Music has been a very important part of my identity since I was 13 or 14 years old. It was around then that I, on a whim, started my first band with some friends, which led to me playing guitar, which led to me being involved in various bands and musical projects through the rest of my life, which is how I’ve met most of my best friends, as well as my wife. However, until I moved to Chicago, I never lived anywhere that could be considered a hotbed of musical creativity, a place with a strong ingrained history of music, a place with a wealth of first-hand resources like cool venues, record stores, and bands. As a result, I got almost all of my information about music by reading.

This was particularly true from the ages of 13 to 16, when my family was living in New Delhi, India. I had no access to American radio or MTV. American and European bands almost never traveled to India to perform (this is why my first concert was Deep Purple – in 1994). I could buy bootleg cassette copies of a lot of new Western albums for cheap, but it was hard to know which albums were worth listening to and which weren’t, as it was difficult to get copies of Spin or Rolling Stone at the market in New Delhi, let alone obscure indie rock zines. Fortunately, this was the peak of the alternative rock era; after Nirvana’s Nevermind album came out, magazines like Time and Entertainment Weekly were suddenly writing about The Breeders and Pavement, which was fortunate for me, as these were the kinds of American magazines I could get in New Delhi (I learned about Ween’s Pure Guava from a review in People). When we would go back to the U.S. in the summer, I would seek out books like the Rolling Stone or Trouser Press record guides, which I would then read and reread until I had nearly memorized the history and essential albums of each band. Once I started playing guitar, I relied on terrible guitar magazines for lessons, since I was too stubborn for a music teacher and most of my friends weren’t much better at guitar than me. I’d even practice playing the tablature for songs I hadn’t heard, trying to imagine how they were supposed to sound. When we moved back to Maryland, I was able to track down books like the previously mentioned Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana by Gina Arnold, Manic Pop Thrill by Rachel Felder, Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll by Richie Unterberger, Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, and England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage, as well as magazines like Maximum Rock’n’Roll, Punk Planet, and Puncture (R.I.P., still my favorite music magazine ever).

The point is, most of the information that I was getting about popular music was coming second-hand through books and magazines that I was reading, instead of first-hand by going to shows and discovering new music on my own. This had its benefits: I think I was much better informed about the context and history of the music I was listening to than if I had just been able to go out and hear it without reading about it first. On the other hand, it made me a lot more prone to accept other people’s opinions as gospel truth. Because I was relying on these authoritative texts for information, I would often not listen to albums that had been described as less important or relevant, but when I would get around to hear them, they would become some of my favorites (see my previous post on personal canons vs. societal canons). 

Ultimately, though, thinking about this has just supported the importance of reading, especially in childhood. There’s a mentality that a child shouldn’t just be sitting around with his/her nose in a book all the time, they should be out running around and doing activities. But in my case, reading helped prepare me what become one of the biggest “activities” in my life: critically listening to, writing, and performing music. Time spent reading may not be time spent direct engaging the physical world, but it can support and enhance engagement with the physical world.