Oh hai, I upgraded mah website

SO! After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, including a brief period yesterday during which I seriously considered hunting down one specific "Customer Service" (SO airquoted) representative from my old web host and cutting his heart out with a pen knife, VOILA! Welcome to Sweetney 2.0, rev 3 (or whatever), now hosted on TypePad. I know, it doesn't look much different. Which was kind of the point, actually.

But then, durr, why did I move to TypePad after four years of self-hosting, you ask? Isn't that sort of a downgrade, you query? Am I just some kind of pussy, retreating to the confines of a managed host, you snort?

Yes. Yes I am.

Honestly, that's not far from reality. Truth be told, over the past four years the back-end (heh, she just said "back-end") and behind-the-scenes tech shit I've had to deal with relative to running Sweetney has been MASSIVELY PAINFUL. For while it's true that I'm geeky enough to enjoy code and design tweaking, increasingly I found that the amount of energy and time I was putting into that stuff was starting to eat into *actual writing* time. And increasingly this felt like a waste, and more frustrating than enjoyable. So why not simplify and streamline and cut out the techy BS so I can focus on my main goal: bringing delicious content (and contentment! because I'm concerned for YOUR happiness!) to you, the people? BINGO.

Massive shout-outs to my hero and savior Anil Dash for hand-holding me through some of yesterday's migration, and Jonathan Schrieber from FM for holding my hand during the parts when Anil wasn't. My palms are, indeed, sweaty with love for you both. Does that frighten you?

(by the by, y'all should make sure you have the right RSS feed for Sweetney, what with all these changes and stuff. The right feed is: http://feeds.sweetney.com/sweetney -- update accordingly!)

. . . . .

But before I go dunk my head in a celebratory vat of vodka, I need to attend to answering the following question for a little round-robin-type action Catherine and I cooked up:

"How (The Smiths, Nirvana, Debbie Gibson, *insert band name/artist here*) Changed My Life." Pick whatever band, performing artist, one-hit wonder - even just a single song, if you want - and write a post about how it moved / rocked / utterly transformed your adolescent / teenage / young-adult self.

I had a big long answer that involved lots of, you know, words and stuff. Words that described things. That were descriptive and imaginative and expressive and stuff. And then I decided to move my site and all four years of its content yesterday, so the words? They do not flow.

But I will say this: I know for certain that I would not be who I am today if it weren't for The Smiths.

And I know that sounds stupid and cornball, but when I was 13 years old I heard their self-titled LP for the first time, and it was revelatory. Over the ensuing years, as I stumbled forward through my teens and my obsession with the band grew, their music expressed perfectly my feelings of strangeness and alienation, my sense of being an outsider and not fitting in. In many ways, The Smiths made me feel, for the first time in my life, that it was okay to be lonely.

And they opened up a new world of music to me: The Smiths begat The Cure, all the 4AD artists, Creation Records, and so on. The soundtrack to my youth began with them. And my sense of being so alone ended. Beautifully, Iike so:

What band, song, album, or artist changed YOUR life?

. . . . .

Please to peruse more life-changing musical reminiscing at these fine Sweetney-approved sites:

Her Bad Mother: www.badladies.blogspot.com
Oh The Joys: www.othejoys.blogspot.com
Whoorl: www.whoorl.com
Mamalogues: www.mamalogues.com
Mrs. Flinger: www.mrs.flinger.us
IzzyMom: www.izzymom.com
Mom-101: Mom-101.blogspot.com
Girls Gone Child: www.girlsgonechild.blogspot.com

Comments

[Mom101]

Okay so now see, you're just being cool with all that Smiths, Cure, Bauhaus/Joy Division stuff. Stop it, will you?

(Wait...you didn't mention Bauhaus/Joy Division. But you meant to, right? Because you're cool that way.)

[Her Bad Mother]

We would just so totally have been bestest friends EVER way back when. 'Cept, of course, we would have been all cool and chill and sway-in-the-corner-with-our-beers about it.

[Mrs. Flinger]

OMG. And I picked TIFFANY! Buhahaha. Mostly because hi, who even remembers her? But your music, I still listen to that. Maybe I'm more out of touch than I know...

[sweetney]

you guys i was (am!) so NOT cool. everyone made fun of me for liking the smiths at the time. i was The Anti-Cool.

oh and did i mention i was "most unusual" in my senior class? (translation: ZOMG FREEEEAK!!1!!!)

as you can probably imagine, high school was a fun, lighthearted romp for me (shoots self in the face).

[Oh, The Joys]

My high school BFF was a die hard Smiths/Cure fan. She could never get me to go there. Twenty years later I called her and was all, "The Smiths and The Cure are so good" and she hung up on me. Heh.

[Dana]

The Cure is one of my favorite bands ever. My husband was dressed like Robert Smith the day I met him. I was all "THAT'S DREAMY."

[magpie]

That would be Springsteen's Born to Run. It woke me up. And I still love it. And him.

[janny226]

Some girls are bigger than others.

[BaltimoreGal]

I loooved the Smiths- the theatricality of it, the humor. And "How Soon is Now?" I remember hearing at a party, not on a TV show. But I know I listened to both The Cure and New Order EVERY DAY during my Freshman (87-88) and Sophomore years of high school- at least once a day. The Cure led to post-punk and new wave and so Bauhaus, Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, The Specials, etc...

Does this sound like the Grosse Point Blank Soundtracks? I really think that John Cusack could pick out the soundtrack to my life. Alterna-moody, heavy on depressed men.

[whoorl]

I can't even express to you how many nights I listened to The Smiths and The Cure over and over and OVER. I'm pretty sure I wore those cassette tapes to bits.

[rascoagogo]

Y'all are so cool with your angsty music. In the height of my college cynicism and intellectualism and depression, I stumbled on Iron & Wine, Wilco. It tethered me to my soft, secret underbelly of hopeless romanticism. I got a lot less angry.

[jenn]

Oh, most defintely The Cure. Without a doubt. Once I heard, and then saw, them, I realized that there were other people that felt the same way I did. (Wow, that sounds lame.) I think the Sisters of Mercy are a close second.

Of course, I look freaking ridiculous singing along with them in my mini-van. Even though a lot of things of changed in my life, I will say that my taste in music hasn't and I still enjoy the same stuff now as I did back then. (and it is so cool to see Sam dance around and try to sing "Lucretia, My Reflection"!)

[Izzy]

Jeebusgawdalmighty! I can't remember the the last time I thought about all those awesome 4AD bands. I loved all that dark, moody, ethereal shit. Of course, if you haven't read my thing yet, The Smiths also figured prominently in my youth.

Dang — I was just reminded, on the 4AD tip, of this movie I watched the other night (Mysterious Skin) that had a Cocteau Twins song in it. When was the last time I heard a CT song? Probably a decade or more!

[emmak]

I think it was Hunky Dory by David Bowie...it was the first Bowie album I ever heard, when I was thirteen. It was so totally weird and the lyrics so freaky and off the wall, I immediately felt he understood me..and I was hooked.

[Marie]

Duran Duran!
But then Tracey changed that with her endless mix tapes of Throwing Muses...

[Cassie]

Now I delurk to say that I'm glad you're not gone. You got the sad [!] symbol on my feed reader, so then I checked your website and OMG, it was gone. And I had to force the sadness at bay. Now you're back and I can go back to joyously awaiting pictures of Truman and whatnot.

YAY.

Also? My past 13 year old self would have died and gone to heaven if she had heard of the Smiths. I was still listening to Barenaked Ladies and now find myself judging my teenage past badly. :)

[Fake Jon Stewart]

Mah rain. Let me show it to your parade...

I apologize in advance for this, but I just have to mention a Seinfeld-ish trait that I and several of my similarly shallow friends have had in the past: If I was interested in a girl, and then found out she was a big fan of The Cure, it was nearly a deal breaker for me.

To me, it was a simple equation: "Attractive + Huge Cure fan = emotionally needy, possibly unstable, and high maintenance"

I've had this conversation before...

ME: Hey, how's it going with that Becky chick?
FRIEND: Didn't work out. She likes The Cure.
ME: Oh. That's a pisser.

A stupid theory? Sure, but can you disprove it?

[Lotta]

I would have to say the Violent Femmes album. I was feeling very out of place in high school and didn't really feel that Lisa Lisa Cult Jam was something I could related to. So I loved that VF introduced this new, ironic, culture to me.

[gala]

the stone roses marked me forever, but i was 10 when i first heard 'the wall' and i think that is when i stopped wanting to listen to whatever my parents were listening to then. but the list of life-changing music is so long - where to start? japan defintely, esp secrets of the beehive, house of love, the cure of course, and morrissey, with or without the smiths, early U2 (boy and war), the pixies, joy division, joe jackson, elvis costello, lloyd cole, the clash, and on and on and on. as someone else said earlier, just refer to grosse pointe blank (or nick hornby's high fidelity) for more of same.

[Holly]

I remember hearing 'London Calling' in 6th grade and being blown away-nothing I knew sounded like that. It took me many years and going off to college before I felt I could be myself and I found people who (gasp) liked the same music I did. (It sounds lame, but it's true. All my high school friends loved classic rock and heavy metal.) But through those years in middle school/high school I carried the Clash-and a few other bands I discovered on MTV in the 80s-with me and it got me through.

RIP Joe Strummer!

[Kathy]

My life-changing band would have to be the Replacements, unfortunately, by the time I got around to hearing them, their shelf life was less than a year.

[palinode]

In 1984 I joined the Columbia Record & Tape Club, which offered you ten free albums for a $1.99, in exchange for years of unwanted cassettes and threatening letters. One of the tapes I picked was the Smiths' "Meat Is Murder". I had no idea who they were or what they were about, but I liked the title.

I put the tape on, and what can I say? The Smiths invaded my brain and retrofitted my entire adolescent identity. At the time my musical choices were either Duran Duran synthjunk or AC/DC posery. The Smiths - and the entire world of music they provided entry to - offered a way out. From there it was a short leap to the entire back catalogue of 70s and 80s punk, Joy Division, Jesus and Mary Chain, Throwing Muses, and so on.

Nothing shook me up like that again until I was listening to late-night radio in 1987 and The Pixies' "Levitate Me" came on.

[Karen (miscmum)]

Right, my answer would be Madonna's Like a Prayer - which in a totally strict Catholic family is, really, the most completely relevant and ironic thing that could happen......

(It also shows my age, somewhat. Child of the late-80s as I was....)

[Robin]

Jane Says.

meh.

[Keryn]

Huh. Nobody else was forever changed by Nirvana or Pearl Jam or R.E.M.???? Also Sarah McLachlan. Oh, the sweet relief when I discovered how moving, how meaningful music could be. Before this discovery, I had been a hair metal fan. *Shudder* Not that I don't enjoy hearing old hair metal songs, but they're not exactly life-changing.

[Elizabeth]

Tears for Fears' Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Remember, I went to Okemos High School, where the cool radio station played songs like "Never Surrender" by Corey Hart. Cheesy as it might sound, Tears for Fears was DEEP to me. Then I got to Albion College and all the Cranbrook kids were listening to The Smiths and The The and Alison Moyet, and my world was absolutely rocked.Oh, and the cassette tape a friend dubbed for me of "Squeeze: The Singles". "Black Coffee in Bed" was pure genius to me.

[Bonster]

OK another lurker commenting. But, The Beatles, hello, anyone?!? I know it seems obvious, but they were the first band to make me melt. I got really into them starting in the 8th grade because radio music sucked so hard (still does of course) and I think it helped to shape who I am today. Also inspired a lot of drug use, fun times.

Then in college years, shoegazers made me melt, most notably Ride. Still love Ride.