I have this weird belief that all of us are like quilts- made up of 100's of different things that make us unique. Our musical tastes are just one example of how we're like quilts as we've all been raised & been exposed to different genres.

 My own, personal quilt was not discovered until a few years ago. I go through these musical mood swings & during one of these I put my musical quilt together. I was reminiscing about being like 10-12 yrs old & listening to KDAY...aww, the good ole days of "real radio stations." But I couldn't figure, for the life of me, how it is that I liked rap so much as we mostly listened to spanish music at home. I distinctly recall the days of tricked-out Nissan/Toyota/Mazda trucks with dope ass multi-colored paint jobs & 5000 watt speaker systems just resonating a bass beat. What was tripping me out was that I remember instantly loving that music but I had no idea where it came from. Then, like a ton of bricks, it hit me!!! I'd grown up on corridos & tamborazo zacatecano. Corridos are like mexican folk music ala the blues here in the U.S- heavy accordion, heavy bass laced with sad lyrics about immigration, drug smuggling or how someone's favorite horse got killed (basically, music that just makes you wanna take a shot of tequila & then some). Tamborazo zacatecano (made popular during the days of Pancho Villa & the Mexican Revolution) is like ALL bass beats. We're from Zacatecas (state in mexico) & this was, by far, my dad's favorite so I heard a LOT of that.

So, not until a few years ago did I realize why I'd gotten so much into rap (& then house). The pervading phat ass bass beat, I realized, was the fabric that interwove my musical quilt. Like Linus, no matter how old I get, I carry my quilt around everywhere I go...