☝️ Short story about how we discovered music as kids in the 90s. Link to the original text written in Portuguese.
Porto, 2023-07-04
I had an interesting chat with friends about the social origins of the music we listen to.
Besides the clear influence my father had, I discovered most of my music through friends. I didn’t have a radio, walkman, discman, or weekly allowance to go out at night. But they did!
I heard Ornatos for the first time in 2000-2001, when I was a senior in high school. They are a great Portuguese rock band for the very obvious reason that they make really good rock, and they have great lyrics too. I got Ornatos through the local kids group living in Foco, Porto. Several of my friends there had already been listening to them since 1998.
For example, my friend João Inácio from that group has always been a big fan of Portuguese bands and alternative rock. When I brought up the topic, I discovered that while I was jumping between 286, 386, and 486 DX2 computers, he was already deep into Smashing Pumpkins, first with Siamese Dream and then with Mellon Collie, and Oasis with Morning Glory. In turn, it was his older sister Joana who got him going. When he was just 8c she took him to the 1992 GNR concert for the Rock in Rio Douro album, and later to the Smashing Pumpkins concert in 1997 at the Alfândega, at the Imperial festival. I asked his sister and found out that Smashing Pumpkins was already a cult band among the group of friends of the 70s generation, probably influenced by a “Kiko”.
Our friend Francisco (another Kiko) listened to a lot of music, which in his mind “was everywhere”. In the yesr 2000 he threw a 16th birthday party and had our mutual friends João Aires and Calvário as DJs. The duo also had a band, Open Mind, in 1999. Aires was 2 years older but quite a bit crazier, which greatly increased the variety of music he listened to, from novel electronic music to St Germain to Paco de Lucia. He also picked up a lot of music from his brothers, but also from the Voxx radio station, which I had forgotten about, and that started in 1998 in Lisbon and later came to Porto with the humor of host Miguel Bacelar and his perfect jingle voice. “Voxx, a yellow radio in a gray country”.
I listened to Voxx in the car that Filipe “borrowed” from his father, and in Tiago’s metallic blue Aixam microcar, and when I went to meet Gonçalo in Lisbon. Those were my 3 best friends then. I didn’t have a car, nor my own radio. At home, it was all classical music, Queen, Chicago, Simon & Garfunkel, and a lot of Jazz and Blues. My father played the keys and sang/ scatted, and he improvised a lot and that made the music spectacular. Strong as his influences were, we were lots of siblings and so there wasn’t much silence or introspective moments. On car trips our father used cassettes with British and American rock & blues to keep us quiet, and he sang a lot.
Back to Tiago, he was my source for everything good about The Doors and Bob Marley, and also some rare pearls in Portuguese bands like Clã; unfortunately, I also had to listen to a lot of Ben Harper and Lamb, and even Dave Matthews. He more than made up for it by introducing me to Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Tiago had a well-stocked Case Logic (the best one) and had some indie crazies like the aliens from Blasted Mechanism, who achieved some success on really cool ethnic-inspired music and elaborate costumes from sci-fi B movies. I called Tiago’s older brother Hugo, who was his source of music, to check his influences. He told me that he picked up all those bands during his musical journey from 1992 to 2000, which were the richest musical years for his age group. In addition to the bands Tiago got me into, he also included the obvious Nirvana, though to be fair that band affected us less. I guess that being in a boys’ school made us somewhat less incessed by emo music. Hugo picked up a lot of new stuff on the radio station Antena 3, plus cassettes he would buy and trade, and later on CDs he bought at the ON-OFF store in the supermarket & mall Carrefour, which was right next to our school. For more specific things, they went to another store, Tubitec, and later to Virgin. Hugo also had a Panasonic recorder, which he only used with TDK or BASF cassettes. At that time, he reminded me, there weren’t many concerts, which he grudegely complains “were created for your generation (80s)”. “We had concerts only in Lisbon, and Vilar de Mouros”. Electronic music started for him at the parties of Cais 447 in 1995/1996, with DJ Freddy, and Hugo & friends also bought CDs at Parque Itália. The DJs also recorded cassettes which were were copied and distributed a lot, as was done everywhere else.
Hugo also told me that he studied one summer in California (OC) in 1998 and brought back the Chris Cornell CD with Black Hole Sun. This was 18 years before my time in LA, where I caught the first concerts of Arctic Monkeys and discovered Roots and Rage in depth, which I saw live. But this is already in the post-internet era and doesn’t matter much for the story.
Jimi Hendrix kept showing up in friends’ playlists and never failed to be cool. Looking at his songs objectively, one at a time, I have to concede it’s a lot of performance and little original music. Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were of a different caliber. They already existed at my home and at my late aunt Tété’s house; they were more original songs with a healthy dose of “I don’t care,” without ever becoming depressing. Except for Stairway to Heaven, which is equally genius and annoying.
Filipe was always more electronic and fluid, scraping music from everyone and every source, and every genre, and I took endless doses of MTV at his house, probably waiting for right time to go out at night. He had the best sound system in any of our homes, at least the one where we could turn up the volume the loudest.
While talking about the musical sources, I also came to the conclusion that everyone (but me) had cable TV, with MTV (channel 16), Viva (18), and Sol Música (15). My father was against cable TV for some reason that escapes me.
Paulo allegedly listened to Pantera from an early age, but since I met him, I’ve always identified him with Pixies and Nirvana, and the corresponding alternating mood “today I’m going to Tendinha” and “yesterday I went to Tendinha”. (Tendinha is a lengedary club you’d end up at end of night). He learned about Nirvana’s Unplugged on MTV. According to tribal legend, he and his high-school colleagues forced the school driver put on a Nirvana cassette as he took them to gymnastics classes on some location, and they would do mosh up and down Boavista avenue. And where did all this music come from? His Pearl Jam CD was an offer from Zé Tó. I asked Zé Tó, also a friend of our group, and he discovered it in 1994 because it was advertised as Top at Valentim de Carvalho. It was also in the stores that he got Silverchair, Greenday, Offspring. Everything that was on display, he’d try without shame. And Portishead.
There were projects that I picked up from who knows where, like Sam de Kid. Several older Portuguese artists floated around us, like Rui Veloso and his folkish-pop-rock, and the provocative Abrunhosa, but without having such an impact on our generation.
There were also some pop slows at parties with friends. No one would actively listen to them (not the boys at least), but the CDs somehow always appeared at the last minute ready to give us some hip-grabbing opportunities. Classic Brazilian music like Tom, Chico, etc., was played one way or another.
Lourenço Magalhães had the best LPs and vinyls. His thing was eclectic and electronic music. And still is. First, we asked, then we stole, then we shazaamed it, and finally, music became unrestricted, with free and digital, and news grew until they died, and everything ended up in the final algorithm.
Then there were the Guns n’ Roses people, a band that scores like a Jimi Hendrix of the 90s Rock generation. Few originals of musical but spectacular at the same time. Whenever they play, it’s good. A Big Mac of music. Gonçalo Mendonça was the spearhead, and I remember seeing him dressed up as Slash for carnival at 9 (I was 8). In turn, Guns got to him via his cousin Miguel Fonseca, whom I couldn’t reach for further comentary. The biggest Guns fan was Carvalhosa, I called him to find out where he originally picked them up from. Apparently it was on the TV recording of the Freddy Mercury tribute that his older sister Bárbara showed him in 1992. He added proudly that he’s been to more than a dozen of their concerts, and is going to another one this very week (in Madrid). Bárbara picked up Guns from her friend Mariana Machado. She got it from her older sister Raquel, who was friends with some surfers - Bagaço, Pisca, Bibas, Baba Lagos, and Freddy - the same DJ Freddy from above.
Back to the elder of the bunch, João Aires. João started with Dark Side of The Moon and The Wall by Pink Floyd. These were records he had at home. A big influence on him was his older brother Nuno, who took him to Drum and Bass parties in London. Once, he told me, João walked into a store on Tottenham Court Road, heard LTJ Bukem, and got quite excited at the novelty. I called Nuno, ~20 older than us, who told me he ended up there by chance. Quite a fun backstory. So Nuno was in Ribeira with a friend, Pedro Mata, and they decided to do an interrail (aka eurorail): He bought a ticket, but his friend bailed at the last minute, and so Nuno did the interrail alone. He came back that August and went to Moledo where a friend of friends suggested that London was “the place to be”. Be what, I asked? Well, Nuno’s friend told him it was a place where it was easy to pay for studies and have a good life. So he headed for England. He was already going out every night in Porto, so “imagine what happened in London” he told me. At home he had started at B Flat in it’s original location in Matosinhos, that is in front of the City Hall, where he’d go with Zé Barbedo, who was crazy about music, influenced by his cousin’s Pink Floyd records. They went to Cais 447, Griffons, later Indústria. In England it was more “what’s happening around me today?”, and out he went with his cowboy friends, that is everywhere. Jazz at Ronnie Scotts, trance, garage, etc - at Avenue and Dragon Fly and other places. He had the Case Logic with CDs he copied from friends and so he bridged the youthes on those two cities. During the holidays, there was nothing else to do but to be in Portugal and go bananas. This Rock n Roll involved mostly psychedelic trance parties and raves. But, Nuno admitted, he also followed his older brothers Luís and Pedro, who even had a rock band called Chance.
Coming back to his younger brother, João also went out a lot in Ribeira, with Gonçalo and others. Gonçalo had moved to Lisbon in high school, and seemed a bit culturally split, developing a Chapitô personality. I got Da Weasel from him and Jamiroquai from Nuno Cordeiro. Gonçalo also had older sisters, Inês and Sofia. So I followed that trail. Inês told me she never bought much music, started with cassettes, and exchanged albums with friends. She doesn’t remember very well. She got Bjork from a Teresa, and like almost everyone, she also picked up her father’s music, Bee Gees and Vangelis. Guns N’ Roses came from Sofia, who in turn picked it up from friends…