COBOL Turns 50

Happy golden anniversary, COBOL! Java’s catching up on you!

Filed under: Computer Science , anniversary, cobol, java

School of Rock

There was a time when the only thing I listen to was the music that blares on the radio during morning commutes.  This was a time when boy bands ruled the world and when 17-year-olds become famous for wearing skimpy schoolgirl outfits and beleagueringly cry that they did it again.  Yes, it was unfortunate.  It was, as Alan Cross has hypothesized, the trough of a rock cycle.  However, all that changed in a single day when I was on a bus just finishing  a regional journalism competition (I was in 4th year then back home).  My friend was listening to something on his Sony walkman, when he came up to me and said, “listen to this”, and came Metallica’s Enter Sandman flooding through the headphones.  Given that I had repressed music expression since childhood, it felt weird. It was different. It was metal rock.

It’s something that I distinctively remember, opening my eyes for the first time to a whole different genre of music. Before that, all my music tastes were limited to only what my other friends listen to or what they play in MTV (which was still big back then).  Growing up on our household probably didn’t help either as hard music was considered “unfavorable”, to put it mildly. I even remember catching a glimpse of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, or Prodigy’s Firestarter, and I can feel my insides in a knot and almost wants to puke (sort of like the first time you played Doom for 3 hours).  Yeah I was that repressed.

Fast forward a few years when music was also evolving on the internet, when Shawn Fanning released Napster. That was also the time that I migrated to Canada, and with all that angst from separation, it was bound to happen.  I ended up being friends with two guitar players daydreaming of becoming a rock band.  I was also a (sort of) guitar player, but because it was rare to see a band with three guitar players and nothing else, I ended up becoming a drummer instead.  It was like Jack Black teaching rock history to the kids in School of Rock, and I was absorbing every minute of it.  Every weekend, we’ve watched DVDs of bands like Oasis, Black Sabbath, Sound Garden, Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Satriani, Page..you name it.  And it wasn’t just for the sake of watching, we were there to learn.  We were watching and admiring intently as to how they accomplish the harmonics on the strings, or how they use pentatonic scales on their leads, or as to how different the key they’ve played a song in.  School was in at that time.

Because we were piss-poor (probably still is), we started renting out music studios and commuted with guitars and amps on our backs riding the TTC. The good thing about being a drummer is you only need to carry your sticks with you.  Sometimes, it would even just become an impulse to us – one minute were eating at Tim Horton’s, the next minute we’re jamming at a studio, around 1am in the morning due to lack of decent studio schedule availability. We would also go down at Steve’s and Long and Mcquade every weekend drooling over the Epiphone Union Jacks and Les Pauls, and jam with $2000 electric guitars for hours. It was like a playground for us.

So why am I blogging about this?  Well, because it was something I was reminded of when I was watching Sam Dunn’s Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.  It made me reminisce that thrill of discovering something musically and taking it to heart: understanding it from an outsider’s point of view, starting from the basics.  It was heavy metal 101.  I wasn’t really that big into heavy metal rock; some of it still scares me (which other metalheads admits to as well).  But from an anthropologist’s point of view,  it was more than just people wearing dark eye lashes and tights.  Metal, for some means social repression, gender and sexuality, and even religion. It doesn’t just break down metal rock for you, it scrapes underneath it. And if that’s not enough Dunn expanded more in Global Metal on the culture of heavy metal, a response to the overwhelming replies gotten from the first doc. It was interesting to see it on a global perspective, uncovering different agendas for each one of them.  I think this has spawned attention to the rockumentary genre, and it’d be interesting to see if Dunn can bring the same level of scrutiny for other genres as well.

Filed under: music , heavy metal 101, repressed childhood