Kill Your TV

by Mix 104.7's afternoon personality, Parker

Greetings one and all. Have you checked out www.amihot.com yet? If not, refer back to the last time I told you to kill your TV in the previous issue. By the way, to set the record straight once again, the name of this column is in no way associated with Marilyn Manson, as I find his overall persona to be that of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video fused with 1980s' shock rockers Gwar. Truth is I've never found relevance in Mr. Manson's music. Even way back during my years in the wonderful public education system of Missouri.

It's funny how music can make you think of a time long ago. Everyone is prone to taking a trip down musical memory lane every now and then. Whether it's the song you listened to the first time you experienced naughty time, or the party "anthem" that you and your friends blasted out of your stereo when it was time to get wild, simply hearing it can transport you to another time in your life. In a lame 4-H type of statement, music is the soundtrack to your life.

For example, every time I hear Guns-N-Roses, I'm taken back to my days as a pre-teen when I thought my best friend Joey was better than me because his parents spoiled their only child and my mom was raising two boys by herself on a E.R. nurse's wage after my biological father left. Fifteen years later Joey is in prison.

Not all songs remind me of bad times, though. Every time I hear Tupac's "I Get Around," I think of my first homecoming when my friends and I rode to the party in this guy Shane's beat-up boat of a car. I also remember the seniors listening to some horrible Ugly Kid Joe song while they tapped the kegs and stole our women with such creative lines as "want the first beer off this keg?" and "I scored three touchdowns last night." But hey that's how it goes and in some sort of "what goes around comes around" karma. College allowed us to get involved with the women that were in the same class as those goons. Therefore the situation, as with most situations in life, worked itself out just fine.

Not only can music help you to reminisce about the past it can also help you remember it. See, last July I went to Cancun with my soon-to-be wife. It was one of those 5-Star all-inclusive resorts where basically you can drink, eat, drink, eat, drink, drink, and let's see -- drink as much as you want at your resort for free. Plus almost every activity outside the resort had pretty much the same deal. Pay once and drink all day or night. I was sober for maybe 15 hours of the entire trip.

My time spent intoxicated, included time quietly freaking out on the plane because I swore I was going to end up on the world news when my body was being fished out of the ocean. Let's put it this way, we took off from Cancun for St. Louis at about 1 p.m. on a Saturday and I was still drunk from the night before.

Note: A word to those of you who are planning on staying comfortably numb during spring break, especially in beach locales. Drink plenty of water or sports drinks between binges. Part of our trip was a wash because we were dehydrated and didn't know it. And when you are dehydrated, yet keep drinking because you don't know any better, it makes matters worse and you develop flu-like symptoms that no 200 peso ($20) package of flu medicine will cure. So drink non-alcoholic water-based fluids before you fall into bed and when you get up. You'll thank me for it!

Back to why I was talking about Cancun. A few days after we got back, I slowly remembered some of our trip, but I kept struggling to fill in some fuzzy spots. Eventually I remembered that there was this song we heard just about everywhere we went down there. This song was so popular that a friend from Fox 23 and I had a 10-minute discussion about it because when he went down there, he heard it too.

Between us, we managed to figure out what we thought the hook of the song was. So I looked it up on Napster and sure enough it was "Follow the Leader" by the Soca Boys. After downloading it from Napster and listening to it, a lot of the trip came back to my mind. On occasions I'll play it during my 5 o'clock traffic jam and I'll get calls from girls and guys alike who all partied to the same song in different parts of Mexico and the world at different times. That is how powerful music can be, and tequila for that matter.

Music can also help me remember how much of a jerk I could be before I grew up. Every time I hear Korn I think of the times when I picked on the kids in marching band because they were fans of Korn, long before Korn sold out and went mainstream. The band kids were different and marched to a different beat but many years ago and I didn't respect that. Now I look up to it because my brother was in marching band and is currently attending the UM-KC music conservatory and is studying to be a film scorer. In about five years he will be working in L.A. or for Disney in Florida. If things keep going the way they are, he will be making half a million dollars a year -- just two years out of college.

Remember that many television shows are like cavities for the brain and unless you're flossing with The Learning Channel, or something informative, your best bet is to kill your TV.