The year the music actually came out
When I was in college, I played in a "scramble" marching band which indexed very low on marching skill and very low on musical skill. We were mostly there to have fun. We did play a lot of pop songs, which was entertaining, and we played some videogame music too. I generally knew the music we were playing, which was a plus.
I do remember playing some Green Day and assuming, for some reason, that the music we were playing had been popular for a long time, and that it was Normal, and that I was supposed to tolerate and probably enjoy it because it was Normal and had probably been popular for a long time. I was extremely out of touch with pop music. I remember assuming that this music had been around for 5-10 years or more and that it had long entered the mainstream.
In fact, however, it was fall 2007, and Holiday by Green Day had only been around for about 18 months. I was playing it dutifully in marching band with the same detatched, remote acceptance that I played Crazy Train or Louie Louie, completely unaware that it was extremely recent and probably still playing on the radio.
I have spent some time recently building a playlist of radio songs that were popular when I was in high school and college. To me, this is my 'diabetes camp playlist' - stuff that I heard while working as a camp counselor at a camp for girls with diabetes. We would hold "dances" with the boys' diabetes camp down the road, and this was practically the only time that I would hear a broad sampling of popular music. I spent the rest of my time using an MP3 player to listen to movie soundtracks. I was extremely into memorizing the themes from blockbuster movies by ear so that I could learn to play them on the xylophone. I knew exactly who had composed which movies in various major series like Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean. I could tell you all about the strange hardware used to perform the 1963 Dr. Who theme music. And I could basically not name the title of a single pop song.
In building this playlist, I've had the opportunity to learn exactly what year all of this music actually came out, and I'm constantly realizing that music I just accepted as normal-and-popular-forever-and-ever, normative-culture, don't-question-it... all that stuff was much newer than I realized when I was a kid. I had assumed that if everyone was listening to something, then I'd obviously missed the boat on it, and it had clearly been around forever. I had no idea that I was playing some of this pop music in high school and college marching bands while it was still pretty much new culture.
I've also been able to identify precisely which years I spent detached from popular culture. It turns out that I was actually pretty on-the-ball in middle school, up until about 2003 - probably because I attended school dances from 6th to 8th grade, where the DJ would play current stuff. I also knew the names of those songs, because I would wander around the dance floor asking the other 15-year-olds without dates what the name of the song was. Very cool behavior.
In 2004, when I transferred to the high school I would later graduate from, I made several much-more-mobile friends. Now that we were riding in each others' cars, and I suddenly became completely unmoored from pop culture. We were all band nerds and anime-watchers, so we were all just playing old jazz records and movie soundtracks and anime intro songs and shit. Later in high school, I got much more into music piracy, but I was basically just downloading the songs from all my friends' MP3 players, so that was just... more movie soundtracks and anime intros. We were also obsessed with Muddy Waters and Moondog. I'm not entirely sure why.
My parents provided me an even more mysterious core-sample of popular music. When I rode in my mom's car, I had access to Kirk Franklin, and my dad's car gave me unfettered access to the Talking Heads, Argentinian tango, Willie Nelson, Sixpense None The Richer, and repeated plays of Ellington at Newport... which was an interesting but incomplete sampling of historical and contemporary culture.
I remember the only times I stuck my head above water to get pop music of my own were times I went to Walmart to buy a CD from a bargain bin. I believe I bought the CDs at random? The albums I got that way were: a re-issue of Graceland by Paul Simon, and X+Y by Coldplay. I may have also ended up woth some tracks from Life in Cartoon Motion by Mika this way. These became completely central to my listening merely because I owned them. I did not subsequently branch out and listen to any other current music in any meaningful way. I have no idea why I lived this way!!!!
The result of all this was that I stumbled into college assuming that Green Day's American Idiot was ten years old, or something, eighteen months after it came out.
This week, while building my playlist of diabetes camp dance songs, I've learned that my cultural isolation pretty much lasted only three or four years, until 2007 or 2008. However, this was the precise period of my life when all of my friends were making big decisions about what kind of music they liked, and I basically was not doing that. It also pretty much killed my music-browsing habits - I emerged into college owning no radio and having no radio-listening habits. I got all my new music from the movies. On top of this, I had a terror of pop music influenced by my parents' belief that popular music was somehow evil. So my ability to be cool [music axis] was pretty much permanently paralyzed, like some kind of musical lobotomy.
But somehow I ended up listening to a shit ton of incredible music anyway?? I knew what Festival Junction was, and the Talking Heads, which were and still are cool. I am not religious, but Kirk Franklin's shit is still incredible. And I could play every major John Williams musical motif on the xylophone. So I didn't turn out that bad after all, I guess!