When I was in high school, my friends' favourite pastime was to quiz me on all the songs and bands I'd never heard of. I was a listener to of show tunes and oldies, and that was pretty much it.
Even now, my music library only extends into the recent past for the quirky or the obscure. Remember I spoke of Aqua the other day. I've got some Lemon Demon and some They Might Be Giants. And I dunno that many people would actually call TMBG new.
I think the newest song I have is Pearl Jam's Man of the Hour, but only because it was on the Big Fish soundtrack. I know I wouldn't recognise a single other Pearl Jam song if it jumped up and bit me.
Wait, Iron and Wine's cover of The Postal Service's Such Great Heights is a 2006, and I have both of those thanks to Garden State.
Well, except that I do have Paul McCartney's Dance Tonight, that's from this year. I guess it's the only one in my list that has even made it on to any Billboard charts, and I understand it hasn't made Top 40.
Looking through my music library, I discover that, yep, most of it is either The Beatles or Beatles related (solo albums), Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, and movie and music soundtracks. And a lot of Sesame Street songs.
I was very excited the other day to find an mp3 of The Stampeders Sweet City Woman, a two hit wonder band from Canada (their other hit was their cover of Hit the Road Jack, which just slipped over into the Top 40). Anyway, Sweet City Woman features a little bit of French and a lot o' banjo.
I recall at camp I made the quote board for the following exchange:
Me: Who or what is an Aaron Carter?
Ruby: You've spent the entire summer at a Girl Scout camp with ten year old girls and you don't know who Aaron Carter is?
Me: Er, no. Should I?
Ruby: It's nice and insulated in your bubble, isn't it?
Actually, at camp, we had what was called The Loop, which was the manner in which all the gossip and other vital information was passed along. Eventually, someone made a graphical representation of The Loop. Ruby was placed in the centre of The Loop. All the rest of the staff fell into place somewhere around Ruby in The Loop. Except me and Badger. Badger hung on to the outside of The Loop and passed information down to me, who was so hopelessly apart from The Loop that I didn't even realise such a thing existed until August.
I'm culturally oblivious. If I didn't visit Fark on a semi-regular basis, I wouldn't even know there was such a person as Paris Hilton. Heck, I'm sure I probably heard the name for years and simply assumed people were referring to the Hilton Hotel located in Paris.
I've always been this way. When I was in first grade, my best friend decorated her room in New Kids on the Block. And she had a canopy bed. She managed to find a New Kids on the Block bed canopy. Even though she was my best friend, I can safely say that I never knew all their names, and I don't think I ever heard an entire song all the way through.
In second grade, everyone else in the universe was in trouble for wearing slap bracelets. I got three slap bracelets in 1995, in a bargain bin at a department store. They had Trolls. To this day, I think I only possessed one troll, sometime in middle school. The girls all watched Saved By the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210. The boys watched The Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I thought these were cable TV shows, because we didn't have cable and I'd never even heard of these.
I didn't realise The Transformers were an incredibly popular franchise until I was in college and met The Boy.
I was always a little confused to how other kids knew about all this stuff I didn't know anything about. I knew I knew all kinds of stuff they didn't know, but that's because I was smarter than all my friends. Heck, the school knew I had higher test scores than any other kid in the school by that point. Still, I watched Saturday morning cartoons just like the rest of them.
What magical system did they use to learn about all this other stuff? How did they learn what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, what to watch? And even more so, why would they go ahead and do it just because they heard about it? Did they really like Trolls that much?
It's not that it really makes much difference. I've had teachers and professors tell me I'm lucky because for the most part, I don't get ostracised for being me. It's true- my elementary school friends always figured I was just a completely different sort of being to whom some aspects of popular culture didn't appply. In middle school I was different, but not quite from another planet, and in high school, like I say, it was a game.
Thankfully, these days, if I really have to know who or what something is, I have the Power of Wikipedia�, so I can look all this stuff up. Except that my results always make me sound a little bit like Sherlock Holmes, I only know based on my observation and research, not my experience like a normal human being.
Still, I think I prefer it that way. Because the responses from people when I express my ignorance of something they assumed you'd have to be living under a rock not to know about? Priceless.