[This post, like the last one, was written as an assignment for the WordPress Writing 101 Project http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_assignment/writing-101-day-three/%5D

Music was not a big part of my childhood. I don’t know whether it was some puritanical family legacy, or the simple fact that we were poor and a record-player would have been a highly dispensable luxury. Until my teens, my exposure to music was thus restricted to Christmas carols and the theme tunes of TV shows.

From an early age I abhorred the inherent snobbery of classical music, but found most popular music of the time facile and its transatlantic twang disconnected from the reality of my everyday life. The first music I really liked was, therefore, punk.

But I cannot say that there is a single punk song that I would rank in my top three. I liked the do-it-yourself ethos, the celebration of the diversity and eccentricity of the ordinary, the thrilling rush of youthful rebellion, the gushing unashamed outburst of teenage angst.

Punk stirred me, at times amused me, but it did not move me.

The first artists who really moved me were the post-punk generation of the early 1980s. I think I heard Billy Bragg’s A New England the first time it was played on the radio. It was something different—sung stolidly in a vernacular accent, simply to the accompaniment of a single guitar, punk-like in its plucking of angry chords, but also wistful and folksy. Bragg sang of a less cynical world—at once nostalgic and utopian, in which love and politics blurred into one another and held equal importance—but firmly rooted in the real world in which I lived.

I felt something of the same frisson the first time I heard the Smiths, again, I think, the first time they were played on the radio. Morrissey’s voice was different—vernacular, like Bragg’s, but also self-deprecatory in its eccentricity—the lyrics told of something at once universal, peculiar, and earthily, eerily close to home… Marr’s guitar soars, flows and cascades in the background, moving like some new genetically-modified species of bird… clashing with yet somehow perfectly complementing Morrissey’s at once self-indulgent and self-effacing clumsy vocal acrobatics and the plaintive yet comical magic of the songs. The Smiths brought humor into pop for me, where Bragg had brought love.

Both of these experiences date from 1983. There was a brief period between say 1976 and 1986, when I could claim that I was ‘seriously into music’. But nothing I heard would truly impress or move me for the next twenty years. Until I first heard Eminem…

I do not know whether I first experienced Eminem’s work pumping out of a car stuck in a traffic-jam or on my then stepson’s computer, after we’d both had a row with his mum. The sound stunned me, the sharp unapologetically savage spite of the lyrics shocked me, the embittered wit of the outré rhymes amused me…

Eminem’s songs are personal in the way a grudge is. His heteronyms lay more layers of himself bare than is probably wise… Very different from Morrissey’s peek-a-boo masks, flirting with, but ultimately avoiding, intimacy, or Billy Bragg’s bleeding salt-of-the-earth heart.

I wonder what it is about these three singer-songwriters that has so specially touched me. Perhaps it is because they are all men who have shed the macho image of the rock-star to reveal something deeper about themselves, however shocking or simpering, without in the slightest relinquishing their masculinity… Perhaps it is because they all write and sing in an unabashedly vernacular style, clearly rooted in their local history and personal psycho-political battles… and for this they are somehow universal voices that speak to us all.