musical identification.

Rock music was all about self-identity and independence for me. I grew up with an eclectic mix of the Time Life Classical Music boxed sets, Jimmy Cliff, The Beatles, Borodin, and Herb Alpert. When I first got a radio in my room, a cast off from my father�s office, what I listened to was AM. I was fascinated by the whole bandwidth � the exotic languages spoken, the distance of some of the broadcasting stations, even the noise that existed between stations. When I moved overseas at age 9, I discovered radio drama, something with which I�ve had a lifelong addiction. I�m not talking about books on tape. I�m talking about actual radio plays. Somewhere around here I still have a cardboard shoebox of cassettes I made from broadcasts of these dramas, mostly taped over sermon cassettes from our local church, since the cassettes were free for the taking each Sunday and I didn�t have the allowance to cover my cassette habit (I�m sure I�m going to do some time in purgatory for this): Hitchiker�s Guide to the Galaxy. Star Wars (a radio play aired in the U.S. on public radio that includes some of the film cast), The Secret Garden, The House of Mirth, The Outcasts of Poker Flat. I�m sure there are others, although I haven�t looked at them in years.

All this is by way of an explanation that I came rather late to rock music. I first remember cultivating a rock repertoire when I was in eighth grade. It happened in one of our required courses, �Crafts,� which I think was supposed to counterbalance the home ec requirement that lingered from an earlier era. In crafts we got to do fun things like hand-tool leather and throw pots. During class our bearded teacher (this was notable, as beards were most unusual in our clean-cut preppy school) would play music. His favorite album was Styx, Paradise Theater and so it became our favorite album too. We lip synched along as we destroyed whatever it was we were supposed to be creating that day.

After that, my pursuit of new music could not be quenched. The newness was important. Even more, though, was that it was important that the music didn�t belong to my parents. It was mine. My brother and I bonded over the music we liked, the music my parents would never listen to. He favored The Police and The Who, both of which I liked also. I preferred the Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, the English Beat, and most of all the soundtrack to Diva.

The importance of the music was that I found it myself, that it didn�t belong to my parents and that while some of it belonged to my peers, some of it was mine alone. You always wanted to find out about that band, that singer, that song that no one else knew about. Why? Because the music identified you -- it identified your age, your peer group and also your individual self. Exploring the world of popular music was a safe way to explore the still mysterious adult world.

By a few years later I had grown up a lot. By then I�d learned how to hold a friend�s hair while she threw up in the bathroom after drinking too much. I�d become accustomed to ignoring the mirrored trays of coke on coffee tables at high school parties, when I�d bother to attend at all. I�d played violin at a friend�s funeral, after she was killed in a New Year�s Eve car accident. The adult world was no longer so mysterious or safe. Music became, instead, an escape. Any sound I could lose myself in was the sound I chose.

My strongest musical memory of high school is from my 16th birthday. I was at an international boarding school in the Massif Centrale region of France. The afternoon of my birthday, the students from my form hiked up a mountain for a picnic dinner that we had made ourselves. We swam in a nearby lake and hiked around the countryside. As night fell, we gathered in a clearing at the peak of the mountain. I remember lying on my back looking up at the stars that were so numerous and so low, that I thought I might be taken up among them. The soundtrack for this idyllic moment? The Clash singing �Rockin� the Casbah.�

[Second entry today. Making up for a weekend of silence]

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