Before the torrent
You’re 13. You’re chatting on mIRC (remember that?) about Gundam Wing with a bunch of people from unknown parts of the world, when the Queen Bee of the chatroom types what looks like lyrics. She tells you they’re from a band called A Perfect Circle. Curious, you open Napster and download a song called 3 Libras. It sounds nothing like the pop music you’ve listened to for most of your life, but you fall in love anyway.
A couple of months later, your first year of high school begins. One of your (in your opinion, super-cool) classmates asks you if you’ve heard of A Perfect Circle. You love that you can actually say “yes.”
And when you find their album, “Mer de Noms,” in a random pile of CDs in Radio City? Bliss. Absolute bliss. (It’s the only copy in the store; it was meant to be.)
* * *
The guy in Tower Records knows your name and knows what kind of music you like. In hindsight, it’s kind of the same way your Starbucks barista greets you every time you come in and knows exactly how you want your coffee.
* * *
It’s 7 a.m. and you’re on your way to school when NU 107 plays a song called Soul Searching by some band with a name that sounds like Urbandub. “Did you hear that?!” you ask your friends later. They did. You’re all blown away when you find out that they aren’t a foreign band. They have no MP3s on KaZaA yet, so you listen to NU every chance you get, fingers crossed that they play it again, and again, and again.
* * *
You type “OPM” into the search field, on the off chance that you find something you haven’t heard before. Ninety-five percent of the results are tracks by Parokya Ni Edgar or the Eraserheads, but every now and then, something new comes up. Raw demos by college bands. (Some of them straight off the hard drives of members of said bands, and you learn this the hard way when the person you’re downloading from opens a chat window and asks you what you think of the track so far. You say, honestly, that the guitars are okay but the singer needs some work; you find out later that you were talking to the singer.) Slightly scratchy recordings by some artists you hear occasionally on the radio. (Aia de Leon’s voice is heavenly, though. Even in low-quality audio rips.)
Every time you start downloading something new, you pray and pray and pray that the person you’re getting the file from, the one person on all the Internet who has this music you’ve never heard, doesn’t log off just yet. Please, just another 30 minutes.
* * *
You’re 15, and finally, you’ve been allowed to go to a gig. (You only have permission because your aunt promised she’d go with you.) It’s a joint Admit One and Broken Middle Finger night at Millennia, and almost all the bands you love are playing. You think about it all week. You lurk on all the bands’ Yahoo! Groups pages, getting yourself even more excited that you’re going to see them play live for the first time ever.
It’s Saturday. You’ve been waiting patiently for this day for what has felt like ages. An e-mail comes in: Millennia hasn’t paid their electricity bill, there’s no power, and there’s no gig.
Disheartened, you tell yourself there will be a next time. You will be 18 someday.
* * *
I did turn 18 eventually. I went to almost all the gigs I wanted to go to, saw all the bands I wanted to see, and even managed to catch Twisted Halo (one of my early favorites, discovered on KaZaA) a few times before they broke up. The 15-year-old fangirl I used to be would be thrilled to know that, almost 10 years later, many of her heroes are her grown-up self’s friends.
But back then, the Internet was my lifeline, my one and only link to good music from here and abroad. It wasn’t as easy for fledgling music fans as it is now.
These days, everything is, quite literally, at your fingertips. You can watch Coachella live from the comfort of your computer chair, halfway across the world. Entire discographies can be downloaded to your hard drive with a click of the mouse. Decades of music history, the latest releases; yours, with a fast enough connection. No band is too obscure for Wikipedia, and there’s new music every day. You don’t even have to look too hard.
* * *
E-mail me at vivat.regina@yahoo.com. Follow me on Tumblr: http://vivatregina.tumblr.com.
