Get Me, by Dinosaur Jr

Four Spin magazine covers decorate the yellowish walls of my memory: one read 'Do you believe in Pixies?', the second said 'Grunge is Dead', the third featured the classic black-and-white photo of Kurt Cobain, the fourth one said, bombastically: 'J Mascis is God'. For those of us who had never thought that Eric Clapton was a deity, the remark sounded exaggerated but almost true. This was the mid nineties. My hair would get on my face all the time and the wind will make it go into knots impossible to untie. Once, a girlfriend noticed my hair reached my navel. And this was the sound of mornings for me. A song I recorded once and again on chrome tapes. No discmans nor i-Pods back then, but walkmans. Leave home at six thirty to make it to school at 7, and listen to J Mascis spread the word. His voice and his guitar were an unity that represented in several ways the way I used to feel back then. The city was sountracked by his aching voice. If a guitar has ever cried it has been under J Mascis's spell. There was always something silly about the lyrics, the easy rhymes and all, but through fragments he left enough room for us Sub Pop losers to imagine emotional landscapes. It was what was between the sentences, the unconnected meanings in the almost inarticulate syntax of his lyricism. This was the sound of early-twenties passion, the soundscapes of urban mornings and late arrivals, waiting in the cold and being stood up, of waking up late or never sleeping. The sound of youth's restlessness and common-place post-teenage angst. And he was dead right: Every dream is shot by daylight...