My intake had until this point been limited to two public service TV channels and one public radio station. Magazines were in somewhat better supply. The NME and The Melody Maker were available at libraries and some newsstands, along with some American publications like The Rolling Stone.

They were great for teasing but not for supply: the movies never reached theatres where I lived and the music was as yet quite unheard by me. Visiting with my friends had a peculiar subtext for me: most of them had VCR's and some had movies in their homes. It would have to be a fine conversation for me not to ultimately suggest we end the evening employing their home entertainment system. Lucky me my mother was sick and bored in the great unemployment winter of 1991, and the prospect of being able to rent movies finally appeared attractive enough to provide me with an ally in my pursuit. A trip to the main street of my population 10 000 hometown and some 1.500 SEK later and everything became easier.

They became easier until they got harder. Around Christmas I came in the possession of a tape containing a kind of run-down of the "top 20 MTV Europe Videos of 1991", elected by the viewers of that satellite station I believe. MTV Europe, around since 1987, was of course preciously unavailable for me but attractive nonetheless, and occasionally glimpsed at Record Stores and chic boutiques in "the City". The VJ:s are predominantly British but many of them have delicious continental accents as well. Up till this day I'll defend this station as not too bad, possibly inspired with some kind of attention to quality as it was and is still produced in that venerable birthplace of the BBC.

Topping the 1991 Top 20 was Bryan Adams "and "everything I do (I do it for you)", from the soundtrack of a Kevin Costner (who was still a star at the time) vehicle called "Robin Hood -Prince of Thieves". Further down this informative list was a couple of feature-sized Michael Jackson clips, a clip of Seal (who was still a star at the time) and Guns n' Roses on a roof, from the soundtrack of Terminator II, the highlight of my summer that year. The commercials between these various numbers were the first ones I learned by heart, as I had previously seen them only before movies in theatres. Oil of Olay, Nike, Noxema.

"Smells like Teen Spirit" was somewhere in the top 5, quite a coup at the time for a scrawny punk rock band from the Pacific North West. I became the first at my high school to buy the album, but only after I'd read they sounded a little like The Pixies.

I needed these things: a new TV set because the old one was at death's door: a satellite dish because cable is yet to be realised on the island of Øland, six kilometres out in the Baltic sea; a way to get my father to cash out the some 10.000 SEK to acquire them. It got ugly, and took months; but I got my MTV, my CNN, my SKY News and Channel three.

The introduction of information technology into my home had all kinds of implications: my father's PC became an interesting point of research. It was a Sperry, a brand I doubt even exists any more, and it had this early graphics program called "Arts and Letters". It was a rudimentary graphics program, which provided with a few hundred clip-art images, some leeway to manipulate them, some fonts, about twenty, and a palette. I'd use it to make mock-ups for imaginary band T-shirts, usually connected with the Pixies. UK Surf was an alternate title of a track they had set to the soundtrack of a Christian Slater movie I'd rented in the hope it would be more like "Heathers".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was in fact "Pump Up the Volume " and it did have an impeccable soundtrack save the Concrete Blonde tune, which was terrible. I pasted the "UK" in the middle of this graphic with a very large font and the "Surf" curling like a wave around it. It shifted from a clear blue at the top to a pale turquoise at the bottom. We'd just got a colour printer. It was beautiful.

Another one I did was "Sweet Cyanide" taken form some cyber punk novel I'd heard of bit never of course read, and "Burning Chrome" William Gibson's book. I didn't read that either. I did read "Neuromancer" before it became trendy again. Other things I picked up from the "Pump up the Volume" soundtrack: Sonic Youth are essential, and "Goo" is their best album. "Titanium Expose' is the least of the tracks on it.

Seattle was in full swing by now, but I was still the only one at my school to own "Nevermind" I bought "Badmotorfinger" when It came out, and the second Faith No More album which no one liked but the NME and myself. I'd achieved a sort of position at my school as someone one could dub tapes from as I had them all. I was a lone hipster. I developed new techniques for finding out about things: If Thurston Moore said a band was good in the NME or the Melody Maker, they most likely were. If a band was played on 120 Minutes which aired on MTV Europe every Sunday at nine PM, it meant that hipsters in England thought they were good.

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If they aired on MTV Post Modern which was to become MTV Alternative Nation, it meant that they were trendy and would make money regardless if they were good or not. It also meant that you could actually buy the albums in stores whereas my first Butthole Surfers album had to be ordered through this place called Sound De Light. I waited five weeks and paid $50 bucks because someone in Jane's Addiction liked them, I think it was the guitar player. The CD was "Hairway to Steven", and it was kinda worth it.

1991 was one of the first times I actually saw a pop band play live on stage. A Festival of the English four-days/60 bands format was held about four hours from my town, in a normally sleepy place about the same size. It had been on for years, done well and was known to attract a bevy of washed-up old goths and sorry heavy-metal revivalists.

In fact my section of the country had a proud tradition of supporting otherwise obscure darkcore bands, often of what is now called an "industrial" vein, but was known as simply "synth" back then. Front 242, Kraftwerk, Nitzer Ebb, Einsturezende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails. The Jesus and Mary Chain were in fact popular enough to enjoy the tribute of several cover bands. None of this had any benefit for me alas, as the kids were older and few enough to appear virtually non-existent. The hard-core synth boys had their sides shaved and looked and smelled much like your average nazi. I loved these bands but I'd have nothing to do with the kids who loved them also.

This festival was now mixing a lucrative offer of commercial rock bands with quality acts, and I had a ride to the site and some one to go there with. That girl eventually ended up spending the festival in a tent with our ride and we don't speak any more, but regardless: A Swedish Ramones-ish act called Sator (previously Sator Codex) played and I had a good time as I was developing a taste for loud things.

More importantly, the new British bands were here. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays had been huge since 1990, and at this humble festival I indeed saw Primal Scream play. Since 1988, starting with Acid House and the summer of Love as it was called then; the kids attracted to this festival had been different. They had these huge flags with flowers painted on them, Beatles hair do's and looked more clever if a quite a bit more wasted than the others. Baggy clothing was becoming universally fashionable. They made tie-dye look OK. Shit was bright and I was happy.

I graduated from the science program of a local High School named Lars Kagg in 1992. I had bad grades in about half my subjects, my favourite bands were Sonic Youth, The Orb, Primal Scream, the Pixies, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers which I now hate. I'd also come to love an old album by Big Black called "Songs about Fucking", and was perpetually searching for ways to purchase the newer "Atomizer".

I got a job at the deli counter of a grocery store for the summer. I was lucky, for unemployment was reaching double digits and was to remain so for some six years for people may age. We were "Generation X" now, as I soon learned. At the deli counter I came to understand some things previously unrealised. Most prominent of these was that I'd been wrong about Guns n'Roses, and that they in fact were a very bad band. I'd in fact bought "Appetite for destruction" which seemed OK and had cover art by Robert Williams. It wasn't that they compared to the Pixies in any way, but they were one of these bands that lots of people liked and that I sometimes liked too, which made me seem less weird.

I furthermore believed that all the sexist crap and over the top-ness of their act was funny (in retrospect I think that that what I perceived as a kind of brilliant ironic statement was in fact deadly serious nonsense). It made the regular sexism and showiness of things seemingly tolerable. They were necessary, because although Nirvana were now superstars and I knew two people who'd bought Soundgarden albums, the charts everywhere in Europe were still completely dominated by Def Leppard, The Scorpions and one-hit wonder eurotechno acts. However, I first became suspicious when the NME, the Melody Maker and VOX began to run articles on Guns n'Roses with headlines like "Guns n'Wankers" and mentioning the word "shite" many many times in the reviews of their recent god-awful double album. The Rolling Stone still liked them, however, which made me increasingly suspicious of that publication.

I came to realise that it was impossible for me to like very large American rock acts (especially the silly ones) and bands like Sonic Youth at the same time. They were, as I learned, opposing fractions and in order to indulge in one fully it was imperative that one would relinquish the other. It wasnÕt without pain that I submitted to this tyranny. I'd spent an entire spring break with "Appetite for Destruction" and Lemmings on my dad's PC. I'd still play Lemmings, would it come my way in an upgraded version, but I sold my Guns n'Roses CD for about a dollar, got very much into Jane's Addiction and haven't liked bad bands since.

I got a ridiculous gig writing articles on pop culture for a local paper as some kind of cub reporter. I was supposed to go to college but as I'd decided to go to art school, which in Sweden is next to impossible, I was saving for a foreign tuition and a plane ticket out. A new glossy in Stockholm read some thing I wrote about their first issue and hired me on as a music critic in exchange for free CD's. It was in fact a stunningly ambitious publication, called POP and it remained in business for seven years with some of the best music journalism I've ever read in Swedish. I was thrilled and proud as I'd read men in their forties give their lengthy explanations on the importance of Dinosaur Jr. for sure but even more so the Suede, not to mention the new wave of middle class hip-hop bands that were coming into vogue, like Arrested Development and Digable Planets. I was just 19, had press passes to the next two festivals in my area of Sweden and as a substitute the life of a rock hack wasn't so bad. A year later, media savvy guys would still approach me in bars about it.

In 1993 I bought a brand new boom box, my first since 1987. It was a Pansonic, I still have it and itÕs still a great machine with this terrific timer feature for playing and recording.

The same year a managed to find someone willing to hop on a ferry and go to the big annual festival in Denmark with me. It is about three times bigger, and just so much better as it is big enough to support itself wholly through quality bands, as opposed to the Swedish one who'll have Status Quo headline just to afford a James show. The best time ever was when Status Quo cancelled and James had to headline, a truly fine evening.

Headliners at the Danish Event was the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they too cancelled. It mattered little to me since I was there to see Perry Farrell's new band, and got some tastes of the emerging dance movement as an entire tent, the White Stage, was dedicated to it.

I saw Jamiroquai there, and missed Gangstarr to catch the tail end of the Digable Planets' gig. I came closer to death than ever before or after at the Sonic Youth show on the evening before, and I never made it close to the Shonen Knife event since they had been put in the Green Tent which really should be reserved for upstarts and bands that suck. Perry looked healthy, but Jane's Addiction they weren't.

At this event I made another discovery, which was to haunt me for some time. I ran into a bunch of kids from my town, the younger brother of a girl I knew and his friends. They had braided their hair in the hope that it would dread and wore this style of knee-long shorts I'd seen skaters wear in music videos. They were a few years younger than me, knew just about as much as I did about the bands within that hip-hop/neo-punk rock genre that was dominant among the educated at the time, and there was six of them and one of me.

I realised that the while it had taken time and effort for me to become knowledgeable, and just to persuade one person to come to this festival with me: these kids had been 14 when MTV came into their lives. They had grown up with notion that they indeed had the right consume whatever culture could be broadcast, and had realised the grave responsibility thereof. They participated, while I was reduced by necessity to a mere spectator. I was twenty and already too old. Emigration seemed inevitable.

Awesome. This word was used by Henry Rollins, whom I'd encountered during some research on Black Flag by way of early Jane's Addiction a year earlier. It turns out the man had a new band, and was turning out spoken word CD's and books. I'd get the CD's out of some kind of longing to hear someone speak fairly intelligently on any subject for a space of time. Often the topics were of a bad-natured whimsical nature: the horror of the band U2, the inherit evil of Edie Brickell. The books, which I had to order right from 10.13.61 in L.A., were of a more melancholy vein, but some of it stuck with me.

It treated the subject of work, of labour; but in a very different way than the labour-romantic literature I'd been force fed in Sweden to instruct me on it's virtues, nor in the do-what's-good-for-you genre my parents and peers preferred; but with a philosophical approach that I understood. It spoke of art as labour, writing as labour. Labour as art. Do It Yourself, Henry said, and I discovered an entire movement dedicated to this phrase. The straightedge movement was just entering into my consciousness as well; and I could suddenly see a culture where before there had been merely a scene. The scene was unattainable for me, but this method wasn't. I saw a way out of the drunken boneheadedness of punk rock, the distant gaze and drugged indifference of dance culture, the juvenile if latent fascism of industrial rock. If one could achieve awesomeness, in the way Henry put it; one would be on equal terms with these things that I worshipped, as opposed to merely chasing after them, press pass in hand. I'd begun to make collages; some of them not bad, not bad at all.

I moved to Southern California in September of 1993 out of some kind of desperation. I'd got into a not-so-great Orange County College and was ready to settle for mere change in lieu of actual satisfaction. I should have known better than to go live in a county naming airports after John Wayne. There were many things there to wonder at. I'd never though new romance and Goth had survived the eighties, but here was several L.A. clubs with names like Stigmata and Helter Skelter devoted to bands which often had dissolved fifteen years earlier.

Kontrol Faktory was popular with the same kids when they were feeling slightly more brutal, and I met a girl who indeed had devoted herself to the praise of Trent Reznor and Ogre from Skinny Puppy. Mexican Goths are adorable for they bleach their hair white, paint their faces the same colour which makes their beautiful black eyes glitter in tune with their PVC club gear. One of my roommates had a black toothbrush to go with her all-black wardrobe and she took on a kind of mythic presence for me. She changed my name, and I kept the one she gave me. Shee dyed my hair, first red, then orange with manic Panic and our friend Sutan the Indonesian drag queen kid braided it beautifully. The Trent girl got me into Fugazi, and Helmet, whose popularity at the time I found hard to believe.

KROQ turned out to be a valuable source of information, but this is long before I discovered college radio. Soon I started to make my way into the so-called city of Los Angeles for more rock-oriented events, as the dark clubs ultimately appeared boring and overrun with drug addicts. On the way to the Hollywood Palladium for a rage Against the Machine my car blew its cooling system with a bang. We still went to the show, which was mediocre, but I'd already decided that L.A. was an awful place. The ridiculous running in circles referred to as a "mosh pit" by Americans but unbeknownst to them quite unlike the more random violence of any respectable European venue, did not improve matters.

She Played "Plague Mass" and I'll confess to being totally scared.

I caught two more shows before leaving town, The remarkable Orb at Westlake Hotel in Downtown L.A. and Diamanda Galas at UCLA's Royce Hall. I went with all the freaks I knew and we got hassled by kids on the Campus on the way there. "Fuck you, fratboy", was a lasting American expression for me; one I still employ and thank the little Mexican goth girl for. I painted a photo realist portrait of her fictional wedding to Robert Smith as a thank you gift.

I had to drop out to leave and back in Sweden I only liked Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds circa "Your Funeral my Trial", and the sadder songs by My Bloody Valentine. Everyone I knew from high school had left town to go become accountants and engineers as soon as the recession let go. Awesomeness seemed harder to grasp than ever before.

These kids I met in San Francisco in the summer of 1994, while I travelled in search of an art School and opportunity to be awesome, all liked the Pixies and in fact preferred an album that I did not own, namely "Surfer Rosa". I met them at a Supersuckers show at a small punk rock club, and I had a very fun summer. My boyfriend was a big and black boy with exquisite tattoos; and although he lacked ear in rock music, his record in hip-hop was impeccable. The Wu-Tang Clan ware to release "Enter the 36 Chambers of Wu-Tang" that same year and kung-fu just took on a completely new meaning after that. Biggie Smalls, Snoop Dogg, the Coup and Warren G were OK, and Mary J. Blige was a late discovery of mine, in 1995. I'd never bought an R&B album before "My Life" and, I'm embarrassed to say, since.

I was going to the San Francisco Art Institute, was incredibly broke, with a walkman but no boom box and no TV. The Art Institute was obviously a terrific place and just the site to be awesome I thought. It was however, a frightening first year and some time before I felt like I deserved to be there in spite of my being an undeniable hick and a foreigner; and against the vigorous advice of my dad. It took some time before I came to employ the Prodigy and some other fast stuff along with a good walk man with a huge headset to aid in my pursuit of things awsome. When the Ministry came to town in the spring of 1996 I had plenty of industrial/goth friends, an ever growing number of ravekids/jungalist pals, a plethora of punker acquaintances and interestingly, quite a few kids who were artists, and friends of mine. It was almost like being in a band!

Late in 1995 The X-files was in its third season already, and this girl who'd moved into my house brought a TV set with her. It was aired on Fridays at the time and I'd only managed to catch a couple of episodes from the second season including "The Host" which is the episode with flukeman. I was most pleased to catch "Grotesque" although in retrospect it doesn't stand out as very memorable episode, and gloriously, "Piper Maru" and "Apocrypha", the first encounter I had with the grand conspiracy theme of the series. It was also my first encounter with my man Alex Krycek, possible a favourite character ever next to Boba Fett.

This roommate had a Mac as well, with an Internet hook-up. At the time one paid to surf by the hour, which seem so ridiculous now. I believe this girl showing me around the premises of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade was my first ever stroll on the web since playing with my dad's gallon-sized modem some three years earlier.

Art School in 1996-97 seemed an awful lot funner and awesomness sometimes appeared to right around the corner. I'd encounter it in my classes sometimes, scrawny kids my age making the most fantastic things. I'd got to sell a painting in the spring show and was feeling somewhat validated. The academic program proved to approach rock n'roll in uncanny ways. Art History once proved to me the complex nature of awesomness in a 5-minute film clip, late one evening in the lecture hall. It was "Mongoloid" by Bruce Conner, then "America is Waiting". I was later to prefer both "Report" and "A Movie" but that evening I saw a goal of painting, of sculpture and of pop music. The version of DevoÕs "Mongoloid" in the film was different to the one on the album.

1997: in the wintertime the tweaked version of the "Star Wars" trilogy was released. "Return of the Jedi" had terrified me as one of the first films I had seen in a Cinema at age 11. It almost killed me this time too; it was so good. It all comes down to "Empire Strikes Back" though, really.

We found a working VCR on the streetand spent Thanksgiving with "Apocalypse Now" playing over and over and over.

A boom box was acquired as KLM told me theyÕd give me $350.00 if I'd only give up my seat from Amsterdam to San Francisco. $210.00 of it went on this JVC piece, which I still love. I came to love the used CD stores of which the city is overrun, just to be able to get rid of CD's as soon as bought new ones. 100 square feet is not conducive to a major CD collection, but I was never prepared to sacrifice the quality of mine because of it. It got easier after I'd switched form KUSF to KALX Berkeley too, the play list was better and if you listened attentively you could release yourself from the need to actually purchase the music. My ex-boyfriend got me into KPOO and KMEL but I gave up the latter when they gave up the Ten O'clock Bomb.

I only really called myself a clubber when Igot into the Jungle scene in San Francisco, which was briefly enough. I met sweet if not-so-clever kids outside school who'd give me little cheap flyers for these techno parties while assuring me that it was nothing at all like house, or trance for that matter. When I started going to these events they were in the basement of Acid House parties with hardly any lights, a large camouflage net would be stretched out over the DJ:s and two large oscillating fans directed towards the gathered. It was fantastic.

In Oakland at an otherwise boring Halloween rave DJ RAP showed up, flown in from England with DJ SS as her MC. She was wearing this enormous fur hat and I was told she was the first lady of Jungle, all hail the queen. No riot grrls ever made half that impression on me. In San francisco I liked Bass Kru, who would paly almoste everywhere and I think still do.I kept going until all my friends in the scene had turned into speed freaks. It took about a year.

In 1998 I graduated and took a job at IBM/Lotus Development. I was supposed to take the phone calls but no one ever called. I only really got into surfing the X-files sites on the Web at this time, and it was sometime before my 10-minute break that I first encountered Slash Fiction.

I've come to the conclusion that it is most important I do not associate myself with anyone who doesn't like the Chemical Brothers

Such blindness to quality when it is that readily available, such ignorance of style when it is big enough to be featured in the Virgin Megastore windows is not just unforgivable, but arrogant, completely void of consideration for anyone.