Amore Per La Musica (Love for Music)

If Music be the food of love, play on….

I can’t recall the first time I discovered my love for music but I remember as a child listening to some songs from my parent’s cassette player…listening to artistes like “Third World”, “The Mandators”, “Sade”, “Ras Kimono”, “Abba”, “Alex O” and some other artistes whose names I may never know but whose songs are forever etched in my memory.

Due to my sheltered pre-teen upbringing, I was a bit late to popular secular music of the early 90s and its dance steps…so no, I do not know how to dance to “Patra” or the butterfly dance or the lyrics to Shabba Ranks songs…songs like All 4 One’s Candy Rain meant nothing to me.

In my early teens, I had “opened eye” when TLC’s No Scrubs was the rave and as fate would have it, we had a broken transformer problem with a 6-months power outage. That was how I made our rechargeable lamp with radio my best friend…I only listened to one radio station back then, Cool FM 96.9. This was my first proper introduction to music – Rock, Soft Rock, Urban Contemporary, Alternative Rock, Soul, R&B.

I also got a “Higher Education” book which served as my music slum book. With pictorial cut-outs of my favourite artistes then – TLC, Aaliyah, Usher, B2K, Destiny’s Child…and guess what, it also served as my lyrics book…whenever one of my favorite songs comes on air, I’d rush to the radio with my pen and book and with my ear against the speaker, I’ll start jotting down the lyrics (which were wrong most of the time). I even scraped some savings and bought a music Walkman and got an empty tape which I used to record my favourite songs from the radio, so in my spare time I would listen to the songs over and over again in hopes of getting the right lyrics (lol!). As fate would have it, then came the invention of “Music/Lyrics book” sold by music merchants…I could buy up to 3 different music books at once if I did not get all the songs I liked in one book.

The next phase was graduating from Walkman to phones with music players and memory cards to store music. Back then, if you had an extensive music playlist with my kind of songs, you were my bestie. I still remember one of my music besties in the University was Sola. Dude always had the latest songs on his Sagem S-7 phone while I was still struggling with my Motorola V6 that could only store 3 songs (presently, I have about 1,300 songs stored on my phone)…the relief when I upgraded to a Nokia Phone 5200 was real. Infact, in my final year yearbook, I stated that my most prized possession was my MEMORY CARD (face palm) due to the assortment of songs on my phone.

I was obsessed with Music; so obsessed that my parents were scared of letting me school outside their location for fear I might go and study Music instead of Accounting (sometimes I wish I did but it’s not too late).

Music is my companion when reading for tests/exam, when driving, happy, sad or heartbroken, heck, Music is still my companion when I want to really concentrate at work (my boss disagrees with me on this though). If there’s one thing I’m grateful for, it’s the ability to hear, not just any sound but the beautiful strains of music.

Welcome to theVibeChic segment…where we shall be gisting about anything musically inclined – Songs (classical, contemporary and other genres), Artistes, Musicals, Music Videos, Music theory; you name it. My foray into the intriguing word of classical music is a story for another day…Stay tuned to this segment. There goes my shameless plug on my love for music. So tell me, when did you first discover your love for Music?