1) What's the first song you bought?
...but back in my day we bought albums, not songs. Songs we stole from the radio on cassettes. My first album was Seal's second eponymous album. I bought it because of Prayer for the Dying. The album was released in 1994 but I didn't buy it until a couple years later, when I was 14 or 15. I almost didn't buy it at all.
Why?
There's a naked man on the cover!
I know, it's very pretty and tasteful, isn't it? Not exactly porno here. Nothing to be ashamed of at all. But my friends didn't drive yet and so I only ever went to the record store with my parents and I was afraid they'd think I was, like, into naked guys or something. (Which maybe I was, maybe I wasn't, but back then that was one of the dark, terrible secrets of puberty.)
When I finally worked up the guts to buy it one day at the store with my allowance (this took YEARS, remember), I felt I had to couch it like a confession.
"MomI'mgonnabuythiscdbutit'stotallyforthemusicnotthenakedguyok?"
I was so nervous, I was definitely sweating. I don't blush, but if I did, it would have been fierce.
And my mom glanced at it and was like, "Whatever. He's cute." Then she went back to browsing Doobie Brothers compilation albums or something.
The second album I bought was Pigeonhed's Flash Bulb Emergency Overflow Cavalcade of Remixes. I bought it shortly afterward and under similar circumstances (as in, I was chock full of unnecessary angst and nervousness). Only this time, instead of being embarrassed over SEX, I was embarrassed because I knew this was an album for Bad Ass Mutha Fuckas. I wasn't sure yet what the hell I was, but I was pretty sure I didn't qualify as one of those.
This baby, I had to track down. It was so fly, you couldn't even find it at regular record stores. When I finally located a copy, it was in a store that to me appeared to be populated entirely with people far, far older and cooler than my stupid self. My mom point blank refused to go in with me, so I was on my own. I had no idea where to begin to look for what I wanted and I had to ask for help from a guy in leather, with a real mohawk and tons of piercings, the nature of which I could barely comprehend. (Had he really driven spikes of iron through his flesh?!)
He thinks I'm a nerd, definitely he thinks I'm a nerd or a prep, he thinks why the hell is a pansy ass little girl like this in my place of employment... my brain was a total bastard to me that day.
But Mohawk rung me up without betraying the slightest hint of a negative judgment (very unlike my asshole daymare premonitions of what would happen). As he handed me back the album he looked straight at my face and said, "You've got the best taste in music of any girl I know."
And that was the last time a boy ever said anything explicitly nice about my musical predilections.
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