Teenage Kicks

Every Saturday my favorite radio station, The Current, runs a show called Teenage Kicks programmed and hosted by Jacquie Fuller. It’s a two hour blast of nostalgia heavily influenced by the music I love from my high school and college years. This past Saturday a listener who’d won a contest programmed the music for the show, and I found myself a bit envious. For as much as I love the show, I hadn’t really thought about what I would play if I had the chance to take over for a show. Now I felt compelled to put together my own two hour block.

The task proved more daunting than I expected. At first I started scrolling through my library and, without much filtering or deep thought, put songs onto the playlist that immediately struck a chord with me. It wasn’t long, however, before I was bogged down by the emotional freight I attached to many of these songs. I found myself amid a sea of records and memories, like John Cusack’s character, Rob, in High Fidelity when he reorganized his record collection in autobiographical order after Laura left him for Ian.

Timelines were blurring. I was having trouble weeding out songs from the past that I discovered during my high school and college years and songs from much later that I attribute to people I met during those years. Depeche Mode recorded Somebody in 1984, but I wasn’t introduced to it until 1988 when a girlfriend put it on a mix tape for me. A friend I met in college in 1989 turned me on to Old 97’s in 1999.

I realized it’d be easier to program 100 hours of music instead of just two. If I were to get this playlist done, I was gonna need some limits. I settled on two; the songs had to be released between 1987 and 1993 and there could be no more than one song from each artist. As an additional guiding principle, I would try not to overload the playlist with obvious hits. While these limits helped reduce the problem of the overall playlist size, it didn’t eliminate all of my challenges. Most dastardly of which, how was I going to pick only one REM song from Document, Green, Out of Time, and Automatic for the People?

So here are my Teenage Kicks. I think it’s a good representation of me, kinda like a cross-section from a tree. Cut me somewhere else, you’d probably get a whole different playlist. But there’d be little doubt it came from the same tree.