Over the past ten weeks, I’ve been looking at the old AbsolutePunk best-of lists and reevaluating my end of the year lists from some of the prime years in our music scene. But what happened before 2005? Over the next few weeks, I’d like to explore the very early years of AbsolutePunk and the music that helped shape my life.

It’s 1998. I’m 15. Every school dance is playing “Gettin Jiggy Wit It,” and boy bands are just beginning their reign. My clothes are too big. My musical taste is mostly made up of whatever my friends have been listening to. There was a grunge phase in middle school. I listened to a lot of Nirvana. A friend’s brother showed us Dookie. There was a Snoop Dog, Boyz II Men, and Salt-N-Peppa thing that happened in elementary school. I don’t remember it that much, but I remember a friend sharing some cassettes with me. And I was a child of the ’80s. I liked Michael Jackson. I had the Batman soundtrack by Prince. I listened to the music my dad would play on the record player every Sunday morning: The Beatles, Elvis, Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver. But my musical identity? The music that I called my own? The obsession with needing to listen to something every single second of the day? At this point in time, it didn’t exist. My closest friends were listening to Metallica and Pantera. I liked it well enough, but it never quite connected with me. It felt like the Nautica shirts I was wearing at the time, a costume I wore because everyone else was. This period, between 1997 and 1998, is where everything changed.