I think I first heard Mr Bungle at a party in 1995. It was an after year 12 party, we'd all officially finished and I was at my friend Mik's place. Mik had similar tastes in music to me. We went to Faith No More and Alternative Nation together in 1995 (and The Sharp, Truth, Caligula and Hunters and Collectors in 1994 and probably other stuff). Point is, I trusted his tastes.
My tastes at the time were fairly limited (that's easy to say with 8+ years of music listening since). I liked Faith No More, The Sharp, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, +Live+, Regurgitator. Gen X'er. Mik liked other stuff. He got me into Midnight Oil, Hunters and Collectors, a few other random bands.
The song I heard was Girls Of Porn from the first album, "Mr Bungle". I liked it. I liked it a lot. Not long after Mik lent me a tape of the Mr Bungle album. I remember listening for about half an hour before realising what it was. It's hard to explain what I thought...
I remember simply dismissing what I was hearing as something put on the tape by mistake and maybe the music he meant me to hear would start soon. Like the music I was listening to was what was on the tape before he taped over it. I listened anyway but didn't really pay attention. It wasn't grabbing me. I couldn't grab onto it. The person singing didn't sound like Mike Patton. The music wouldn't sink in. I remember not liking it at all. Well, not ever hearing it enough to like it.
Not long after that "Disco Volante" came out. Mik didn't like it. I don't think he hated it but I remember him thinking Mr Bungle was much better.
Therefore I dismissed it without listening.
I can't remember how I first heard "Disco Volante" after that, but after my first listen I loved it. Thought it was genius. I bought Mr Bungle at a university market and loved that too. I couldn't understand if what Mik had given me on tape was the same thing and my mind had changed in some way to accept it.
Did hearing Disco suddenly make the Mr Bungle album make sense?
I don't know. Maybe one day this kind of music will click for our friend?
Musical tastes change. The ears open up, start looking for more. When I was at Alternative Nation (music festival in Australia, 1995) I remember I watched +Live+, Faith No More, L7, The Tea Party (I think, I don't actually remember), bits of Ween, bits of Bodycount.
These days I'd have gone well out of my way to make sure I watched Supergroove, Tool, Powderfinger (this was pre-Double Alergic), Regurgitator (their 2nd EP "NEW" had just come out), Nine Inch Nails, Primus, Ween. In fact at the time I did see bits of these bands but took nothing in.
Meanwhile, kind of related: Easy prediction of the year...
A quick search reminded me that the record for such a palindrome, established in 1984 by Dan Hoey, was only 543 words. I immediately thought I could (and therefore should) write a program to beat that. I wrote an algorithm that searches a dictionary and figured out how to put the words together in a sentence that starts with "A man, a plan" and ends with "a canal, Panama." It took me until 1:00 a.m. that night of 02/20 (and some minor bug-bashing the next day) to produce this result -- to my knowledge, still the longest palindromic sentence ever created.
The more data on the web, and the easier it is to find it, the more crazy things we can do. Soon I hope to have setlists from every show Faith No More ever played. It'll be really easy to work out things like "What was the largest number of gigs in a row FNM didn't play Epic?".
My question is, are people more likely to not do such things because they're so easy? Or... to do them and no-one notices. These days I look at the above and thing "good on ya, big deal" where the first time someone tried it took a lot of effort. It's more impressive. People remember.
Or was it always lame and pointless to do this sort of thing, we're just exposing it's lameless with technology?
The smaller it is the more disposable it is... and it seems they're going to include download codes for ringtones. The world of music is in a horrible place is people buy a CD single for the ringtone and get the real song for free.