Blog Posts by Priscilla E Perot-Rajan

My mum used to frequently wonder what I did when I was sitting on my chair, before and after dinner time, gawking at my laptop. And after I got married, she told me one day that she thought that I must have been catching up with a lot of things because I had given her the impression that I was reading a lot of the time.  Although that is to a degree correct, I had also spent a reasonable quantity of my time listening to random music and watching literally every movie trailer I could get my eyes on.

A couple of months ago found me watching an American reality talent show, The Voice, and the song one of the singers' performed caught my attention. A simple Yahoo! search revealed the reputed woman behind the curtain that went by the name Adele.

At the start I didn't want to not know more about the artist as in my head she was the one-hit-wonder with "Chasing Pavements", if only a tad more distinctive, replica of the overall development in popular music.  The calculation runs like this;

When I was an adolescent, I spent a disproportionate amount of time lying on my bedroom floor listening to music and reading an album cover/sleeve, which usually had much more on it than just the lyrics and who did what on which tracks. Most bands turned their sleeves into art forms.  CDs and downloads just can't do that. I was in school and I remember what a big deal getting a new cassette was and how excited I was to be able to shop for them. I had a tiny portable player that I went to sleep with listening to one cassette or the other.

When I was 15, I learnt about Crowded House and Phil Collins. Undeniably unhip, though not at the time, but they were single-handedly responsible for the music enthusiast I am today. The finest time in my life as a music fan was the short-lived period after I'd seen a video of Phil Collins playing "In the Air Tonight" for the first time. I combed through music stores, trying to find all the songs performed by him and his earlier band, Genesis. I didn't

Sarah McLachlan is to perform "Angel" at the dedication of Pennsylvania's 9/11 memorial as a tribute to the victims, families, friends, firefighters, and police whose lives were personally affected by the events of 9/11. A remembrance to those who died in the Twin Towers ten years ago, and how the events of that day unfolded and changed lives forever.

This song also makes me remember of that very day in my life. I remember coming home and looking at my parents glued to the TV watching smoke rising from an explosion at the World Trade Center. I recall the shot of the sunny blue day, before the explosion. I remember observing the pieces of rubble plummet from the towers and, then learn that the rubble were actually people. I remember thinking, "how terrible it must have been up there to make jumping down from the tallest building in the world appear like the better option."

I remember these things because they were permanently engraved into my mind and entwined into the cloth of America,

I was raised up in a home in which music was always playing. I spent my youngest formative years in the eighties and, while my parents were relatively "with it", they weren't exactly metal fans. I don't quite recollect what was playing but I doubt it was Whitesnake's Saints & Sinners or Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love. More likely, it was Pat Benatar's Tropico, Phil Collins' No Jacket Required or  The Police's Outlandos d'Amour. My parents preferred light country and sunny-rock. But it didn't matter. It was music. And it nurtured a love that would come to a head around 1999, the year in which I became surprisingly obsessed with the stuff. Music, that is.

One day, my dad came home armed with two huge cartons of cassettes and vinyls he'd got from a yard sale through some American couple who was leaving the country on short notice. While I fathom how insanely unhip it is to admit that your first albums were by WHAM and A-HA, if you want me to carry on in the spirit of honesty, I'm