Hailing from a suburb just north of Toronto is an 18 year old girl (that's me!) with a penchant for music and writing with lots of brackets . Moving all around southern Ontario growing up and a little in the States as well, I've always had music as a solace no matter where I was. I attended my first concert at the age of 12, and it was the Up in Smoke Tour featuring Dr.
Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Needless to say, my tastes have progressed quite a bit, and my first real love for music came when I hit high school and discovered punk rock.
Living in a town where the music scene was very divided between punk kids and jocks who listened to nothing but rap, I found myself comfortably falling into the former category.
I cut off all my hair, ripped up all my clothes and decided I would have been better off growing up in the 80s when all the classics I loved were around. I adored pioneers such as the Clash, Sham 69, the Ramones, the Germs, and the Buzzcocks, and got into a lot of ska like the Specials and Madness as well.
Of course there were a lot of more current bands I enjoyed and went to see downtown, but I always thought there was something better about the old stuff.
After years of trying to adopt this punk lifestyle as much as possible (which isn't much coming from upper-middle class suburbia) I decided I had grown out of this whole phase, and started listening to calmer music. My friends (most of whom were as heavily into punk as I was) all sort of slipped into the "indie" scene at more or less the same time. We started attending smaller shows, with more "arty" bands, where the kids didn't beat each other up, they more so seemed to just stand with their arms crossed in snobbery.
At first I hated this whole scene, stuck in the mindset you weren't really enjoying a show if you weren't having trouble breathing. Nevertheless, I moved on. (Although I still attend the odd punk show, and still throw on my old Rancid albums from time to time, because a first love never dies, right?
)
These days I find myself listening to a mash of things, from electro to brit rock to hardcore to indie rock to punk to noise/art rock to acoustic singer/songwriter types. Often with a camera attached to my arm, I enjoy concert photography (when possible) and have managed to make my favourite hobby into a job, working as a photographer for a local
newspaper. Down the line I see myself in the journalism/photography area, so life seems to finally be falling into place these days with blogging here, working for the paper, and doing as much photography work as possible.
I plan to go back to school in one of these areas at some point, but for now will keep doing what I'm doing, and taking care of my dear pet fish (the only animal on earth I'm not allergic to) Darby Crash [Fishington], after the iconic singer for the Germs, of course.
News RSS