![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
15 Albums Meme
Jan and Haddayr tagged me, so you all get to suffer.
Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. Get the idea now? Good.
1. The Mary Poppins Soundtrack, Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, et. al. I could have picked any of the Disney LPs, but this is one that I still love, so. Someone gave our family all that stuff when I was young, and it all had my name on it because I was the oldest. "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" taught me to love absurdity.
2. "I Love Trash" b/w "Goin' For a Ride," Oscar the Grouch & Anything People. Later in life I had friends who referred to me as Eeyore, but my true role model was always Oscar.
3. The Muppet Movie Soundtrack. The Muppets were my first fandom, I guess. I don't think I've seen this movie more than once or twice but I was obsessed with the LP. I did all the voices and dreamed of becoming a Muppeteer. Once I brought this in to my 4th grade class, and years later classmates remembered that I had sung along with every word of it.
4. One of Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits Albums. No idea which one, but if I made an effort I could probably name all the songs on it. Mom was a Manilow fan, and this was how us kids spent a lot of our afternoons, listening to her LP of this. It had big hits like "Copacabana" and less-big-hits like "Bermuda Triangle," but we listened to it over and over until I, at least, had it memorized.
5. One of K-Tel's compilation cassettes. I wish I could remember it and find it, but it had Eddie Rabbit's "I Love a Rainy Night," which I thought was the coolest song ever, and something by Rick Springfield, maybe. This marked my first, tentative, movement towards something like rock and roll, which having been raised on AM pop and hippie church music was still a bit frightening to me as a kid.
6. The Police, Ghost in the Machine. I've written about the Police elsewhere, but as an adolescent it was the darker parts of this cassette, about death wishes and alienation, that first hooked me into music in a serious way; first it was because I felt like Sting was describing my life, later it was because I began really listening to the lyrics and the parts -- more Andy's weird un-guitary guitar parts and Stewart's frenetic-but-precise drumming than Sting's I-could-play-that bass parts. I was a band kid, so I was sort of a musician, but I had never really been serious about listening before this.
7. R.E.M., Document. First album by any band that I bought the day it came out. My friend Steve Lang had introduced me to R.E.M., as well as The Cure and Talking Heads; those three and the Police were my favorite bands for a long while to come. Document is where R.E.M. plateaued, in my opinion, but they didn't start down the cliff until sometime on Green. I memorized "It's the End of the World As We Know It" but my favorite song was probably "Oddfellows Local 151" because it was odd and so was I. It was twenty years before I realized that "Strange" was a cover of a Wire song. R.E.M. set me on the indie/college rock track that was my primary musical course for the next decade.
8. Prince, Sign O' the Times. The first album on this list that I still unreservedly love. I'd grown up in the Cities, so I knew Prince, but I knew Radio Prince, which meant "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" and "Raspberry Beret." I knew he was supposed to be a weirdo pervert but not why, really. Sign was not only my true introduction to Prince, but retroactively to James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament, Hendrix, Dorothy Parker, Gospel, and Autogynephilia. There are moments on any Prince album that are transcendent, but this one kills me back to front. My favorite stretch starts with "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" -- with its out-of-body guitar solo and its "One, two, one, whoo!" -- winds through the spare gospel harmony of "The Cross," and climaxes in the What-a-fucking-party! glee of the live "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night." Sheila E.'s Transmississippirap kills me every time.
9. The Beatles, The Beatles (AKA The White Album). Reasonable people disagree on this, but early Beatles does little for me; at the time it may have been groundbreaking, but nowadays it mostly comes across as shallow pop. This album, though, made me laugh ("Rocky Raccoon"), rocked me ("Helter Skelter"), and probably most memorably, scared the shit out of me. I'm thinking of "Revolution 9," which was unlike anything I'd heard to that point and which, listening to it after dark in the basement of my friend Joe's parents' house, had my Catholicism-warped mind half-convinced that some kind of devil shit was going on. Yeah, I was a sheltered kid. But without that track I don't think I'd have been open to, say, Can, or Tom Waits, or the Liars down the road.
10. A Tribe Called Quest, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. I could add more of the Native Tongues posse here, but this is the album that hooked into me the most. Fuzzy-funky with a lazy, almost nerdy feel to the lyrics, and some hilarious shit going on in nearly every song. "I Left My Wallet In El Segundo" is still one of my favorite tracks ever; in some ways it maps onto DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's "Parents Just Don't Understand," but instead of being bland and cliched and subtly moralistic it's surreal and spacious and funky. Sometimes I think that, if not for these guys and De La Soul and the Beastie Boys, hip-hop might have missed me altogether.
11. Fishbone, Truth and Soul. Like I said, I was a band kid; one of the things I took from that experience was a love of brass. '80s pop has much to answer for in what it did to the saxophone, but as far as I'm concerned a nice balanced horn section is an automatic win. That, and this album, made me an easy target for ska in all its forms, but most especially aggressive, fast, and slightly unbalanced. Without Fishbone I may not have learned to love the Mighty Mighty Bosstones or the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, and I damn sure wouldn't have bothered to check out the Skatalites. Besides, I can't listen to "Bonin' In the Boneyard" and be in a bad mood.
12. Old 97s, Wreck Your Life. I was aware of the Old 97s through my friends in the band Junior High, who opened for them in Madison and semi-worshipped them. The first two songs of this album remind me why. It's Ken Bethea's guitar work, yeah, and it's the young-n-earnest of Murry and Rhett's vocals, with their hearts breaking on just about every note, but really it's the lyrics. "Victoria": "This is the story of Victoria's heart/ You might think it's stupid, but I still think it's art./ She lost her lover to an accident at sea/ She pushed him overboard and ended up with me." Then there's murder ballad "The Other Shoe": "One old brown shoe falls in slow motion/ and the bedsprings hover right above your head/ as bedsprings do when you're beneath them/ someone else just climbed into your bed." At the time, I loved this album despite the twang, but it was the first step on a long road to re-discovering country.
13. Johnny Cash, Live at Folsom Prison and San Quentin. Even though I was one of those kids who claimed to like all music "except country and classical," I knew Johnny Cash was cool. I had loved "A Boy Named Sue" as a kid, and, hell, the Beastie Boys had sampled him. When I made the decision to Learn Country Music, Johnny was the first place I went. At first it was the mean edge of songs like "Cocaine Blues" that I loved, but Johnny's sincerity got through to me, too, even on songs that I might otherwise sneer at, like "Greystone Chapel." And of course there's "Jackson" with June, still one of the greatest duets of all time. Like many converts, I became a fanatic and an evangelist, and Johnny led me to other artists; it took a while before I could admit to myself liking, say, Dolly Parton or the Dixie Chicks, but after Johnny it was inevitable.
14. Sarah Harmer, You Were Here. It gets tricky, at this point in the list, to pick out individual albums, because perspective begins to break down. But I don't think I really came out of my indie-kid phase, in terms of that being my primary musical focus, until I learned to love singer-songwriters. My vitriol at Paul Westerberg's early solo stuff, for example, was as much motivated by feeling like he had abandoned some "gang" ethos as it was dislike for his new direction. But partly because of the Man in Black, and maybe because I was learning to be OK with the fact that I was myself a loner, I was becoming more attracted to solo artists. So this could have been Neko Case or Kelly Hogan or Lyle Lovett or Dwight Yoakam, but it's Harmer, because this CD didn't leave my car stereo for months, literally.
15. The New Pornographers, Electric Version. Nowadays when it comes to the indie music I am, by most yardsticks, out of touch. I have never heard a song by Death Cab for Cutie or Arcade Fire, I don't know the Killers from the Strokes, and I didn't even realize the Mendoza Line had broken up. Much like with fiction, I've decided I'm more interested in understanding where things are coming from than in keeping track of the new to figure out where they're going. It pleases me, though, that I have at least one hip "new" band to devote myself to, one that changes keys and time signatures like it changes lanes, one that loves harmony and smart lyrics and doesn't make much of an effort to explain itself. I'm speaking of the band as an entity, which is weird, but their super-group sound is oddly more unified than that of many conventional bands, where the members feel more of a need to assert their own musical thoughts without the release valve of a solo career. The New Pornographers turn the cliche of the rock-star ego on its head in a satisfying way.
Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. Get the idea now? Good.
1. The Mary Poppins Soundtrack, Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, et. al. I could have picked any of the Disney LPs, but this is one that I still love, so. Someone gave our family all that stuff when I was young, and it all had my name on it because I was the oldest. "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" taught me to love absurdity.
2. "I Love Trash" b/w "Goin' For a Ride," Oscar the Grouch & Anything People. Later in life I had friends who referred to me as Eeyore, but my true role model was always Oscar.
3. The Muppet Movie Soundtrack. The Muppets were my first fandom, I guess. I don't think I've seen this movie more than once or twice but I was obsessed with the LP. I did all the voices and dreamed of becoming a Muppeteer. Once I brought this in to my 4th grade class, and years later classmates remembered that I had sung along with every word of it.
4. One of Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits Albums. No idea which one, but if I made an effort I could probably name all the songs on it. Mom was a Manilow fan, and this was how us kids spent a lot of our afternoons, listening to her LP of this. It had big hits like "Copacabana" and less-big-hits like "Bermuda Triangle," but we listened to it over and over until I, at least, had it memorized.
5. One of K-Tel's compilation cassettes. I wish I could remember it and find it, but it had Eddie Rabbit's "I Love a Rainy Night," which I thought was the coolest song ever, and something by Rick Springfield, maybe. This marked my first, tentative, movement towards something like rock and roll, which having been raised on AM pop and hippie church music was still a bit frightening to me as a kid.
6. The Police, Ghost in the Machine. I've written about the Police elsewhere, but as an adolescent it was the darker parts of this cassette, about death wishes and alienation, that first hooked me into music in a serious way; first it was because I felt like Sting was describing my life, later it was because I began really listening to the lyrics and the parts -- more Andy's weird un-guitary guitar parts and Stewart's frenetic-but-precise drumming than Sting's I-could-play-that bass parts. I was a band kid, so I was sort of a musician, but I had never really been serious about listening before this.
7. R.E.M., Document. First album by any band that I bought the day it came out. My friend Steve Lang had introduced me to R.E.M., as well as The Cure and Talking Heads; those three and the Police were my favorite bands for a long while to come. Document is where R.E.M. plateaued, in my opinion, but they didn't start down the cliff until sometime on Green. I memorized "It's the End of the World As We Know It" but my favorite song was probably "Oddfellows Local 151" because it was odd and so was I. It was twenty years before I realized that "Strange" was a cover of a Wire song. R.E.M. set me on the indie/college rock track that was my primary musical course for the next decade.
8. Prince, Sign O' the Times. The first album on this list that I still unreservedly love. I'd grown up in the Cities, so I knew Prince, but I knew Radio Prince, which meant "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" and "Raspberry Beret." I knew he was supposed to be a weirdo pervert but not why, really. Sign was not only my true introduction to Prince, but retroactively to James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament, Hendrix, Dorothy Parker, Gospel, and Autogynephilia. There are moments on any Prince album that are transcendent, but this one kills me back to front. My favorite stretch starts with "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" -- with its out-of-body guitar solo and its "One, two, one, whoo!" -- winds through the spare gospel harmony of "The Cross," and climaxes in the What-a-fucking-party! glee of the live "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night." Sheila E.'s Transmississippirap kills me every time.
9. The Beatles, The Beatles (AKA The White Album). Reasonable people disagree on this, but early Beatles does little for me; at the time it may have been groundbreaking, but nowadays it mostly comes across as shallow pop. This album, though, made me laugh ("Rocky Raccoon"), rocked me ("Helter Skelter"), and probably most memorably, scared the shit out of me. I'm thinking of "Revolution 9," which was unlike anything I'd heard to that point and which, listening to it after dark in the basement of my friend Joe's parents' house, had my Catholicism-warped mind half-convinced that some kind of devil shit was going on. Yeah, I was a sheltered kid. But without that track I don't think I'd have been open to, say, Can, or Tom Waits, or the Liars down the road.
10. A Tribe Called Quest, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. I could add more of the Native Tongues posse here, but this is the album that hooked into me the most. Fuzzy-funky with a lazy, almost nerdy feel to the lyrics, and some hilarious shit going on in nearly every song. "I Left My Wallet In El Segundo" is still one of my favorite tracks ever; in some ways it maps onto DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's "Parents Just Don't Understand," but instead of being bland and cliched and subtly moralistic it's surreal and spacious and funky. Sometimes I think that, if not for these guys and De La Soul and the Beastie Boys, hip-hop might have missed me altogether.
11. Fishbone, Truth and Soul. Like I said, I was a band kid; one of the things I took from that experience was a love of brass. '80s pop has much to answer for in what it did to the saxophone, but as far as I'm concerned a nice balanced horn section is an automatic win. That, and this album, made me an easy target for ska in all its forms, but most especially aggressive, fast, and slightly unbalanced. Without Fishbone I may not have learned to love the Mighty Mighty Bosstones or the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, and I damn sure wouldn't have bothered to check out the Skatalites. Besides, I can't listen to "Bonin' In the Boneyard" and be in a bad mood.
12. Old 97s, Wreck Your Life. I was aware of the Old 97s through my friends in the band Junior High, who opened for them in Madison and semi-worshipped them. The first two songs of this album remind me why. It's Ken Bethea's guitar work, yeah, and it's the young-n-earnest of Murry and Rhett's vocals, with their hearts breaking on just about every note, but really it's the lyrics. "Victoria": "This is the story of Victoria's heart/ You might think it's stupid, but I still think it's art./ She lost her lover to an accident at sea/ She pushed him overboard and ended up with me." Then there's murder ballad "The Other Shoe": "One old brown shoe falls in slow motion/ and the bedsprings hover right above your head/ as bedsprings do when you're beneath them/ someone else just climbed into your bed." At the time, I loved this album despite the twang, but it was the first step on a long road to re-discovering country.
13. Johnny Cash, Live at Folsom Prison and San Quentin. Even though I was one of those kids who claimed to like all music "except country and classical," I knew Johnny Cash was cool. I had loved "A Boy Named Sue" as a kid, and, hell, the Beastie Boys had sampled him. When I made the decision to Learn Country Music, Johnny was the first place I went. At first it was the mean edge of songs like "Cocaine Blues" that I loved, but Johnny's sincerity got through to me, too, even on songs that I might otherwise sneer at, like "Greystone Chapel." And of course there's "Jackson" with June, still one of the greatest duets of all time. Like many converts, I became a fanatic and an evangelist, and Johnny led me to other artists; it took a while before I could admit to myself liking, say, Dolly Parton or the Dixie Chicks, but after Johnny it was inevitable.
14. Sarah Harmer, You Were Here. It gets tricky, at this point in the list, to pick out individual albums, because perspective begins to break down. But I don't think I really came out of my indie-kid phase, in terms of that being my primary musical focus, until I learned to love singer-songwriters. My vitriol at Paul Westerberg's early solo stuff, for example, was as much motivated by feeling like he had abandoned some "gang" ethos as it was dislike for his new direction. But partly because of the Man in Black, and maybe because I was learning to be OK with the fact that I was myself a loner, I was becoming more attracted to solo artists. So this could have been Neko Case or Kelly Hogan or Lyle Lovett or Dwight Yoakam, but it's Harmer, because this CD didn't leave my car stereo for months, literally.
15. The New Pornographers, Electric Version. Nowadays when it comes to the indie music I am, by most yardsticks, out of touch. I have never heard a song by Death Cab for Cutie or Arcade Fire, I don't know the Killers from the Strokes, and I didn't even realize the Mendoza Line had broken up. Much like with fiction, I've decided I'm more interested in understanding where things are coming from than in keeping track of the new to figure out where they're going. It pleases me, though, that I have at least one hip "new" band to devote myself to, one that changes keys and time signatures like it changes lanes, one that loves harmony and smart lyrics and doesn't make much of an effort to explain itself. I'm speaking of the band as an entity, which is weird, but their super-group sound is oddly more unified than that of many conventional bands, where the members feel more of a need to assert their own musical thoughts without the release valve of a solo career. The New Pornographers turn the cliche of the rock-star ego on its head in a satisfying way.
no subject
no subject
no subject
I too am a sucker for a brass section (but don't like particularly care for saxophone by itself.) Boston had a great ska scene in the early nineties and I get exhausted just thinking how many hours I spent dancing at shows.
Different album, but to me the New Pornographers song Letter From an Occupant is pure kick-ass pop perfection.
no subject
I was listening to some Coltrane recently and thinking that it's really the saxophone's similarity to the human voice that made all those lazy '80s producers exploit it the way they did, and how it's actually much better when it's not used to stand in for vocals at all.
I love that New Pornographers song, too. I can't ever pick a favorite from them because it's usually the last one I heard. Although I suspect it's either "All For Swinging You Around" or "Miss Teen Wordpower." Or maybe "Myriad Harbour." AH I CAN'T DECIDE.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject