Sometime during 2004 my dad and I happened upon a then-new band called The Mars Volta that had melded aspects of jazz fusion noise bands, heavy rock, grunge, psychedelic, and lyrically-heavy genres of music. At the time few bands could compare to the amount of musical prowess they exhibited by screaming solos, melodic harmonies, roaring drums, and haunting vocals. The songs would transition from a slow crescendo into a full-fledged face-melting peak followed by dropping into a valley of conceptual lyrics with the power of deep and broad storytelling. I still recall the first time I heard and watched the video to “The Widow.” To say it blew me away fails to hold water to the impact it had to the both of us. It seemed that the band had appeared out of the ether and hit with the force of an atomic bomb.
I say all of this with the privilege of over a decade of retrospection and reflection on such a pivotal moment in my personal evolutionary journey of music tastes. At the time I had become a rather die-hard punk with my Mohawk, denim and leather jackets, rolled cuff in my blue jeans, and assorted band t-shirts. My dad had exposed me to the likes of Pink Floyd a few years earlier for a class project where I needed to come in to class with band lyrics. He prompted me to use the song “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” by Roger Waters on the album Animals. I sat there that night listening the album on loop for hours while I transcribed the lyrics from CD booklet to our still new and first personal home computer.
He had already showed me multiple DVD copies of concerts from Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin in the middle school years between the that class project and joining the punk scene. I, of course, stayed deep in punk music frequenting The Launchpad after my very first punk concert at The Attic to see a small local band called Censored Youth. It did not take much work to move from the immensely influential System of a Down album Toxicity to the hardcore punk of The Casualties, Rancid, Anti-Flag, The Unseen, Clit 45, and, my favourite, Lower Class Brats.
I absolutely loved the sense of freedom that punk shows and relished in the chaos of a circle pit. Not to say that I didn’t have an outlet for pent up energy, testosterone, and teenage angst turned “a bit of the ultra-violent.” Rather, I had plenty of that through school sports as a football player and wrestler for years before and all through high school. Those outlets, though, simply lacked something ethereal and intangible. This most likely stemmed from the environment inhabited by my peers, teammates, and friends who adamantly dejected my taste in music in favor of the contemporary, mass-consumption genre of “radio-friendly,” Top-20-on-repeat, mainstream hip-hop songs playing on 3 different radio stations at once. They wanted to listen to club and baby-making-music to get psyched up for football games, wrestling matches, and during workouts. I simply couldn’t jive with it.
I caught constant flack for choosing to meditate while listening to high-energy, angry, violent, fast music with distorted guitars, banging basses, screaming vocals, and pounding drums. I got hazed, picked on, and made fun of constantly for it by my friends, teammates, and upper classmen. Nobody could understand why my black ass wanted to sit alone in a corner listening to “all that screaming” while practicing focused meditation and channeling of energy. They simply could not comprehend why I refused to take part in their rituals of playing “Grab Ass” and trying to force assimilation that typically amounted to breaking the spirits of those with less fortitude and self-assurance. I saw far too many people run off from the teams simply because they could handle or cope with the stresses of the environment. Even I had to adapt my personal rituals to such an extent as to minimize the high-visibility practices I had used for years. I found it befitting when we got to Senior year and Varsity football where the team practiced guided group mediation before every game.
