August 20th. Three different albums I've been looking forward to are coming out that day- Pulp's We Love Life, Spoon's Kill the Moonlight and Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights. Those are probably the only three albums being released this month that I've thought ahead of time of buying, so it's a little weird they're all on the same day. Thinking of walking down Market St to the record store to pick them up reminds me why I do a lot of my CD shopping online. I always feel like I'm the only girl combing through the bins by myself, which always manages to remind me of a remark that I've never been able to quite shake. Summer after I graduated high school, I was driving home an older friend after hanging out in a diner for a few hours, catching up on his first year of college. We started talking about music, and I mentioned some bands I was listening to (I think they were Velvet Underground and Tom Waits, but I can't remember for sure). He came back with "Well, which ex-boyfriend's taste are you borrowing now?" - oh, I got so mad, but I didn't say anything & just laughed with him. Yeah, I wanted to snap back, I'm not listening to U2 or Violent Femmes, favorite bands of the last boy I dated. I followed my own path to my musical taste, right through all kinds of bands I never want to listen to any more, to a few shows that I wouldn't go to now, and through tons of music magazines and web sites that I've read on my own. I think about that laugh a lot of times when I'm going through a rack of CDs, how my silence was there to let him think sure, that's it. There's such an implicit assumption from some guys that women just pick up their taste from whoever they're dating- new boyfriend, new CD collection. The dumb thing is that I know more women than men who can talk intelligently about music, who I'd consider to be way more opinionated about their music.
In other August musical goodness, Bumbershoot is only a few weekends away, and I need to remember to go to a Starbucks to get tickets.