...And on the seventh day, he created the Internet

I do not remember my first CD, my first cassette, or my first record. If I ever, through some confluence of improbability and slipshod editorial decisions, find myself the subject of a twenty questions magazine interview, I'll have to make something up for that particular question; something endearingly embarrassing, probably: the Little Mermaid soundtrack or Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em, both of which I did, sadly, own on cassette.

I don't remember my first album, because for as long as I can remember, I've been listening to music. We used to get these big boxes of pretzel nuggets, and I would sit behind the armchair, right in front of the speaker, listening to records on my Dad's old record player and eating pretzels by the fistful. I'd listen to the Beatles and Zeppelin and the Who. I'd listen to the Crickets, who sounded suspiciously like Alvin and the Chipmunks. I'd listen to Huey Lewis and the News. I'd listen to Bill Cosby's stand-up. I'd listen to the story of Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity. I'd even listen to Billy Joel.

I don't remember the landmarks like first album; what I remember are the little things. I remember listening to Van Halen's "Jump" on one of those magazine inserts you could play on your record player. I remember the way that the number of songs you could listen to on the walk home from school depended on how long your batteries had been in your walkman. I remember our older brother buying a copy of Def Leppard's Pyromania in Sears. I remember seeing the video for Michael Jackson's "Beat It" on network television; Radiohead's "Creep," too, and our brother trying to explain the "chookah chookah" part to our parents. I remember never knowing which side was which on my Achtung, Baby! tape. I remember listening to "Batdance" in our neighbors' basement. I remember hearing "Hangin' Tough" every time I went to the rollerskating rink. I remember being in Pizza Hut and debating whether or not I should drop the five or ten bucks on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles album, deciding to save the cash and then regretting it for a really long time. I remember staying up until five in the morning one night in college, downloading the entire Ninja Turtles album off Napster from some kid with a dial-up connection, completely geeking out with my friend Joe and listening to "Pizza Power" for what must certainly be the most times in a row that that song has ever been listened to.

These are the things I remember; in fact, my memory is little more than a string of these innocuous musical details. I've listened to some great music in my life, and I've listened to some awful music. I've seen Neil Young in concert, but I've also seen Flickerstick. I've heard albums that I've wanted to tell the world about, like World Leader Pretend's Punches, which I pestered my brothers to buy every single time I spoke to them until they eventually both did, and which made all three of our top ten lists that year. And I've heard albums to which I've wanted to affix bright orange "Do Not Buy" stickers, to warn the record-buying public, like Semisonic's All About Chemistry, which very nearly went out the window on the QEW after only three or four tracks.

It was somewhere on I-90, while listening to either K'naan or the Shout Out Louds or Animal Collective, that my brother and I decided that it would be a good idea - although maybe not actually a good one, and not so much an idea, either - to start a blog about music. And so, a week and a day later, here we are. We've chosen a name and a layout and are prepared to unleash upon our imagined, hypothetical readership a sporadic dribble of uninformed and inarticulate opinions of a scattershot fraction of what all there is to listen to. And yeah, I've ended two sentences with prepositions in this post. That's right.

Enjoy.