And my seven inch leather heels

I mention it pretty much on a weekly basis, but I love this instant-gratification age of music that we're in now. Fire up Limewire or iTunes and I can have pretty much anything I want within a couple of minutes, either legally or illegally.

So the other night, a craving to revisit my elementary school musical self and hear Kiss's Destroyer was satisfied almost immediately.

I was amazed at how well I remembered the lyrics, considering I hadn't heard most of these songs in 25 years. I remembered how the weird little kids voices at the beginning of God of Thunder¹ scared me because they sounded like they were being tortured, and I could still perfectly recall the memory of how Geoff, the most popular guy at school, once abused his social status and made our friend Hagop kneel down in front of him at the line in that song, "...and I command you to kneel before the God of Thunder."² I remembered how I used to love how Paul Stanley said "el-ec-tric gui-tars" in Do You Love Me and I could even still almost recite the corny radio news soundbite the beginning of Detroit Rock City word-for-word. I remembered how I formed a four-person Kiss army in 4th grade—each of us "being" a member of Kiss— with my friends Sean (Paul Stanley), Geoff (Gene Simmons), Hagop (Peter Criss). I still hold a certain fondness for Ace Frehley because of that.

But the most fun part of the music nostalgia is hearing music from your past when you have 20 years of knowledge and experience, and you can put this music from your past alongside the music from your present and see what holds up and what falls flat. It all holds nostalgia and is fun to listen to, but what's actually good? I first had this experience when doing an early '80's radio show in 1993, and while both Come On Eileen and The Safety Dance³ brought back giddy nostalgia, my more refined musical tastes made me realize that the former is brilliant and the latter is crap.

So it was fun to judge Destroyer when I've been past the personal musical landmarks of top 40, cheese metal, REM/U2/The Smiths, indie rock, drum lessons, two bands of my own, music snobbery and anti-music-snobbery, and I was—not surprisingly—a lot more critical than back when I was feeling sophisticated to not be listening to Disney and Muppet Show albums anymore. My aged ears heard that Do You Love Me and King Of The Night Time World (in the jukebox) still ring true as pop-metal classics, and that the twin-guitar solo at the end of Detroit Rock City still gave me goosebumps. I could hear that Paul Stanley was a much better songwriter than Gene Simmons, and that Gene's songs were as juvenile and stupid as he still proves himself to be in every interview he gives. I could hear that Peter Criss isn't a bad drummer, but he's not very good either.

I wonder where this history-dredging will take me next. Pyromania? 1984? All I know is that I'll have to be really drunk to go looking for Midnight Madness.

¹ This is a truly awful song. I'm sure that were some parents who were sincerely shocked by this song, but the whole thing is an incredibly lame, transparent attempt to come across as scary and demonic and in control of children. I guess it worked on ten-year-old me, but 34-year-old me thinks it sucks.

² This is an uncommon memory of Geoff, who was as nice a "popular guy" as could ever be, though that might have something to do with the fact that being the most popular guy in a class with only 15 people in it didn't really hold much weight.

³ There's a massive page of mp3s (disguised as jpgs, so you have to know how to change file extensions) of just about every cheesy song of the last 30 years. These are songs that are fun to have in your collection, and will make you laugh at first when it shows up through shuffle, but you'll never really *want* to hear them. In other words, you'll grab a lot of them.