My first three decades, I was a Wisconsinite. I was born in Madison, went to college in Stevens Point. On my thirty-first birthday, we climbed in to a big moving van and departed for a completely different part of the country. Since then, I’ve lived in Florida for six years and North Carolina for two. Through it all, America’s Dairyland still feels like home.

For a long time–and still now, I suppose–I was especially attuned to any mention of Wisconsin in the pop culture. It’s the natural convergence of state pride and pop culture obsession. This included to a special feeling of warmth when Harold Ramis and Bill Murray debated the relative toughness of going in and out of Wisconsin in Stripes and caused me to watch That 70’s Show with a greater level of affection than it probably merited. And it naturally extended to occasional influence of radio playlist selections, where even a glancing reference to Wisconsin in the lyrics earned a song a few extra spins. I would even make a rare venture in 90FM’s metal/punk stacks to retrieve a record called Wisconsin, even though the band’s name presented unique challenge in adhering to the era’s label-driven urging “When you play it, say it.”

The walk-five-mile-uphill-in-the-snow-both-ways, it-was-different-in-the-olden-day detail to this is to note how much harder it was to find these songs back then. There was no handy search in a person (or station) iTunes library to find the songs with Wisconsin in the title, there was no YouTube search engine providing unexpected bounty, there was no electronic apparatus for hunting through lyrics. We just knew and noticed and shared with one another. Which explains why, despite the popularity of Dead Milkmen at the station (“Punk Rock Girl” was released during the first weeks of my freshman year, which helped immeasurably), I didn’t know about their song “Living in Wisconsin” until many years later. We had much of their music, but nothing as obscure as the cassette release which included this song. This may be a good thing. I can only speculate on how much this song would have been overplayed had we access to it.

It’s better that I found the song much later for another reason. The sentiment of the song–“I’m living in Wisconsin/But only in my mind”–is better for a displaced Badger-backer than someone residing in the heart of the state.

Dead Milkmen, “Living in Wisconsin”

(Disclaimer: Usually I make a point of using a song from my own collection, but some interesting household computer challenges made that more difficult this week. So I should credit the other Interweb denizen who originally made sure this song had an electronic home. Also, while there are plenty of Dead Milkmen releases readily available for purchase, but this song doesn’t seem to be upon any of them. Of course, if anyone with do authority to so asks me to remove the song, I will gladly comply.)