The Collegian

Issue date: 12/2/05 Section: No Limits

Media Credit: Karyn Gilbert A hurricane called Pam Kohler plays a mean air guitar. The man, the myth, the legend, Justin McElfresh, is not only a Pam-supporter, but a fan of his own column.

Please, let me be unobjective, or slanted and enchanted: Modern music is not groovy, unless it has some sort of distorted, broken typewriter ambience.

Hi, I am Justin, and this is the first "Just in the Wind" column. The name of the column is a pun on the Kansas song, "Dust in the Wind." I am not an arena rock fan, though I am known to spin the first Boston album. I even invite my colleague, Pamela Kohler, to play the coveted air guitar while it trembles in all its bombastic glory.

In all sincerity, though, the radio is a syndicated curriculum of plagiarism, and what was once a poignant love affair, has become a discursive procedure of attrition. Songs have become a ghostwritten exeunt of aesthetics. If I am in the vicinity of radio, I am usually wired-in to 740 AM, KCBS, "all news, all the time," or 88.9 FM, KXJZ, the NPR station. These particular frequencies allow a cumulative detox from the aerials that constantly assail me. Not that I am paranoid, but I go into cardiac arrest whenever they announce Grammy nominees.

Therefore, I like to rummage through imagined aisles of asbestos, or other carcinogens, searching for further tiny circles of positivist feedback and unclassifiable beauty. Forsaken vinyl and neglected cassettes, the scuffed up patina of compact discs, the audio trash one person decided to eject to the dust bin, I like to salvage. A wide field exposure allows a nonalignment that is hard to come by these days.

To keep things somewhat current, considering the Johnny Cash biopic, "Walk the Line," came out a couple of weeks ago, a lot of the Cash cassettes and vinyl I own, I purchased from thrift stores. There have been a number of reissues since his death, and commendably so, but there is such a markup on modern-day retail that I get saddened whenever I walk into a record store.

I remember hearing "Ring of Fire" on an old AM station back in the 80s. I was only nine, but the weird Tijuana brass-feel (Herb Alpert is another story) to a country song was a little disorienting to me, not to mention the lyrics.

Continued...

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