American Music
- Submitted by: cokol
- Views: 898
- Category: English
- Date Submitted: 01/09/2011 01:11 PM
- Pages: 6
- Report this Essay
American Music
Winter semester 2010/11
Eva Hamplová
AMUSED AT AMERICAN MUSIC
If I think about music and how it has influenced my life, I realize that most of the music bands or artists that I like or liked to listen to, come from America. There were several stages in my discovering of music. I was born in the beginning of the 1980s, in the time in which the American songs were unwelcome due to the political situation in the Czech Republic. Maybe that's why I remember hearing Michael Jackson for the first time. It was, as I learned later, a tape that my uncle, a 1980 emigrant, brought from Germany together with a brand new cassette recorder. I remember all our family 'stuck' upon the recorder and listening to the Thriller. Although none of us understood a single word, we were deeply impressed and we all knew that that was something special. Hearing "Billy Jean" and "Beat It", I always remember that moment.
Later the Velvet Revolution came and American music has become easily accessible. There were many groups and singers me and my friends listened to, mainly to those which appeared in the ESO music chart, moderated by Tereza Pergnerová by that time and broadcast each Sunday morning. We listened to nearly everything that appeared in the chart. We recorded songs from the radio (RUBI mainly). The recordings created in that way were of a very poor quality; sometimes we caught the song in its half, sometimes the moderators voice intruded the song (I was feeling like killing him or her in such moments) and when we finally heard our favorite song and didn't miss much of its beginning, there was not recording time enough on the tape. We were young girls so it is no wonder that our favorites were the boy bands, e.g. East 17 (oh, Brian and Tony were so cute!; their "Stay Another Day" was definitely on one of my cassettes), No Mercy ("Where Do You Go") or The Hanson's ("Mmm Bop"). Each of us had an idol in each band and we were arguing at brakes at school...
Winter semester 2010/11
Eva Hamplová
AMUSED AT AMERICAN MUSIC
If I think about music and how it has influenced my life, I realize that most of the music bands or artists that I like or liked to listen to, come from America. There were several stages in my discovering of music. I was born in the beginning of the 1980s, in the time in which the American songs were unwelcome due to the political situation in the Czech Republic. Maybe that's why I remember hearing Michael Jackson for the first time. It was, as I learned later, a tape that my uncle, a 1980 emigrant, brought from Germany together with a brand new cassette recorder. I remember all our family 'stuck' upon the recorder and listening to the Thriller. Although none of us understood a single word, we were deeply impressed and we all knew that that was something special. Hearing "Billy Jean" and "Beat It", I always remember that moment.
Later the Velvet Revolution came and American music has become easily accessible. There were many groups and singers me and my friends listened to, mainly to those which appeared in the ESO music chart, moderated by Tereza Pergnerová by that time and broadcast each Sunday morning. We listened to nearly everything that appeared in the chart. We recorded songs from the radio (RUBI mainly). The recordings created in that way were of a very poor quality; sometimes we caught the song in its half, sometimes the moderators voice intruded the song (I was feeling like killing him or her in such moments) and when we finally heard our favorite song and didn't miss much of its beginning, there was not recording time enough on the tape. We were young girls so it is no wonder that our favorites were the boy bands, e.g. East 17 (oh, Brian and Tony were so cute!; their "Stay Another Day" was definitely on one of my cassettes), No Mercy ("Where Do You Go") or The Hanson's ("Mmm Bop"). Each of us had an idol in each band and we were arguing at brakes at school...