Back to the Beginning

I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent over the last two weeks in the company of the queen of my universe, Madonna. Listening back through her catalog reinforced why she's played such an important role in my life for the past 15 years and why she's influenced the world the way she has for the past 30. She's an innovator, an experimenter, a trend-setter, a perfectionist and just generally kicks ass in every way possible (you can read more about my feelings about her Madgesty here).

There's no better way to sum up everything that Madonna is and does than through her performance of "Like a Virgin" from the 2006 "Confessions" tour. Having recently survived a horrific horse riding accident that left her with many broken bones, Madonna took to the stage in riding gear and road a carousel horse while singing about "being touched for the very first time" as X-rays of her broken bones showed on screens around the stage. She won't be knocked down.

Now that I've made it through the Madonna CDs, I've decided to go to the start of my CD collection and wind through the remaining 295 discs. Here's what I have on the list for the next few days:

The Doors "The Best of the Doors"
Guns N' Roses "Appetite for Destruction"
"Lies"
"The Spaghetti Incident"
"Use Your Illusion I"
"Use Your Illusion II"
Motley Crue "Decade of Decadence"
"Too Fast for Love"
The Eagles "Their Greatest Hits"
Don Henley "Actual Miles: Henley's Greatest Hits"

I did listen to The Doors this morning, which sent me on a nice trip down memory lane, back to junior high and high school when the band's music and Jim Morrison's everything reached out to me across all the anxiety, awkwardness and general low-self-esteem wonderfulness of being a young teenager. I thought about the words I'd memorized and wrote, the books I poured through, the number of times I saw that terrible movie, the Jim Morrison poster in my room, the Com 101 speech I made, listening to the music in the dark.

Henry Rollins, a fellow Doors fan, had a line about being young and thinking you're so deep, "Jim Morrison would dig me." I used to think that, think I could have connected with him over poetry, philosophy, art, music, but the truth is I never could. Growing up and being exposed to more healthy people and more damaged people, I've realized that charismatic, addictive, destructive people rarely dig anything, least of all themselves. If they did, they wouldn't be so keen to tear everything down.

On that front, Guns N' Roses epic "Appetite for Destruction" is now playing. I'm sure I'll have some reflections to offer on Axl & Co. in the next installment.