What if this wasn't just for a year?

When I told my roommate that I had already lived in Austria on two separate occasions, and was coming back for a third time, the first question she asked was, "Would you ever consider staying here long-term?"

It's a valid question, and one, I'll admit, I've given a lot of thought over the past year or so. Because I am getting into the meat of my twenties, and more and more of my friends are meeting people they could see themselves settling down with. And so the question of location takes on added importance.

Doing it Aurally

I like music for the same reason I like sports -- as a form of collectivism and communal experience. There's nothing inherently exciting to me about banging on a piece of metal in a regular fashion, or blowing gusts of wind through a wooden cylinder; I enjoy listening to music for its ability to connect me to (sub)cultures. As I youngster, I was embarrassed about living in a middle-class household in a working-class district, so I got into punk. Maybe I couldn't be a throwaway youth -- someone who has decided to burn out rather than grow up because earning a good living is not really possible -- but I could listen to their music and get angry just the same. I feel as if I can bore my way into the minds of a specific group of people by listening to the music they do. For example, I named my blog last summer "Crack in Chelsea" because I would always listen to a certain Dropkick Murphys song on my way home from work, "as I put on my most bad-ass face and dodge through the crowds at Grand Central Station," as I wrote at the time. I was a New York bad-ass, and bad-ass New Yorkers listen to hard-edged skinhead music. So I did the same.

That's why I knew that my early-2000s American rock collection was not going to cut it in Austria. I tried listening to almost everything in the U-Bahn during my first few weeks here (rap, ska, indie, punk, folk), but it always felt a bit wrong, as if I was disappearing into an American world between my ears and letting Austria pass me by. Interestingly enough, international pop hits like Airplanes seemed to work well, but I can't ignore my American socialization, which tells me that those songs can only be occasional guilty pleasures, long enough for them to serve as a sustainable solution to my dilemma. Since I still wanted to listen to music on the trains, I needed to amp up my German-speaking music collection. Here's some of what I've found so far: