By YAGI OLAGUERA

DISCUSSED: Music as/is my girlfriend, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Grindcore, Motley Crue’s big lie, and this sweet, sweet fantasy, baby

I love music. It’s been a constant refuge for more than two decades. It’s the thing I’ve turned to at the best and worst of times. It’s my aeroplane. It’s my hot, hot, sex. In many ways it is, as the title of the now defunct geekiest show on Philippine radio once proclaimed, my girlfriend.

I love music so much that I’ve probably prioritized it over actual girlfriends in the past. Who am I kidding? I have actually prioritized music over everything else in my life for the past decade. I’ve worked for a music website and a radio station and I’m the moderator of my school’s music organization. I’ve also spent the past ten years building my life around a band that creates music that’s way too loud, ugly, and fucking weird to ever make money.

Hello, my name is Yagi, weekend metal vocalist, part-time ESL teacher, freelance writer, and occasional lush. I love music.

This hasn’t always been the case. I didn’t fall for music until late in my career as a fat, asthmatic, grade school kid. Back then, I was into cooler, more important things. Every day after school, my gang of friends and I would congregate at our spot in the cafeteria where no one dared touch us. We would then spend the next two hours slaying goblins, kobolds, and beholders.

You only get this joke if you got the last paragraph.

Somewhere along the way, my fellow adventurers discovered Campus Radio DWLSFM. Back then their DJ’s were sneaking in increasing amounts of latter-era glam rock and early alternative music in between Dr. Alban’s “Hello Africa” and Kathy Dennis’s “Too Many Walls.” What started as a way for me not to feel left out of the conversation during non-gaming periods turned into a full-blown obsession. By seventh grade, priorities shifted from leveling-up my half-elven ranger to calling LSFM enough times to make sure that “November Rain” beat out “The Actor” by Michael Learns to Rock on the Top 20. Life was awesome.

Around the same time, an incident occurred that would cause me to always feel awkward when speaking to girls I’m attracted to. I was sleeping over at a friend’s house for a riotous weekend of decadent die rolling and dragon slaying with the rest of my adventuring party. Sometime between lunch and a saving throw against rods, staves, and wands, I was supposed to meet my friend’s neighbor who I liked. I can’t remember why I actually liked that girl, now I suspect peer pressure had a hand in it. Someone else in the group probably liked her and I thought it was the thing to do. Whatever the case, I did what any self-respecting, asthmatic, half-elven ranger/7th grade kid would have done.

I stuttered. A lot. And Ran.

I believe that was this was the first time I actually felt like kicking myself in the head. It’s now an emotion I’m very familiar with, but I discovered a cure for that feeling on that same weekend, and that cure has stayed with me since then. That was also the weekend I first listened to Faith No More’s Angel Dust. Although I hated it when I first listened to it, Mike Patton’s bitter cocktail of spite and sarcasm, sang/whispered/screamed/puked over the backdrop of the band’s genre-spanning acrobatics would define my taste in music for the rest of my life. It confounded me so much that I actually felt physically sick. I became morbidly curious about this album and its ability to make me feel such violent reactions.

Needless to say, it made me forget about wanting to kick myself in the head. After a couple of flips of the tape, it actually made me feel good. That is when it dawned on me that music was like a cure light wounds spell for girl troubles and shit.

But as time passed, I found that it was so much more than that. Somewhere along the way, I learned to define that sick feeling as something great. I felt variations of it when I first listened to the Cocteau Twins, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Isis, and a slew of other bands that I love. It could be the same reason I enjoy listening to bands most people would consider unlistenable like Sunn 0))) and Ocrilim. It’s the same search for that feeling that drives me to listen to Agoraphobic Nosebleed at 3 AM.

Agoraphobic Nosebleed is cybergrind fool.

Oddly enough, it’s the same feeling that makes me reach for the opposite end of the spectrum for Steely Dan or Joni Mitchell. It does not discriminate.

Though my musical palette was definitely not as wide as it has been since the advent of the internet and Demonoid, I found very early on that people didn’t really dig what I was into. Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love was too sloppy and… well, loud for most of my friends who were fans of Superunkown. People in my class who I listened to hip-hop with would rather listen to Warren G than Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.

Somewhere between Alice in Chains’s Dirt and Jar of Flies, I reinvented myself into one of the bad kids. Who knew that learning to smoke and drink was all it took to upgrade your high school caste? Smoking and drinking made me feel like I was in Motley Crue. My metamorphosis to rebellious rocker dude was completed when I played truant, got caught, and repeated freshman year.

Somehow it worked for me because that was when I started meeting more girls. It wasn’t what I expected though. It turned out that Motley Crue was lying all this time. Nobody was into the rocker dude who smoked a lot in the corner during soirees. Hell, none of them were really that into rock n’ roll at all! I would continually meet blank stares when I’d talk about how sublime the Smashing Pumpkins’ feedback solo at the end of “Drown” was. Nobody cared that Quicksand vocalist Walter Schriefels was once from the legendary Gorilla Biscuits. I couldn’t even get anyone to listen to Rancid even after I told them that Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong played with them for a few gigs when they were starting out.

You lied to me, Vince Neil.

The girls I met were into the Goo Goo Dolls, Blackstreet, and TLC. Goddamn it, even Fiona Apple was too weird for them! Back then, it seemed that all girls were like this. It was a difficult decision, but I had to adapt. I was very reluctant at first but my life changed when I saw the video for the remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy”. There was Ol’ Dirty Bastard rapping about how he and Mariah went back like babies and pacifiers. If the great Dirt McGirt could sell out then what right had I to refuse?

I then “learned” to “appreciate” all of this pop stuff that hadn’t really resonated with me before. I also spent the next two years hung up on a girl I had totally nothing in common with, save that I also listened to Boyz 2 Men’s “Four Seasons of Loneliness” and thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Of course, this was all a ploy to actually borrow the CD from her so that we could meet up.

The girl would eventually break my heart, and I wept afterwards while listening to “Breakdown,” Mariah Carey’s absolutely brilliant collaboration with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. The absolute nadir however was when I realized how pathetic I was for lending her my copy of Indigo Girls’s Swamp Ophelia which included the TGIS mainstay, “Power of Two.” I feel like kicking myself in the head whenever I remember this period, but not for the reasons that I can deal with.

Yes, I cried to this crap.

Things started to pick-up in college, when I was constantly in Club Dredd and I started to discard all the perceived selling out that I did in high school. I even had my lip and my eyebrow pierced to symbolize how I would totally keep it real. The piercings didn’t last but I think the keeping it real part did me good. I would eventually fall in love with a girl who was into Pulp, Cibo Matto, and other kinds of pretty music that I could also appreciate. Not only that, I also found people who did appreciate a lot of the things that I listened to. With some of those friends, I would form a band that would play whatever the fuck we wanted and somehow make enough money to keep it working for almost ten years.

My teenage dreams of Motley Crue style backstage groupie debauchery never materialized of course but I think I’m much better for it. I now also often fall for women who I suspect have better musical tastes than I do. I discovered Broken Social Scene, The Postal Service, The Arcade Fire, Xiu Xiu, Tunng and other great bands because of girls who still make me feel awkward. I still want to kick myself in the head when it happens but at least I don’t run anymore. Plus, I can always listen to Venetian Snares and Phantomsmasher to make me feel better afterwards.

One day, I hope to find someone who thinks it’s awesome that I sometimes listen to “Search and Destroy” in the morning to make myself feel invincible. She probably won’t like, but will tolerate that I sometimes need to listen to Slayer when I work. She will also give me shit for still playing Dungeons and Dragons every few months, but she will secretly find it adorable.

Until that day comes however, I still have the music to tide me over and that’s always been more than enough.

________________________________________

Yagi Olaguera is the lead singer of the testosterone laden heavy metal act, Cog, one of the few bands that can simply walk into Mordor.

When he is not moonlighting as a contributor for New Slang or as a ghost writer for women’s fashion magazines, he is guiding foreign students through the many nuances and intricacies of English as a second language. He tumbls here.