The weird thing about being into music as much as I am (much to the chagrin of every girlfriend I’ve ever had) is that I still end up missing out on a few — okay, a few hundred — really cool artists along the way. It’s just not possible to be up on all the cool music out there. It isn’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Of course, if you were anything like me when you were younger, you were quickly jaded to the greatness of certain artists who were, for lack of a better term, fucking huge. And it’s not just my generation — my parents were kinda “meh” about the Beatles because, near as I can tell, those guys were everywhere, and just about everybody and their freakin’ brother liked them. If I’d been alive, or at least old enough to give a crap when the Beatles were still together, I probably would’ve written them off too.

Thus there are quite a number of bands that were still together when I was old enough to give a crap and their crazy level of success and/or popularity made them like Kryptonite to me. My thinking was: if all the nimrods at school like them, how good can they be?

Case in point: Huey Lewis & the News. How does a cat go from palling around with Nick Lowe and Declan McManus to, ahem, wanting a new drug?

Then there’s Def Leppard. Forget that I was the first kid in my school to own 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry — the fact that everybody else soon owned a copy of 1983’s Pyromania quickly reduced Def Leppard to Loverboy status in my book.

And Prince? Don’t get me started. (more…)