Music Monday | Diddy

Hello!

We are in another month: June. Hope everyone has been enjoying your summer so far! If you have missed out on what the special meaning of this blog series, you can check it out here. Back in April, I started off with the big dogs: Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin. And then last month, I talked about the influence both Timbaland and Missy Elliott had on me in the late 90’s and early 00’s.

The last two months were kind of easy to sort out because I’ve known who I wanted to talk about, but once I started working on my June content, my mind went blank. I knew I wanted to discuss my love of Scott Storch, but I had no idea to pair him up with originally, until it hit me of another producer who was at the heart of my teenage years too.

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Although my mom enjoys The Notorious B.I.G. now, I actually don’t remember anything by him or Diddy when I was child, so I’m basing this post on what I loved during my pre-teenage years.

In 2002, before MTV was probably in the early days of creating Jersey Shore, they still had music on their minds. TRL was still well and kicking – I even think both Carson Daly and Vanessa Lachey (nee Miliano) were still hosting the show too! The time was new for everybody, even the music competition shows. American Idol would have been on their second or third season around this time, and thanks to the success of AI, Diddy worked with MTV to create something similar, titling it “Making The Band”. Some of you might remember the show; I remember seeing the promos while TRL went on commercial breaks but I didn’t actually watch it until 2004.

I loved when Diddy decided on creating the ultimate all girl group for his label Bad Boy Records. I still remember (vaguely) of the first season and finding Aubrey O’Day and Aundrea Fimbres, but he wasn’t ready to build a group with the girls on that season, so they came back for a second shot and both Aubrey, Aundrea were joined with Shannon Bex, Dawn Richard, and D. Woods. By the time, they released their first album, I had never listened to a whole album all the way through before, so the fact I can do this for this and Welcome To The Dollhouse was an absolute shock but a very good sign or so I thought. I loved Danity Kane and still do, but my favorite was always Aundrea and since she really never came back to the group over the last few years, I haven’t been as excited as I was in the beginning.

While Diddy was seemingly busy creating one group, he actually went back to MTV with the intentions to make an all male group too! I did watch that season and the finale shocked me, because after the creation of what we know as Day26, absolutely nobody figured he would give Donnie Klang a solo contract! Unfortunately, neither Day26 or Donnie really broke out on their own like DK. I think they each had one decent album release and everything was over.

At the beginning of the year, I heard that the series was coming back but since the COVOID-19 mess, I hadn’t heard anything else about it. Honestly, the only thing I can say about it is, not everything should be rebooted. Back then, there were only two or three music shows whereas now, there are so many to literally drive a person go a bit nutty! I think one of the main differences it worked back then was because, if you wanted to watch something on TV, you had to watch it that night or else you were screwed unless they showed it over the weekend as an encore. Now, we rely on our DVRs and would rather wait until the season is over and binge a large collection at a time.

I really don’t think I’d watch the new reboot, that is, if it ever gets off the ground! I think I’d try it – watch the pilot and see if that magic is still there inside of me. Honestly, it will take a lot of twists and turns in just that hour premiere to capture my full attention to keep coming back for more each week.

Do you remember the ‘Making The Band’ show? What are your thoughts on the prospect of it coming back to TV? 

 

Music Monday | 10 Years Of Apperciation!

Howdy!

So, I have some exciting news to share with you today.

Last year, I celebrated 10 years of blogging and talked about various disability topics. It was fun and I seriously thought I was done and was going to have a nice break for a while, but then back in February, I realized I have been a high school graduate for ten whole years! If you feel old, don’t worry I’ve never been more afraid of sliding into my thirties this much in my life! Although, I don’t think they are considered “old” (hell, I don’t even think fifty or sixty years old are elderly anymore!) but everyone close to me will certainly feel their age and I don’t necessarily feel that bad about that! 😉

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If you have been following me for a long time, you might remember my ‘Tune Tuesday’ summer posts I did for a good three or four years in a row. They were about music from all around the world. It was exciting to share with my family, friends and audience of new and old acts are based in places they’ve never expected before. Some people were really surprised by this and it made me really happy! I hoped I gave everyone a shot on discovering something different each week!

Unfortunately, I am not comfortable to mess up my new schedule just so I can publish on Tuesday, but I had a clear version of everything coming together nicely (we’ll see about that!) so I thought about using the start of the week, like my A-Z challenge and I have seen other blogs use it before and it’s even trended on Twitter in the past! The last two Mondays’ of the next six months will be called ‘Music Monday’.

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Now let’s discuss the theme of this new journey.

I’ve been getting the idea to go this route back for a while. I know I don’t talk about this a lot, but after I graduated from high school I was supposed to study Audio Recordings, and hoped to become a record producer one day.

One of the classes I had to take was one called “music appreciation”. Now, I have to remind you of the fact that I only lasted about a month or two, before I quit the whole thing, so I don’t really remember the main objective of the class itself. However, I feel like it would have talked about finding the genius in various genres and the masters that created each piece. If it ever turns into a special on PBS, I would probably end loving it!

I have selected 12 people that have inspired prior to making the decision to study this and the others were found while I was doing my own course into appreciating all forms of music for the last ten years. I am hoping to explain a little more into why I gravitated to discover something different and how I evolved with each new act I collected overtime.

I am really excited to do this series and hope you enjoy every post that I publish in the next couple of months.

Who are you hoping to see included in my new series?

A Place I’d Never Sit Foot In Again…

Source: perfectbucketlist.tumblr.com

The other day I was working and fixing my bucket list on my little tab at the top. It definitely needed to be cleaned because in ways it felt very chaotic and hard to read. I am very happy that I decided to make my own list but at times I feel like I wasn’t being realistic enough. As much as I’d like to get inside a taxi and say to the driver “follow that car!” and hit somebody over the head with a frying pan. Let’s face it, those things will never happen no matter how hard I try!

I was looking through my Pinterest board of things that I have on my original list. I’m sad to say that I’ve chosen to remove this one. To a normal person this would be a dream come true, but not for me.

I have never liked my voice being recorded, when I hear it, it sounds like squeaky and I feel so embarrassed by it, but it’s never kept me away from choir. I’ll be honest I don’t know what I was thinking in late 2009 early 2010, all I knew was I had to find a college to continue to educate myself. Even in middle school, I never had an idea what I wanted to do in life. At one point, I wanted to be a fashion designer and I actually took a class specifically to see if I’d really like it. I loved the class, but since I still needed help controlling a sewing machine I lost interest in it. I hate having help! It’s a normal pet peeve for ones with any kind of disability deals with on a daily basis. Anyways, the only music based class I have ever taken were the ones you had to have in middle school plus choir. That was it! I have always been interested in learning more about music. How to make it and record it. So when I found out that a college nearby my hometown had an audio recording program and that our school was taking a group of juniors and seniors to that exact college, my mom and I decided it would be a good idea for me to check it out.

Before even deciding that I was going on this college tour trip, I had actually been in contact with the director of the program. He was extremely sweet and genuine believed that there could be a way for me to do this. I was very upfront about my disability, explaining that I did everything with my feet and had trouble with tables being too high and such. He sounded like things could modified for me and that’s when things started to freak me out a little, but I’ll get to that later on. The day of the trip, it was just my aide and I on the short bus. Thank god for iPods because I was a nervous wreck the whole drive there! When we got there, we were all in the student union? Is that what it was called? I don’t remember, but we had to hear a few of the students talk about finding the right career and what college life is really like from their perspective. Afterwards, we were separated from our friends and into different programs we signed up for that the school had, audio recordings was mine of course and I was paired up with a junior boy. Within five seconds later a very tall man came up to us and looked down at me and said, “are you Meghan that I’ve been talking to?” I said “yes” and he took us on the tour of the music department.

I don’t remember much of the actual tour but he did a pretty good job at it though! He talked to both of us including my aide. It was nice to brig a voice and face to a person I had only met through emails. We took a couple of elevators because there were a lot of stairs. We got to meet a few of the different instructors and we finally got to see the rooms where the students get to play their instruments and learn the recording process. When we walked into both rooms I felt as though I was in heaven! It was so roomy and he explained to me that tables could be lowered or raised higher if needed. We also got to meet some of his present students, including two boys that I went to school with and I was a little weirded out about that. They were nice but I know different looks from people – they had the look of “why is she here? How is she going to attempt this?” It was pretty cool just being in the rooms with all the equipment. The experience itself was neat! After our little tour was over, he took us back to be with our classmates in the lunch area. Before we left the school completely, we had one last tour of the whole campus and that was great too because I hadn’t been through the whole grounds since 2004 when my mom signed up for the start of her nursing degree.

That January, I applied for the school and got my letter in mid-March. The same day I brought home one of my drawings for my dad to make a frame out of it for me. I remember my mom crying because she was so happy that her oldest daughter was going to school at the same one she went to. In May, our hometown newspaper puts all of the graduates’ majors and schools they were going for and I was the only one with “Audio Recordings” on it. I felt weird again, along with other feelings too! Once I graduated, we kept getting mail for college campus tours for the parent’s and I wanted to go to the one in June. We should have went to that date but we couldn’t because of my mom’s schedule. We didn’t even get started on my Voc Rehab stuff until mid-August. I signed up for my classes and met my advisor, within three days later we realized that I wasn’t going to have my books or an aide for my first week of classes so my cousin was comfortable with filling in. The day I was supposed to start my classes, my mom had been on the phone with my advisor and switched all of my classes to online. That’s when my real depression started. After that, I’m surprised that I didn’t grow a hatred for music, since I didn’t I learned to distance myself from everybody else.

What still gets me though, that September I started emailing a student I had seen on that campus trip, I thought if I could get him to give me some advice about my situation and learn more about the program I’d feel better about it. He was really nice and was honest with me. He told me if I really wanted to learn about music then I’d like doing this career wise. At that point, nothing was really working with me and I quit my studies in October. Before all this, I knew I was in a wheelchair and did things with my feet, but I didn’t fully accept myself. I don’t normally like getting help from anybody, trust me both my papaw and dad are bad at this still! I also don’t like modified tables and things of that nature, I feel as though I can push myself to deal with it. I’ve used random chairs as my desks way too many times. I think I signed myself because I needed to do it and thought it sounded the most interesting! I didn’t care for anything else. I think my mom was right, maybe I just wanted to go to college to join all of the parties.

Now I have a new sense of myself as a person and have a new respect for musicians. I have also added quite a few artists and bands onto my long list on my iPod and Spotify. They say things happen for a reason. Maybe I needed to have this little downfall to rise back up who knows. I do know that even though my music preferences have advanced far from everything that I could imagine, that I never want to set foot or in this case “wheels” into a recording studio. I don’t think I’d ever feel the same as I did that first time. I might feel ashamed or sad and then I’d have to explain why I feel like that to a stranger. So that is my entire reason why I’d never go back but I might apologize to the director for leading him on like that, but it’s funny though he was one of the only people who ever had faith of me being in the program. So I’d probably tell him “thank you” for that part. Yeah, now I’m done.