They ain't heavy, they're just big-boned

Hilts went on beautifully on a blog entry I can't link because of the ancient nature of my Safari about how he came to love the Rolling Stones. It made me think, even made me a little misty. My brothers are separate but equal. I love them all. Like I love chocolate, marijuana, and coffee. Separate but equal, and non-carcinogenic into the mix; very different boys, men, brothers, but the best a human female could have.

Anyways, one thing they more or less agreed upon as I meandered my way through childhood and they erupted into oversized zitfarms is that music worked like this:

1. The Beatles
2. The Rolling Stones
3. Other bands

When I was ten I went through a antepubescent pseudoerotic obsession with the New Kids on the Block. It lasted five minutes because my brothers found out. They mocked me until I cried and then we went on vacation in the Laurentian Mountains for two weeks. They would not allow any music to join us except the White Album and Some Girls. The cassettes were on constant rotation as we drove and drove and drove and canoed and barbequed and swam and sailed and ate and dozed. I was cured, or brainwashed, or what have you.

Then my brothers all moved out at once what seemed like just a couple of weeks later, as they're all much older than me. Well, Elvis didn't move out right away but he did enter his acid years and as far as I was concerned all it did for him was make him either unbearably cranky or totally incomprehensible. He did bring home some better looking friends, though. Anyways, I was suddenly an isolated ten year old kid who only listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and I despised my peers for listening to tinkly synthesized crap and dressing like idiots.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with looking down my nose at people, today extending to Justin Timberlake fans and women who get cutesy tattoos. It's a fucking tattoo, for god's sake, get something cool instead of a twee little star or such bullshit. Someday you're going to be burning your way through menopause, and you'll look at your fancy girly wrist rosebud, and want to punch yourself in the face. And Justin Fucking Timberlake is a joke music producers are playing on the listening public. 'I know, let's buy some crap boyband dancer with a smurf voice and park him in front of some good beats. People will think he's not total shit and buy all his albums. It'll be hilarious!' And it is.

My point is that even now, nearly eighteen years after the trip to the Laurentians and with us all living as far apart as we can manage without moving to continents where we'd be an ethnic minority, I can't hear even the briefest excerpt from the White Album or Some Girls without feeling profoundly safe and loved.