AK, thank you very much much for sharing that story of your family with us. It was really beautifully written and made me think a lot about my own family and my own memories as well. It sounds like you had an amazing father who loved you very much, and I'm sure he would be very very proud to be responsible for bringing something into your life that became so central and important to you. We can all only hope that we have the chance to share moments like this with our children in our own lifetimes.
When we first came to Canada, the guys my Dad went to school with were really into music and so they gave him some records to introduce him to the culture or whathaveyou. It was a wide array for the few LPs we got, I guess they were trying to cover a lot of genres and make for a smooth transition too lol. They were the first records ever in the house and I listened to all but the Neil Diamond repeatedly. I???m still going to list it though because it was part of the whole experience. 1. Kenny Rogers ??? The Singles 2. Elton John ??? Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 3. Abba ??? Super Trouper 4. N Diamond ??? You Don???t Bring Me Flowers 5. Bee Gees ??? Best Of
These were constantly playing at these guys??? apartments when we went over. I would be the only kid usually, so I???d hang out by the stereo while the in-their-20s folks had their conversations. 6. Supertramp ??? Breakfast in America 7. Bob Marley and The Wailers - Survival 8. Bob Marley and The Wailers ??? Babylon By Bus 9. Rolling Stones ??? Some Girls 10. Steely Dan ??? Aja
I still love this movie and this soundtrack (except for Hopelessly Devoted to You). Laugh all you want, but I think these songs taught me to appreciate arrangement. 11. Grease soundtrack
These two were like contraband ??? kinda dirty and we knew we weren???t supposed to be listening to it. A big part of that can???t wait to be a teenager impatience. I asked an older kid neighbour what throwdown meant and what S&M and B&D were. He answered clearly and honestly and then sent me on my way. 12. Rick James ??? Throwin Down 13. Frank Zappa - Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch
The rest 14. Duran Duran ??? s/t 15. PE ??? It Takes A Nation 16. De La Soul ??? 3 Feet High 17. NWA ??? Straight Outta Compton 18. A Franklin ??? Greatest Hits 19. Bad Brains ??? Rock For Light 20. Burning Spear ??? Garvey???s Ghost 21. Velvet Underground ??? VU & Nico 22. The Gruesomes ??? Tyrants of Teen Trash 23. Sonic Youth ??? Burning Spear 24. B Holiday ??? Billie Holidays??? Greatest Hits 25. The Clash ??? London Calling
I gotta mention Planet Rock. It was being passed around school on cassette and I thought I was having some sort of heart attack the first time I heard it. I will never forget standing in front of the stereo and listening to it, rewinding it and playing it again, rewinding it and playing it again, rewinding it and playing it again....
- the beatles - white album. i listened to this in the womb and kicked harder.
- van morrison - astral weeks. i used to listen to this record with my dad and just feel cold, trapped and restless. could not handle it. still almost can't.
- ornette coleman - the shape of jazz to come. i remember the first time jazz made sense to me, i was getting ready for a baseball game and my parents were playing this. i just remember hearing a whole bunch of scattershot horns and cymbals and then all of a sudden they congealed. i think my exact words were "what happened there? in the music?"
- the temptin temptations. i remember obviously feeling like this was from another time, a time that didn't exist anymore. it helped me understand my mother, to see her singing along, to think of her as a child like me.
- ice-t - the iceberg. "freedom of speech - just watch what you say." there was some kind of direct logic in that record, the perfect subversive cartoonism to taunt a 7 year old.
- motley crue - shout at the devil. i don't remember the music on this. i don't even think i had it. but the costumes were incredible. i bought a nikki sixx wallet.
- prince & the NPG - diamonds and pearls. the hologram cover, the ridiculous over the top sexual aphorisms. i learned every word to "get off." i really liked the idea of prince as some kind of master of his domain, with the new power generation as his servants. i imagined that he slept with tigers.
- michael jackson - bad. "smooth criminal" with its weird semi-chanted chorus i didn't understand, "liberian girl"... there was a certain foreign quality to this record, something i couldn't quite wrap my mind around. but it was so direct, so pop, so digestible.
- nirvana - nevermind. this was the first music i chose, even if it chose me. cannot underestimate the roads this record opened up.
- geto boys - we can't be stopped. this record actually shocked me. i thought i knew it all as a scrappy little fucker, but no. the lyrics on this record were seriously warped.
- sonic youth - dirty. i learned to play guitar along with this record. the tunings, the open passages, the bad lyrics. it all made sense at the time. i felt like i was really onto something liking this.
- KMD - mr. hood. this was like my rap version of sonic youth. loose and up to chance and singular. and most assuredly not pop. no one in my classes even knew what this was. which made me feel so cool.
- eric dolphy - out to lunch. another record of my dad's that just hit me at the right time. a lot of free space, a lot of chiming, a purposeful meandering. put sonic youth in perspective.
- velvet underground & nico. going back, listening to what came before, this one was very profound. the music sounded almost situational, very performed. but it was so sonically captivating and the songs were so plain. absolute mindfuck.
- television - marquee moon. almost the opposite of VU - this record sounded like some guys who just got together and jammed it. obviously that is not totally the case, but the risk, the buildups, the brinks that they would scurry to with their songs, were so inspiring to me. just that a band could hone themselves to that point, the amount of focus. they really connected.
- anthology of american folk music. not only did this record give me a grip on the function of music as more than expression or entertainment, the songs... the f*cking songs are absolutely unreal. the way they are preserved, presented and revered - i felt like i had found something truly kindred here.
- the meters. oh, ok so this is why rap sounds like that? nice. as far as i can see it, this is still a rock record.
- curtis live. so much presence. a very real tempering of feeling, style, substance and purity. joy and pain. an incredibly subtle, complex recording, with such resonance. humbling.
- kraftwerk - the man-machine. after the beatles, the single greatest pop group to exist. what these guys did with sound, language, image, and their combined communicative power is, to this day, the most apt commentary on technological progress that the world has seen. and the fact that they could say what they said while making simple, beautiful pop truly blew my mind.
- boredoms - super ??. this is more of a live show that changed the way i perceive sound and ritual, but the record itself is pretty good approximation to cross with my memory.
- bernard pamegiani - de natura sonorum. the poetics of pure sound, composed for maximum response. art as music, an expression of a non-specific yet completely tangible idea, requiring rapt attention. i think too much, and this record tells me why.
- musique centrafrique / chants gbaya. the first ethnic recording that hit me, and still the deepest. a pure loss of consciousness in music. almost too raw to listen to.
- ali farka toure - red. so otherworldly, yet so familiar. the crackling gourd-drum and the relentless fluidity of the guitar were just too epic to stand. and then the vocals came in. i remember thinking this music must have come from a very real place. it did.
- animal collective - sung tongs. some kids my age, from my circle, in my world, doing something completely transcendent and personal. this record should have made more of a difference in my life than it did. a record that makes me regret. but still a huge place marker, and a reminder.
- tsege mariam gebru - spielt eignen kompositzien. quite simply, the most beautiful and unique record i have ever heard. solo piano from ethiopia, released in germany with the help of haile selassie. totally irreplaceable. life is simple.
I grew up in the heyday of the 45....my first 45 purchase was the Four Seasons "Sherry" but I really spent a lot of time in my early years playing my very Italian step-Grandfather's(Joe/Guiseppe) records like "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" by Hank Ballard, "Shout Shout(Knock Yourself Out) by Ernie Maresca and "Everybody Likes The Cha Cha Cha" by Sam Cooke......those are the ones I remember best.
Here's my Top Ten.....maybe will add 15 more when I get some time.
1) Smothers Brothers "Live At The Purple Onion" - I was living in a brownstone in Brooklyn and the girl who lived upstairs bought me a copy of Rubber Soul for my birthday in Dec. '65......I brought it back to the store and exchanged it for a copy of the Smothers Brothers LP....I had no interest in the Beatles but the girl (Ronnie) was the president of the local Beatles Fan Club and was pissed at me for not keeping the LP.
2) Blue Cheer "Vincebus Eruptum" - The first LP I ever bought on my own. I was staying with my Grandmother and I bought this at Red's Toy Store on Utica Avenue. She wouldn't let me play it in the house so I spent a good part of the summer sitting on her front porch blasting this over and over again....I thought "The Parchment Farm" was where they grew paper.
3) Beatles "Rubber Soul" Guilt must have lead me to this purchase whan I was 12 years old...still to this day my favorite Beatles LP.....Thanks Ronnie!!
4) Skillet & Leroy - Grandpa Joe had these hid away in his closet with his Redd Foxx and Nipsey Russell records...whenever I was left at his home alone I'd dig them out and play them....laughed my ass off.....today I don't even find them remotely funny.
5 & 6) Led Zeppelin's first two LP's - This was the first concert I ever attended. I was in the 7th grade and their show at MSG was the first time I ever smoked dope....I still smoke but I don't listen to much Zep.
7) Bobby Fuller Four "I Fought The Law" - Billy Quackenbush and I were walking to the Deli to see if someone would buy us some beer. On the way we found a box sitting on top of a garbage can....it was a 25 count box of the said LP....being the pseudo-Hippies that we were, we made fun of their "square" clothes and played frisbee with every last copy....some only after we drew long hair and beards on the covers....later when I started to seriously collect records I realized we had played Frisbee to the tune of $2K or more.
8) Jimi Hendrix "Smash Hits" - This is what I listened to the first time I dropped acid...over and over again....at one point a green monster came through a big hole in my bedroom wall and I had to take the music off and walk around the block a few times scared shitless.
9) Frank Zappa & The Mothers "Mothermania" - "Yeah, I knew everydamnword to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" and most of this LP.....sitting im my friend Steven's room smoking dope and hoping his older sister would come hang out with us.
10) Thirteenth Floor Elevaators "Psychedelic Sounds" - By the time I got into H.S. I had a definite identity crisis.....I was pretty good at sports so I knew all the jocks....I was into music so I knew all the music heads and I'd take any drug set in front of me that didn't require me using a needle. I met a guy from across town who was a FREAK in every way you can imagine.....he was a drummer and would come jam with me and my friends....first time we went to his house he put on the Elevators LP and it changed my life.
Skillet & Leroy - Grandpa Joe had these hid away in his closet with his Redd Foxx and Nipsey Russell records...whenever I was left at his home alone I'd dig them out and play them....laughed my ass off.....today I don't even find them remotely funny.
You too, huh?
My dad had their Two Or Three Times A Day album - the one with Skillet coming home and finding his wife in bed with Leroy, on the cover - and I thought it was funny when I was a kid, but only because as a grade-schooler, I wasn't used to people openly cussing and talking about sex.
I came back to it a little later, somewhere between junior high and high school, and it sounded like old stale vaudeville jokes "updated" with curse words. Cheech & Chong were funnier than that.
This thread is really good. I feel like everyone on this entire board should post in here and it should get a sticky and stay at the top of the page. Please pardon the incoherence, non-chronological order and generally scattershot nature of what appears below, but I???ve always had an incredibly difficult time writing about music in any sort of cogent way. It just seems like trying to put lightening in a bottle.
1. Sam and Dave Double Dynamite/Beatles Rubber Soul: These are my foundational musical experiences. My father didn???t leave me with much but an anger problem and a genetic predisposition to sprout hair from unfortunate parts of my body, but he was a fanatic soul fan and in particular a Stax lover. We used to dance around our little apartment to this record until I collapsed in fits of laughter and exhaustion. My mom loves the Beatles and the Stones. The former are, I think, space aliens gifted who were gifted with an uncanny ability to make PERFECT music. I brought five albums with me when I went to Africa, all of which make this list (except for Cal Tjader???s ???Soul Whiffenpoof?????? who knows, I was on A LOT of drugs) and I just remember walking around Dakar dazed on weak pot and baking in the sun listening to ???I???m Looking Through You??? and thinking that life couldn???t possibly get any better, and really, it didn???t.
2. Television Marquee Moon/Clash London Calling: I file these under ???being a teenager and realizing you???re not nearly as cool as you think you are???. I discovered both of these in my stepdad???s extensive collection, at a time when I was pretty much listening to nothing but hip-hop and Bob Marley. London Calling I latched on to immediately, because it felt bad and good and dangerous and everything I wished I was. Marquee Moon just confused the shit out of me. I basically knew that I wasn???t ready for it at all, but that it was undoubtedly great and amazing. In the intervening years, I have fucked and cried and laughed and read Prosser and Keaton on Torts while playing this record over and over again and I think it???s in a way the most ???advanced??? music I???ve ever heard but never feels sterile or overthought. I cannot figure out how human beings made this record. File under: records I have listened to while watching the sun go down on Rape Donkey???s roof top and ingesting painkillers.
3. Run DMC Raising Hell/Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet: Raising Hell united pretty much everyone I knew across race and class lines as THE ALBUM. I remember going with like 15 other kids to purchase this en masse at Princeton Record Exchange. Fear of a Black Planet was like everything I loved about Raising Hell (and all other hip-hop) turned up to a fever pitch and it felt exhilarating every time I put it in my walkman. Around the time this tape came out, the divide had begun among my friends between hiphop kids and metalheads. Up until this time it was pretty cool to like both kinds of music. I remember my best friend telling me that he liked some metal album better, maybe Anthrax, and I told him that he had shitty embarrassing taste in music and was just bugging so hard. He was a year older than me, a big Irish kid from Queens, he punched me in the stomach and we were not friends anymore (incidentally, this was not the only time that my opinions about music got me punched in the stomach: in 7th grade [?] me and Tremayne F. had an argument on the playground about who was better, Third Bass or K Solo, I was right, but he was already 200 pounds and I got my ass kicked and threw up on the Four Square court).
4. Guns and Roses Appetite for Destruction: Pure adolescent sex, drugs, and bad attitude rolled up into some of the most amazingly written well played records ever recorded. I know it???s not considered cool to love this record in certain circles, and that???s fine, you can listen to Pavement talk about isosceles triangles, and I will listen to Axl wail about whiskey and heroin and, as the saying goes ???I???ll see you at the finish line???.
5. The BUMS Watch The Bumrush (red cassette single, available in the greater Princeton area only) and Koncepts Project Ambershine: Nothing is more transformative and awe-inspiring than the first couple of flesh and blood friends of yours who manage to make good credible music. I thought my friends in the BUMS, and later on the one Johnny Paycheck himself were like magicians, because here they were, people I hung with and smoked blunts with and yet they had somehow managed to make actual SONGS and ALBUMS and to me this was no less remarkable than if they had been able to fly or shoot lasers out of their fingertips.
6. Van Morrison Astral Weeks/Zombies Odyssey/Love Forever Changes and Oracle/Velvets S/T: Out of necessity, maturity, or what-have-you, I???m clean and sober these days, but there was a time when nothing pleased me more than the ingestion of a fine opiate or six followed by four or five hours of narcotized, ethereal bliss. These four heartbreakingly beautiful records were the mainstay soundtrack of my junkie days. I???ll never regret, and always remember fondly (longingly?) the hours I wasted away, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling listening to these records and smiling to myself and saying over and over again ???god this is beautiful???. The moral of this story, such as there is one, is not that drugs are bad (or good), but that when I got sober and put these albums back in rotation, I discovered that the magic was in the records not in the hydrocodone and not a single one of them goes more than two or three days without finding its way on to my turntable.
7. Fela Kuti No Agreement/Curtis Mayfield Sweet Exorcist: An itinerant friend of mine left these in my possession on a stopover in his endless and mysterious travels (along with a big box of sunglasses and scarves??). By the time he reclaimed them they had changed me completely and I had fallen hopelessly in love with the music of both men. If Marquee Moon is the most ???advanced??? music I have ever heard, No Agreement and the rest of Fela???s discography is the most ???perfect??? music I???ve ever listened to, meaning that it if I were able to articulate what I personally think music should sound like, it would sound like the music that Fela made and I feel like he is an extension of my brain, and I of his.
8. Smif and Wesson /Redman Dare Iz A Darkside/ Raekwon Only Built for Cuban Linx: My weedspot triumvirate, and the soundtrack to a city that exists only in the hazy corners of my brain these days. I miss passing out flyers, Tunnel, Palladium, Esso???s, Vinyl, El Flamingo, Sticky Mike???s, Stretch and Bobbito, Polo and Northface, all day all night craze in ???The Ville??? (a mythical place that no longer exists). These records were in constant rotation as I made NYC my own and left my first mark in the clubs and concert halls and started to live my dreams.
9. Jorge Ben A Tabua D???Esmerelda: I got curious about Brazilian music at a time when I haughtily, in all of my post-college self-impressed narcissism had decided that I knew all that there ever was to know about music (yeah, I know, that???s beyond ridiculous and couldn???t have been further from the truth, but what do you want, I was ???full of piss and vinegar??? as my grandfather would say). When I heard this record, I knew immediately that I knew nothing, and the discovery of my own na??vet?? was the greatest and most exciting discovery that I have ever made, because I at that moment I realized that I would be excited and amazed by music forever, and that being jaded is the most pathetic and defeatist thing that a person can be. I have no idea what Jorge is saying with his words, but this music makes me want to craugh, which is the simultaneous act of laughing and crying.
10. Common Resurrection/Main Source Breaking Atoms/ Organized Konfusion Extinction Agenda: I love all kinds of hiphop, from 40 Water to Quasimoto to the Beastie Boys, but I am also an unapologetic backpacker, who spent a long
period of my life, walking around hunched over with Sony MDR headphones perched on my dome and a backpack filled with tapes. These albums are the reason why. I???ve still never heard smarter, more soulful music that spoke to ME the way these three records did and I could care less if it???s out of fashion, or regionalist, or pass?? or what the f-ck have you to ride for these records above all others. I don???t care because music should be something that you FEEL and politics, and trends, and pitchfork and soulstrut and the New York Times should never override that feeling. Like Kool Keith said ???I just need what I need???.
My dad had their Two Or Three Times A Day album - the one with Skillet coming home and finding his wife in bed with Leroy, on the cover -
That is the EXACT Lp I was referencing.....Leroy is headed out the window!!
Naw, The Burglar In The Bedroom is the one with SKILLET headed out the window...Two Or Three Times A Day is the one where a scared-looking Skillet is pointing a gun straight at Leroy (the fat one), who is shirtless, in bed with Skillet's wife, and has a shit-eating grin on his face!!
This thread is really good. I feel like everyone on this entire board should post in here and it should get a sticky and stay at the top of the page. Please pardon the incoherence, non-chronological order and generally scattershot nature of what appears below, but I???ve always had an incredibly difficult time writing about music in any sort of cogent way. It just seems like trying to put lightening in a bottle.
1. Sam and Dave Double Dynamite/Beatles Rubber Soul: These are my foundational musical experiences. My father didn???t leave me with much but an anger problem and a genetic predisposition to sprout hair from unfortunate parts of my body, but he was a fanatic soul fan and in particular a Stax lover. We used to dance around our little apartment to this record until I collapsed in fits of laughter and exhaustion. My mom loves the Beatles and the Stones. The former are, I think, space aliens gifted who were gifted with an uncanny ability to make PERFECT music. I brought five albums with me when I went to Africa, all of which make this list (except for Cal Tjader???s ???Soul Whiffenpoof?????? who knows, I was on A LOT of drugs) and I just remember walking around Dakar dazed on weak pot and baking in the sun listening to ???I???m Looking Through You??? and thinking that life couldn???t possibly get any better, and really, it didn???t.
2. Television Marquee Moon/Clash London Calling: I file these under ???being a teenager and realizing you???re not nearly as cool as you think you are???. I discovered both of these in my stepdad???s extensive collection, at a time when I was pretty much listening to nothing but hip-hop and Bob Marley. London Calling I latched on to immediately, because it felt bad and good and dangerous and everything I wished I was. Marquee Moon just confused the shit out of me. I basically knew that I wasn???t ready for it at all, but that it was undoubtedly great and amazing. In the intervening years, I have fucked and cried and laughed and read Prosser and Keaton on Torts while playing this record over and over again and I think it???s in a way the most ???advanced??? music I???ve ever heard but never feels sterile or overthought. I cannot figure out how human beings made this record. File under: records I have listened to while watching the sun go down on Rape Donkey???s roof top and ingesting painkillers.
3. Run DMC Raising Hell/Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet: Raising Hell united pretty much everyone I knew across race and class lines as THE ALBUM. I remember going with like 15 other kids to purchase this en masse at Princeton Record Exchange. Fear of a Black Planet was like everything I loved about Raising Hell (and all other hip-hop) turned up to a fever pitch and it felt exhilarating every time I put it in my walkman. Around the time this tape came out, the divide had begun among my friends between hiphop kids and metalheads. Up until this time it was pretty cool to like both kinds of music. I remember my best friend telling me that he liked some metal album better, maybe Anthrax, and I told him that he had shitty embarrassing taste in music and was just bugging so hard. He was a year older than me, a big Irish kid from Queens, he punched me in the stomach and we were not friends anymore (incidentally, this was not the only time that my opinions about music got me punched in the stomach: in 7th grade [?] me and Tremayne F. had an argument on the playground about who was better, Third Bass or K Solo, I was right, but he was already 200 pounds and I got my ass kicked and threw up on the Four Square court).
4. Guns and Roses Appetite for Destruction: Pure adolescent sex, drugs, and bad attitude rolled up into some of the most amazingly written well played records ever recorded. I know it???s not considered cool to love this record in certain circles, and that???s fine, you can listen to Pavement talk about isosceles triangles, and I will listen to Axl wail about whiskey and heroin and, as the saying goes ???I???ll see you at the finish line???.
5. The BUMS Watch The Bumrush (red cassette single, available in the greater Princeton area only) and Koncepts Project Ambershine: Nothing is more transformative and awe-inspiring than the first couple of flesh and blood friends of yours who manage to make good credible music. I thought my friends in the BUMS, and later on the one Johnny Paycheck himself were like magicians, because here they were, people I hung with and smoked blunts with and yet they had somehow managed to make actual SONGS and ALBUMS and to me this was no less remarkable than if they had been able to fly or shoot lasers out of their fingertips.
6. Van Morrison Astral Weeks/Zombies Odyssey/Love Forever Changes and Oracle/Velvets S/T: Out of necessity, maturity, or what-have-you, I???m clean and sober these days, but there was a time when nothing pleased me more than the ingestion of a fine opiate or six followed by four or five hours of narcotized, ethereal bliss. These four heartbreakingly beautiful records were the mainstay soundtrack of my junkie days. I???ll never regret, and always remember fondly (longingly?) the hours I wasted away, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling listening to these records and smiling to myself and saying over and over again ???god this is beautiful???. The moral of this story, such as there is one, is not that drugs are bad (or good), but that when I got sober and put these albums back in rotation, I discovered that the magic was in the records not in the hydrocodone and not a single one of them goes more than two or three days without finding its way on to my turntable.
7. Fela Kuti No Agreement/Curtis Mayfield Sweet Exorcist: An itinerant friend of mine left these in my possession on a stopover in his endless and mysterious travels (along with a big box of sunglasses and scarves??). By the time he reclaimed them they had changed me completely and I had fallen hopelessly in love with the music of both men. If Marquee Moon is the most ???advanced??? music I have ever heard, No Agreement and the rest of Fela???s discography is the most ???perfect??? music I???ve ever listened to, meaning that it if I were able to articulate what I personally think music should sound like, it would sound like the music that Fela made and I feel like he is an extension of my brain, and I of his.
8. Smif and Wesson /Redman Dare Iz A Darkside/ Raekwon Only Built for Cuban Linx: My weedspot triumvirate, and the soundtrack to a city that exists only in the hazy corners of my brain these days. I miss passing out flyers, Tunnel, Palladium, Esso???s, Vinyl, El Flamingo, Sticky Mike???s, Stretch and Bobbito, Polo and Northface, all day all night craze in ???The Ville??? (a mythical place that no longer exists). These records were in constant rotation as I made NYC my own and left my first mark in the clubs and concert halls and started to live my dreams.
9. Jorge Ben A Tabua D???Esmerelda: I got curious about Brazilian music at a time when I haughtily, in all of my post-college self-impressed narcissism had decided that I knew all that there ever was to know about music (yeah, I know, that???s beyond ridiculous and couldn???t have been further from the truth, but what do you want, I was ???full of piss and vinegar??? as my grandfather would say). When I heard this record, I knew immediately that I knew nothing, and the discovery of my own na??vet?? was the greatest and most exciting discovery that I have ever made, because I at that moment I realized that I would be excited and amazed by music forever, and that being jaded is the most pathetic and defeatist thing that a person can be. I have no idea what Jorge is saying with his words, but this music makes me want to craugh, which is the simultaneous act of laughing and crying.
10. Common Resurrection/Main Source Breaking Atoms/ Organized Konfusion Extinction Agenda: I love all kinds of hiphop, from 40 Water to Quasimoto to the Beastie Boys, but I am also an unapologetic backpacker, who s
pent a long period of my life, walking around hunched over with Sony MDR headphones perched on my dome and a backpack filled with tapes. These albums are the reason why. I???ve still never heard smarter, more soulful music that spoke to ME the way these three records did and I could care less if it???s out of fashion, or regionalist, or pass?? or what the f-ck have you to ride for these records above all others. I don???t care because music should be something that you FEEL and politics, and trends, and pitchfork and soulstrut and the New York Times should never override that feeling. Like Kool Keith said ???I just need what I need???.
GREAT POST. I would read at least 300 pages like this. More stories please. I wanna hear more.
My dad had their Two Or Three Times A Day album - the one with Skillet coming home and finding his wife in bed with Leroy, on the cover -
That is the EXACT Lp I was referencing.....Leroy is headed out the window!!
Naw, The Burglar In The Bedroom is the one with SKILLET headed out the window...Two Or Three Times A Day is the one where a scared-looking Skillet is pointing a gun straight at Leroy (the fat one), who is shirtless, in bed with Skillet's wife, and has a shit-eating grin on his face!!
Here it is: (POSSIBLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK)[/b]
You're right....he had that one too.....and the one by Aunt Esther.
1. The Commodores Three Tiems a Lady: This is the first song I remember listening to, on the radio or otherwise. My mom had this really old Jaguar XKE "convertible" (where the top just comes off) with the choke, and I don't know to this day whether she had an 8-track or I just heard it on the radio all the time. But anytime I hear this song, I think of her.
2. Michael Jackson Thriller: I saved my own money to buy this--I got it from K-Mart! It had the white cassette holder around it, and I begged my mom to cut it open with some scissors in the car.
3. Guns N Roses Appetite For Destruction: This dude Ernie got the tape from someone, and we listened to it endlessly...the first album I'd ever listened to that had profanity.
4. Faith No More The Real Thing: I was nieve enough to believe that 1) FNM had originally wrote 'War Pigs' and 2) guitarists made different sounds by using different parts of the string. Didn't know much about much for a long time.
5. Ice Cube AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, N.W.A.'s Efil4zaggin, Ice Cube Death Certificate and Dr. Dre The Chronic: Unfuckwithable. This informed my California State of Mind through the early 90's.
6. Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions..." and Fear of a Black Planet: The Bomb Squad were absolute geniuses at this point in their career. Being mixed in a very white area made P.E. seem all the more dangerous, interesting and compelling.
7. Mr. Bungle Mr. Bungle: Sharky, I'm sorry I stole this from you sophomore year. You were a good dude--you didn't deserve that. If I ever see you again, I'm buying you a beer and a shot. This album was so many things rolled into one...LOVE IS A FIST!
8. Faith No More {i]Angel Dust[/i]: "In regards to my usage of the drug...it modified my personality! To the extent that I was highly irritable...I was like a CRACK HITLER!" Thank you, Mister Patton, for saying what needed to be said.
9. Radiohead "Street Spirit": This song still creeps me out--the chord progression and the lyrics made me feel like the apocalypse is outside my window. Radiohead always creep me out, like sonic prophets spinning doom out of shopping centers.
10. Tortoise Millions Now Living...: Straight-up ill band, way beyond my meager expectations of what "post-rock" might be. A complete journey; 'Beyond the Banks and Rivers' as a funeral dirge.
11. DJ Shadow Endtroducing...: Totally blew my mind as to what a record could sound like. It still does. I worked at a little music store and was supposed to order for someone else, but bought it for myself instead. Sorry J****y.
12. Nurse With Wound To The Tiny Man... and Can Ege Bamyasi: This was the beginning of my real musical growth. There was/is a small record shop called Vinyl Revolution in Monterey, CA, where the owner (Bob) would let me hang out and listen to whatever. Sometimes I would buy stuff without previewing, just for the rush of taking it home and (hopefully) having my mind blown. NWW is a tough band to dissect, but fun in certain settings (like light reading, for example). Can is straight up greatness, and I picked it because I liked the cover.
1) The Jackson 5 - ABC: The first album that me and my sister would listen to everyday on our Bugs Bunny portable turntable. We would lip-sync the whole joint. To this day Micheal vocals sound like he was possessed by an old man.
2) Curtis Mayfield - Superfly: My pops would play this even before we listened to ABC. The soundscape and falsetto vocal were locked into my dna.
3) Marvin Gaye - Lets Get It On: another of my fathers staples in the house. Dude had an above average stereo that we couldnt touch until we were old enuff. I would stare at the album cover for a long ass time without really knowing what was goin on. Another dna record.
4) Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 - The Message: We as kids knew the single and partied to Scorpio, but I fell for the R&B joker on there. The Message was like str8 lookin in the miiror. But we didnt have rats,roaches,piss, and broken glass in our building like that.
5) Micheal Jackson - Off The Wall: My first personal album that i got along w/ my own turntable. The emotions on this album shaped/inluenced my ideas of what I thought was love and sex at the time. MJ talmbout being "so cavalier". I looked the meaning up in the dictionary and realized that selfishness can hurt a relationship. Even if dude was "asexual" to the public, Dont Stop Till You Get Enough" was about f*ckin and as a 10 year old i could only imagine what that shit was like.....and to that tempo.
6) Sade - Diamond Life: Even if Promise is my fav, when I first heard the entire album, I was actually kinda ashamed for liking this "smooth jazz" shit at a time I was well into Hip Hop and wasnt "suppossed" to get w/ this brillant UK hybrid of genres. My best friends mom had it and I sat down w/ it. I felt like i was being hugged by a ghost. On top of lookin at Sade's other-worldly beauty. That definitely helped it go down easier. Hooked ever since.
7) The Jungle Brothers - Straight Out The Jungle: after hearing mad promos/single on Red Alert Show, I copped the Cassette when it came out. They were recalling older breaks,wore Banana Republic(like i did), and became another step towards an "alternative" Hip Hop vibe that was still street yet on some Afika Bambaataa, next level steez, w/out isolating the simpletons.
8) Public Enemy - Yo! Bum Rush The Show!: single handedly got me checkin my my fathers libary and pickin up Franz Fanon/Pan-Africanism/Message To Black Man/David Walker's Appeal/etc. Here was an mc that had an old school cadence and voice in a time when new voices/styles where becoming more popular. Forget it.
9) Guy - Guy: Someone finally made an R&B album that aging B-Girls can fusk w/. Shit was ridiculous. Gap Band vocals over recogizable/chopped James Brown breaks. This shit opened the door. Even if Bobby Brown set shit off, this was a full album of the new Uptown flavor. Spoke to me and all my peers like crazy
10) Earth Wind & Fire - Gratitude: my pops told me-"put on Reasons and u got her" Are all live albums supposed to be this good. Years later I would get to play this shit out and realize its power.
11) Mandrill - Composite Truth: yet another Daddy LP. Now EWF had that costume thang going on , but these dude on the back cover looked like the real multi-culti NYC i was seein in NYC - exaggerated. Moroccan Nights as a kid had me open. My pops would play it and id stare at the cover and ask him what a mandrill is. Seeing Coffee's intense face had me kinda shook. Dude look hard as hell along w/ the rest of 'em.
My tastes as a teenager weren't nearly as high-brow as most of the lists here, but here's mine, including some musical skeletons
Rotary Connection S/T: My mom was a big fan of Minnie Ripperton. This one was passed down to me. The Best Of Ritchie Valens: Some gas station impulse buy tape that my dad bought for me. I enjoyed it. Veruca Salt American Thighs Lou Rawls Natural Man: My mother and my aunt, as young teenagers, had a stint as housesitters for Lou and his hippie wife's house (second? third?). Apparently, both sat in on the session and were included amongst the "live" cheering. Onyx Bacdafuckup: I stole this tape during an elementary school field trip in Univeral City. Why were cuss words so thrilling at that age? Extreme Championship Wrestling comp: Yeah, I was into that. So what? Primus Sailing The Seas Of Cheese: FONK! Public Enemy It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back: I remember that one of the kids next door taught me what a "basehead" was. I thought the video was funny. Hole Live Through This James Brown Live At The Apollo: My dad was the first who hipped me to him. He went to a concert in '65 at the Great Western Forum. Ever since he has played this in the car often. He also played... Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Deja Vu.
Fukkkkk... I just wrote out one long ass post (Just over an hour) on this shit and it got fucked over. I even had pics of me as a kid with records involved GGGrrrrrr
Frank Zappa - Grand Wazoo Sitting in the car as a kid, singing along with all the funny voices in "cleetus awreetus-awrightus" with my dad & brother, and just thinking "blessed relief" was the best thing ever, cloud-free summer day soundtrack to paradise type stuff, so nostalgic.
Culture - International herb/Johnny Osbourne - Warrior My dad had a cassette with these two albums on either side, and I used to walk around in elementary school listening to these just thinking it was so great.
Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones Also a record my dad used to play and I remember "In the neighbourhood" and how idyllic that neighbourhood sounded, haha. I used to wish I could go there. The accordion/pump organ on "Just another sucker on the vine", and the like mystical "Troubles braids" wich is when I remember really trying to visualize and imagine the music on another level for the first time.
Curtis Mayfield - Roots I found this at a fleamarket when I was ca 13, and I went home and played "beautiful brother of mine" and "now your gone" on loop for days.
Donny Hathaway - Live This was one of the tapes always lying in the glove compartment of the car, so we used to play this whenever we went on road trips when I was a kid. I especially remember trips home from my grandfathers house in the middle of the night and the perfect atmospere this record created. A staple of my childhood
Midlake - The Trials of van Occupanther This came out during my last year of high school and I would just tune out and listen to this, perfect album.
A Tribe Called Quest - The Love Movement One of the first hip-hop albums I bought, when I was 12, I still remember that day, and I went home and listened to no other album for months. It got me really excited about hiphop and so many lyrics from this record are etched into my brain.
Redman - Doc's da Name 2000 Another one of the early hiphop albums I got, and I thought redman was the funniest dude ever. I had this in my walkman going down to the trains to check out graffiti and me and my friends would just shout lines from this record at eachother in school hallways etc
Erykah Badu - Mamas gun I remember my older cousin had Baduizm wich would be on when we went to her house sometimes and when mamas gun came out I bought it and listened to it all the time, doing homework, when i went to sleep etc.
Hellacopters - High Visibility This was pretty big and made me seek out mc5, the stooges, radio birdman etc and I always played guitar along to these albums
Common - Like water for chocolate/Reflection Eternal - Train of thought Around the time I got these my dad was in a car accident where both his legs were completely crushed and his best friend died, and they kinda helped me through that period
Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced/Electric Ladyland/Axis/Smash Hits/Etc Jimi Hendrix was always on the turntable at home since I can't even remember, and is probably what shaped my whole view of music in general. Or something like that.
Patrice Rushen - Straight from the heart This made me get into the more disco/modern soul/80's side of things, and subsequently listening to more of her stuff just made me think she was a genius musician.
Quasimoto - The Unseen This record really felt to my young mind "this is what hiphop should sound like" and made me start making beats and really searching for samples and want everything to sound dirty and sp-1200:y in that little dude way we've all come to know and love here at soulstrut. but it is an amazing album.
ps. really looking forward to james post in this thread.
This thread is really good. I feel like everyone on this entire board should post in here and it should get a sticky and stay at the top of the page.
I'm loving it too. I'd like to post, but for some reason, when I think of music that changed my life, I can't think of particular albums...it was more like ENTIRE GENRES that shaped my thinking. Not sure if I can narrow it down to certain records, but if I can, I'll be right in there, telling my story...
This thread is really good. I feel like everyone on this entire board should post in here and it should get a sticky and stay at the top of the page.
I'm loving it too. I'd like to post, but for some reason, when I think of music that changed my life, I can't think of particular albums...it was more like ENTIRE GENRES that shaped my thinking. Not sure if I can narrow it down to certain records, but if I can, I'll be right in there, telling my story...
You need to give it a try dude. It doesn't have to be definitive or anything, it's just some scribbling on the internet. I am also paging the following people to this thread:
Paycheck, Sween, The Donger, Cosmo, Faux Rillz, Herm, Jacob Wizzle, Dr. Manhattin, P-ro, Doc McCoy, Senior, Soul On Ice, Luck, etc. Everyone really, except for Hemol.
1) The Jackson 5 - ABC: The first album that me and my sister would listen to everyday on our Bugs Bunny portable turntable. We would lip-sync the whole joint. To this day Micheal vocals sound like he was possessed by an old man.
2) Curtis Mayfield - Superfly: My pops would play this even before we listened to ABC. The soundscape and falsetto vocal were locked into my dna.
3) Marvin Gaye - Lets Get It On: another of my fathers staples in the house. Dude had an above average stereo that we couldnt touch until we were old enuff. I would stare at the album cover for a long ass time without really knowing what was goin on. Another dna record.
4) Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 - The Message: We as kids knew the single and partied to Scorpio, but I fell for the R&B joker on there. The Message was like str8 lookin in the miiror. But we didnt have rats,roaches,piss, and broken glass in our building like that.
5) Micheal Jackson - Off The Wall: My first personal album that i got along w/ my own turntable. The emotions on this album shaped/inluenced my ideas of what I thought was love and sex at the time. MJ talmbout being "so cavalier". I looked the meaning up in the dictionary and realized that selfishness can hurt a relationship. Even if dude was "asexual" to the public, Dont Stop Till You Get Enough" was about f*ckin and as a 10 year old i could only imagine what that shit was like.....and to that tempo.
6) Sade - Diamond Life: Even if Promise is my fav, when I first heard the entire album, I was actually kinda ashamed for liking this "smooth jazz" shit at a time I was well into Hip Hop and wasnt "suppossed" to get w/ this brillant UK hybrid of genres. My best friends mom had it and I sat down w/ it. I felt like i was being hugged by a ghost. On top of lookin at Sade's other-worldly beauty. That definitely helped it go down easier. Hooked ever since.
7) The Jungle Brothers - Straight Out The Jungle: after hearing mad promos/single on Red Alert Show, I copped the Cassette when it came out. They were recalling older breaks,wore Banana Republic(like i did), and became another step towards an "alternative" Hip Hop vibe that was still street yet on some Afika Bambaataa, next level steez, w/out isolating the simpletons.
8) Public Enemy - Yo! Bum Rush The Show!: single handedly got me checkin my my fathers libary and pickin up Franz Fanon/Pan-Africanism/Message To Black Man/David Walker's Appeal/etc. Here was an mc that had an old school cadence and voice in a time when new voices/styles where becoming more popular. Forget it.
9) Guy - Guy: Someone finally made an R&B album that aging B-Girls can fusk w/. Shit was ridiculous. Gap Band vocals over recogizable/chopped James Brown breaks. This shit opened the door. Even if Bobby Brown set shit off, this was a full album of the new Uptown flavor. Spoke to me and all my peers like crazy
10) Earth Wind & Fire - Gratitude: my pops told me-"put on Reasons and u got her" Are all live albums supposed to be this good. Years later I would get to play this shit out and realize its power.
11) Mandrill - Composite Truth: yet another Daddy LP. Now EWF had that costume thang going on , but these dude on the back cover looked like the real multi-culti NYC i was seein in NYC - exaggerated. Moroccan Nights as a kid had me open. My pops would play it and id stare at the cover and ask him what a mandrill is. Seeing Coffee's intense face had me kinda shook. Dude look hard as hell along w/ the rest of 'em.
ill finish tmmw
12) The Jackson 5 - Get It Together: I had to jack this from my cousins and gotdamn it just blew my mind. They had finally embraced some psych-steez. Weird ass sounds and edits and track overlaps. Its Too Late To Change The Time.......talmbout the future is bleak. Black Sci-Fi Soul.
13) Kraftwerk - The Man Machine. I didnt hear much from this album as a kid, but when i heard the joint that The Fearless Four used for Rockin' It. Mad connections were made. The whole robot steez is still ahead of its time. Funk not Funk. They were the doors that opened my interest in Electronica in the 90's.
14) Quincy Jones - The Dude: One summer, the year it was out, my friend Rima from my 6th grade class would call me almost everyday, in the early afternoon. We would play the album over the phone to each other, and talk about how incredible it was. The following year in the 7th grade she became my girlfriend.
15) Tim Dog - Penecillan On Wax: Ultramagnetic to the dark side. This album set shit off. Arguably the best Ultra album. One of the first times that attitude outweighed technical skill. f*ckin masterpiece.
16) Terrence Trent D'Arby - The World According To....: after Thriller there was bound to be a clones out there, and dude came close but on his own steez. Dude had the live shit, could dance, sing fast or slow. Soundtrack to my freshmen year in college.
17) Tracy Chapman - S/T: Critics and the industry loved her. I was part of that impressionable college demographic, even though i copped in high school(sr yr.) She got a little Black radio love but not enuff. Shit was mad foul how she was froze out by the Black media. Muthafuckas spent their time talmbout "Beige Music" artists, while this sister was right there in the mix w/ social commentary. Ya'll fuckers interviewin Chuck D, but slept on Chapman. If she was "pretty" cats woulda had a different story. This album made/makes me cry.
18) A Tribe Called Quest - Peoples Instinctive Travels And The Paths of Rhythm: Damn, what do u get when u mix Str8 Out The Jungle and 3 Feet High And Rising.....this shit! I rocked this all the time. All the time. There are still rhymes on this album from Q-Tip that I havent fully digested. Dudes improved on two very important albums. That's crazy.
19) Ultimate Breaks and Etc. - I didnt even own these joints but my boy did. And we would run thru them a realize that so-and-so used it for their routines from the mix-tapes. "Oh shit, dude used this at Tyra's birthday party 2 years ago!" I later got to cop them and play a gang of them out within my Funk sets. So invaluable.
20) Wynton Marsalis - Majesty Of The Blues: I was workin' at this restaurant during the summer in between college. The staff could play CDs. Since we were in the Lincoln Center area, most of it was Classical,Jazz, or Light Rock. One of the waiters was this snobby Brother who sang Opera. And when he controlled the stereo he'd play his shit, and walk around all stuffy. Whatever. But dude was a little theatened by me. Dude was a hatter cause I was on some Hip Hop shit yet I could talk about other shit. Once i had the chance to pop in The Majesty Of the Blues (which everyone enjoyed), dude ripped that shit out of the cd tray. Just mad cause im stylin. Shit was Too-Black for his ass.
21) Prince and The Revolution - Around The World In A Day. Dude was on some Beatles steez. How the hell do u follow up Purple Rain? Alot of folks were hattin cuase he didnt deliver a part 2. I thought it was brilliant. Pop Life had some Black Radio, but after that the album just got pushed to the side by the regular folks. The Ladder is written by his father like Purple Rain was. And Temptation was like some Sex in Hell on Acid shit. I once took a tab and listened. Oh my...
22) Maxwell - Urban Hang Suite: BET had a show during the day that played a whole gang of artists that werent str8 contemporary R&B,Hip Hop Soul, or Hip Hip. from like 11am till like 1pm. This is where you'd get to see Omar. At the time Sade was on hiatus and the Neo-Soul thang started to bubble. Well here comes this cat who gets the groove right. Modern yet warm. Clear falettos and a fashion sense that wasnt Black Leather R&B gaudy. Till The Cops Come Knockin had me open. Then dude just disappeared. I found the album months before the radio started play
ing Acsension. This shit was SADE the lost album. At the time i had gotten over my rookie mistakes at my new gig, and I played the hell outta this shit. Got a whole alot of LES lovin as well. Good times.
23) Steel Pulse - Earth Crisis: i had to attend a summer program before freshman year in college. My roomate Mike"Boogie" couldnt sleep w/out music on. Dude either played this album or some Farakhan speeches. Ay first I couldnt stand it. Music all night - i understand a little something to help you nod out, but at 4am???? Over time i learned that album. I had minimal knowledge of Steel Pulse's catalog, and from there I ended up becoming a weedhead/growing dreads(w/ the fade)/and expanding my Reggae game.
24) Playgrounds-Children of Zoom/Free To Be You And Me-Various Artists: Both are Nursery school staples. Zoom was funky as shit and FTBUAM was accompanied by a TV special that featured the classic Rosey Greir - Its Alright To Cry and the Roberta Flack/MJ collabo - When I Grow Up, which isnt on the album. On my first trip to the TV Museum - my first request was to see that tv special. 2 great Children joints.
25) Ultramagnetic MC's - Critical Beatdown: Bury me w/ this album. Str8 up. Waste ur energy talmbout Rakim, Kane,Kool G. Rap, and all they rest of the same muthafuckas that get kicked around....YAWN. This has never been cloned - never. Cats have tried, but no cigar. In the "Golden Age" this still stands out as its own animal. The precursor to the Alt-vibe/Abstract/NativeToungue/etc. Forward production and lyrics.
Kiss: Destroyer Tom Tom Club Coldcut: What??s That Noise? Mano Negra: Puta??s Fever Clash: Sandinista Public Enemy: It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back Beastie Boys: Paul??s Boutique De La Soul: 3 Feet High And Rising Sly & The Family Stone: Fresh Curtis Mayfield: America Today Funkadelic: One Nation Under A Groove Fishbone: The Reality Of My Surroundings Massive Attack: Blue Lines Praxis: Transmutation The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy: Hypocrisity Is The Greatest Luxury Miles Davis: On The Corner John Coltrane: A Love Supreme Bj??rk: Debut Tricky: Maxinquaye DJ Shadow: Endtroducing Beck: Odeley Radiohead: Ok Computer Gnarls Barkley: St Elsewhere MIA: Kala The Good, The Bad And The Queen
No chronological order, I'm just listing them as they came to mind:
1) Blue Break Beats[/b]
I know this compilation probably looks quaint now...a collection of jazz-funk tunes from the Blue Note catalog marketed towards the hip-hop generation. One summer I was working in a record store where all my coworkers were bigger jazz and hip-hop fans than me. Both of those musics were played constantly (and sold the most). I never got it with the hip-hop, but one day somebody played this comp and something clicked. Prior to this, I never really "got it" with jazz, either...it seemed too aimless and deliberate and without a center. Like something I was SUPPOSED to like, but somehow never got the hang of. I thought jazz-funk was even worse, because it was neither here nor there...just some older cats trying to make some money w/third-rate Kool & the Gang covers. And it wasn't like it was my first time hearing this CD, either. But because I'd just started getting into early-'70s funk by bands like Black Heat and Charles Wright's Watts Band, jazz-funk sorta started making sense. And I eventually made my way to liking real jazz that WASN'T funky. I'm still not the BIGGEST fan of that music, but I own more jazz records now than I did before the summer of '93. And, yes, they got played...
2) Moby Grape[/b]
Another one from that same summer...I'd just graduated from college, but hadn't gotten that Great Journalism Gig In The Sky that I was looking for...I was also trying to avoid a recent ex who I'd seen walking around with her new boyfriend (not that she was checking for me!)...I had just discovered the first Moby Grape elpee, and that was how I got through the rest of the year. I was a huge fan of 1960's garage-rock (more on this later)...although Moby Grape weren't garage, they are revered by fans of that music because they weren't a "jam band" like the other groups from San Francisco ca. 1967-70; you could slip "Omaha" in a set with the bands on the Nuggets anthology and it wouldn't sound out of place...we had two copies of their first LP at the store (WITHOUT the guy flipping off the camera on the cover) and I snagged one for myself...another one I didn't get right off, but when I did, I hunted down every last Grape album that existed(people forget that Moby Grape were popular in their day, and between that and being on Columbia and Reprise, their elpees weren't that hard to find...I don't know about now, but in the '90s I still saw their records floating around for under $9).
3) The Jackson Five - Looking Through The Windows[/b]
My first record ever (not counting a couple of kiddie records), which I got as a childhood birthday gift. I never really got into children's music when I was a child (never mind that the two youngest members of the J5 were practically kids themselves)...I'd go to friends' houses to play, and I'd be entranced by the soul sounds that their teenaged brothers and sisters would be playing, the stuff I saw and heard on Soul Train. When I found out (last week!) that Ebony and Jet started archiving old issues on the Net, the early-seventies issues took me back to that time. This is what got me started...
4) MC 5 - Kick Out The Jams[/b] 5) Flamin' Groovies - Flamingo[/b]
When I was in junior high in the early eighties, I thought these albums WERE punk-rock! And it turns out I wasn't far off-base...I had gotten bored with soul music around this time, because the disco thing kinda smoothed everything out. I turned to rock because it represented FREEDOM, to me at that age...plus, the rock and rollers looked like they were having FUN, which I did not get from the current soul scene. I'd see Chic on Soul Train in their impeccably pressed suits and skirts, lookin' all cosmopolitan and precious...but then I'd open a rock magazine and I'd see Mick Jagger or David Johansen just cuttin' up for the cameras like they were on holiday! I'm like, "F*ck this disco shit, I gotta get over to the ROCK side!" Now the next question is: how would a young black kid in South Chicago know enough to buy records by the MC 5 and the Flamin' Groovies ten years after they came out? Well, back then I devoured all sorts of rock magazines - Musican and Trouser Press were faves, but I was really into Creem, that was the one I followed every month. And around this time, punk and new wave were coming on strong and I liked what I'd heard. The MC 5 and the Groovies were always being played up as bands who were "punk before it was called punk"...I saw the MC 5's album for maybe $3 in a comic book shop, bought it, and played it constantly...saw the Flamin' Groovies elpee in a Goldblatt's bargain bin, bought it, and now I know that album as well as my family (or the back of my hand). All based on what some rock critics said!!! Believe it or not, back then I did know a few black folks who were into rock, but they mainly knew about what was played on the radio, like the Police and Genesis, both of whom I liked back then (not so much now). On the other hand, relative obscurities like the MC 5 and the Flamin' Groovies was stuff I shared with me, myself and I - didn't meet anybody else into their stuff until college...
MAYBE MORE LATER...AND I PROMISE I WON'T WRITE AS MUCH NEXT TIME!!!!
not chronological or well-organized and cheating a bit with a 45 and a 12", but here's the first part of my list (i'll try to get around to the rest later):
the slits - typical girls 12"
i remember reading about the slits a little bit in some article about the sex pistols. i found this 12" at my local record store and was struck by the cover. i noticed there was a cover of "i heard it through the grapevine", which i thought was a strange choice, so i bought it. this record opened my mind way up as a teenager. the feeling of youthful not giving a F*ck about anything and the way it carried into their musical decisions and not just some posturing was a revelation to me at the time. i would smoke grass and listen to this shit incessantly -- they seemed like communal cartoon witches to me, just taking what they could and pumping out something that seemed so magical and effortless.
de la soul - is dead dj magic mike - back to haunt you
my family moved to rural pennsylvania from jacksonville florida when my father retired from the navy. i was 13 years old at the time. at age 14, i was listening to de la soul is dead over and over in my walkman every single day. this was the first kind of concept album i'd ever spent time with and i loved the music and was amazed at the construction of the album and how it all fit together. that year i took a train back to jacksonville to spend a week and a half with my best friend from my time there. i listened to the de la soul tape the whole way there. when i got to his house, i was so excited to share this discovery, especially since he had always been more into music than i was and was the first person i remember hearing rap from. i played the tape for him and he looked at me like i was out of my mind. he put on this dj magic mike tape and let me know that this was music that really hit and that the de la record was just weird and weak. throughout the rest of my time there, we spent our mornings drinking vodka and listening to the d.o.c., gucci crew, and poison clan while his mom was at work and taking the bus to the mall before she arrived home. i realized on this trip that my friend and i were already growing apart. i also realized how narrow my idea of rap music was, despite thinking that the de la album was so unique and apart from a lot of other rap i knew.
beatles - revolver
unlike a large percentage of people in the western world of a certain age, i did not grow up with my folks playing the beatles non-stop. my folks liked them alright, but were simply not at all into music. they owned maybe a handful of records but that was it. still, i heard this music so much throughout childhood being at friends houses that it is probably the single biggest influence on how i look at music/sound.
suicide - s/t nico - chelsea girl kraftwerk - man machine
in highschool, i became friends with this 30 year old former garage punk type dude in my town. i drank a lot of beer, popped some pills and listened to tons of garage, rockabilly, old r&b and such with him. he played a lot of shit that was just totally foreign to me at the time. he also played the above three records for me. i remember thinking it was weird that he was into the nico record especially. all three records became favorites and i will always associate them with a time of realizing just how boundless and endless one's investigation of music should be. realizing that the unifying thread that runs through the music you love isn't necessarily about similarities in sound or style or anything else easily identified.
funkadelic - america eats its young the impressions - i'm so proud 45
i remember buying both of these records within probably a week or two of each other. living in a small town with one record store that serviced the local university and spending a lot of my time listening to music and reading liner notes and taking little dollar chances on records here and there. i knew the names "funkadelic" and "curtis mayfield" and the records were cheap, so i picked them up. i was really hoping for something that i could draw a direct line to from the music i was currently listening to (rap). i didn't exactly get that (maybe to a degree with the funkadelic record). america eats its young really set my head spinning. i knew the later music of parliament/funkadelic to some extent already, and this wasn't that. it was one of the first times i can remember being totally surprised by a record. the impressions record was also a surprise, albeit a more gentle one. this was a record i played at home by myself but would have never put on when any friends were around. the record really took me somewhere whenever i listened to it and i was sure that it would lose some of its appeal (and that i would get clowned for being into this soft old ballad) if i were to share it. it's still one of my favorite impressions songs.
Please pardon the incoherence, non-chronological order and generally scattershot nature of what appears below (...) It just seems like trying to put lightening in a bottle.
I would read at least 300 pages like this. More stories please. I wanna hear more.
I, too, appreciate the posts in this thread.
It is hard condensing a collection of thousands and thousands of records into 25 that embody my life. With each record picked, there are hundreds of contenders being cut. The easy part, in my opinion, is writing about the final 25. I could write reams and reams about these records. I've done so elsewhere, already. So I thought it appropriate to try and distill these 25 records to their absolute essence. I'm no Basho, but obviously the best format for such concision is haiku.
The haiku are in 5 sections, roughly chronological and roughly representing different stages of record nerd-dom in my life. Like Zvi said, it's fairly scattershot, as everything I like overlaps, but I imagine this is true of most of us.
I offer: 25 HAIKU for 25 LPs[/b]
SECTION I
"MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN COWBOYS"[/b] (Formative years. The modern-day-drifter)
cowboys like smokey old pool rooms and clear mountian moringings little warm puppies and children and girls of the night
willie nelson - "shotgun willie"[/b]
hated this back then drunk uncles yelling at me, "make 'em be doctors..."
"...and lawyers, and such." country music was all we ever listened to
today, though, willie is an absolute favorite don't see family much
merle haggard - "mama tried"[/b]
"i turned twenty-one in prison, doing life without parole ... ... mama tried"
waylon jennings - "honky tonk heroes"[/b]
toothless dudes in bars talkin 'bout fucking whores seemed "normal" to me
shit how can i follow that i am feeling this threads and the recent throwback to vintage lily and bam emostrut. we just need schnipper to come home and the cipher will be complete.
1. Michael Jackson - Thriller[/b] My first musical obsession. I remember nothing of my first house except for the day my parents brought home this giant mitsubishi (yes) stereo and I begged them to play "billie jean" over and over again.
2. Sade - Stronger Than Pride[/b] 3. James Taylor - Sweet Baby James[/b] My parents definitely weren't jamming Love or Dolphy, but in retrospect mom had decent, if oddly narrow taste (pops on the other hand was into mostly unforgivable tripe). Aside from Thriller these are basically the only two albums I remember hearing in the eighties (though I think I may have buried a windham hill compilation or two in the depths of my subconscious?) Both artists stir up some interesting emotions whenever i hear them in wawa and I think that is because I secretly love these records more than any gangster rap.
4. Dr. Dre - The Chronic[/b] Dre and Snoop were the first and last celebrities i wanted to be. I later saved up for a penguins jersey so i could look like snoop in the gin and juice video. Since then I've loved a lot of music since but none has ever inspired to engage in that level of hero worship.
5. Nirvana - In Utero[/b] This is the greatest rock album of the 90s but more than musically, Cobain was the artist that taught me to actively search for other great music. Prior to this record and the surrounding hype (im young enough that i only have the vaguest memories of nevermind...) I was just eating up the acts I saw on mtv or where ever. Cobain interviews set me off on looking for music, dubbing all kinds of weird shit off the older siblings of friends and searching for old vinyl thinking i was going to find the f*cking raincoats album in the bins of the antique malls my parents were dragging me to.
6. Stevie Wonder - Innervisions[/b] What i did find at the antique malls. set me off on a decade of searching for equally transcendent soul music and mostly failing.
7. Nas - Illmatic[/b] I wasn't cool enough to buy this record when it came out, probably missed the source buzz by about a year, but I was later gassed off "If I Ruled The World" and It Was Written hadn't yet dropped so I instead got this out of the princeton record exchange budget section. i spent the next five years buying every half interesting rap album in said budget section, trying to recreate the feeling of hearing this for the first time.
8. Mr. Bungle - Disco Volante[/b] What cobain did for exploration patton and co did for experimentation. I bought this the day it came out, having really enjoyed their self titled album in the way that any 11 year old would like goofy rock rapping about knocking up betty crocker and flaming anuses. The more adventurous musical nuances of that record were lost on me, but this was an unavoidable mindcrush - avant jazz freakouts, disjointed ethno techno loops, long bursts of silence. Anything but traditional songwriting. At first I hated it for its formlessness but just forced myself to accept it because, well, i couldn't really afford to not like an album I just spent sixteen dollars on. over time it opened some damn doors.
9. Outkast - Atliens[/b] 10. Goodie Mob - Soul Food[/b] Musically perfect, but also took such a subtle and human approach to heavy issues like poverty and racism and the drug trade that they shaped my world view in ways i wouldn't understand until years later.
11. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2[/b] 12. Nurse With Wound - Soliloquy For Lilth[/b] taught me that the most powerful music barely exists.
13. Curtis Mayfield - Curtis[/b] This is the time I didn't fail re: #6
14. De La Soul - Buhloone Mindstate [/b] this made me rethink the way i write words.
15. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme[/b] the album that upgraded my religious belief from that of a proud atheist to confused/optimistic atheist. i don't really care to believe but at the same time i fail to understand how something like this can exist without the guidance of a higher power. listening to it for the first time was like witnessing a miracle.
16. Jay-Z - Vol. 3[/b] i was starting to buy into the whole rawkusy pop rap rage around this time but jay totally debunked all that because he was rapping better than anybody else on the planet.
17. Eugene McDaniels - Headless Heroes of the apocalypse [/b] One of the first records I got off ebay in high school for a then heart stopping price of $50. I did it for teh breaks but then got totally wrapped up in the mythology and the politics of eugene. I know you guys probably mock this for being on some 98 wall record steez and because he's a pretty shitty vocalist but it's still a really intense work that sounds like nothing else. permafiled.
18. Too Short - Born To Mack[/b] 19. E-40 - In A Major Way[/b] Prior to going to college I could've sworn I knew every damn thing about rap music. The first week of school i met the bay expat homie and would be radio cohost JG and dude started schooling me on all this bay shit I had since ignored (that bicostal ignorance works both ways - just a few months back i was out with dude and we heard "buck em down." he asked me if it was arrested development...) I was aware of Short and 40 and Spice 1 and Mac Dre mostly from source ads and cameos and "5 on it" but they just never were presented as something worth exploring further. (I was on that hierohobolegends.) These records in particular and living in dc (the SOUF) on the whole really helped me better understand hip hop as a localized phenomenon, which has informed so much of my writing.
20. Sonny Sharrock - Black Woman[/b] I think I told this story here once but I bought this record in baltimore years ago and then my car then broke down. I laid the parking lot of a jiffy lube and listened to it on a portable like a half dozen times in a row. sunlight warped the record, record warped my thoughts.
21. Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges - Clube De Esquina[/b] When I was younger I never had interest in leaving the united states because I thought the absence of good rap in other countries rendered them worthless. This record and the string of mind numbing brazilian music that I devoured in its aftermath weakened the second half of that thesis. Now I have a passport, grip world music and am growing my hair to ponytail length.
22. Common Sense - Resurrection[/b] the thing about this album is that i listened to it all through high school as a headphone obsession on some "did you hear he said who he's talking bout yall is hip hop?" punchline sweating alongside a dozen other tapes that haven't held up quite as well but then as i got older and was living in the sort of unemployed mild alcoholic haze that com speaks of it started to make sense on an entirely different level. i fucked with it then but i caught it later.
Had my mind blown by 'Everyday' on the oldies station as one of the first songs I ever heard.
2. Holst - The Planets
My dad is a big classical music fan, I graduated from John Williams/superhero themes to this as a young'n. Mars was always my shit.
3. Oasis - (What's the Story) Morning Glory
I was 11 years old when this came out. It was a big deal.
4. The Beatles - Sgt. Peppers
Knew all the hits, but this was the first Beatles album I really got stuck into.
5. Radiohead - The Bends / OK Computer
Recorded these albums onto one cassette and listened to it on the bus to school for about 2 years.
6. Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
I was young/naive and should have known better.
7. Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions
London, England...consider yourselves WARNED!
8. Tribe Called Quest - Low End Theory
I remember putting this on the communal stereo at school to much derision. I rather naively believed Q-Tip to be the greatest of all-time for an embarrassingly long period.
9. DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
The usual cliched introduction to blazing downtempo and mad raers.
10. The Pixies - Doolittle
A friend lent me this and Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation at the same sort of time. It was all about the Pixies.
Comments
1. Kenny Rogers ??? The Singles
2. Elton John ??? Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
3. Abba ??? Super Trouper
4. N Diamond ??? You Don???t Bring Me Flowers
5. Bee Gees ??? Best Of
These were constantly playing at these guys??? apartments when we went over. I would be the only kid usually, so I???d hang out by the stereo while the in-their-20s folks had their conversations.
6. Supertramp ??? Breakfast in America
7. Bob Marley and The Wailers - Survival
8. Bob Marley and The Wailers ??? Babylon By Bus
9. Rolling Stones ??? Some Girls
10. Steely Dan ??? Aja
I still love this movie and this soundtrack (except for Hopelessly Devoted to You). Laugh all you want, but I think these songs taught me to appreciate arrangement.
11. Grease soundtrack
These two were like contraband ??? kinda dirty and we knew we weren???t supposed to be listening to it. A big part of that can???t wait to be a teenager impatience. I asked an older kid neighbour what throwdown meant and what S&M and B&D were. He answered clearly and honestly and then sent me on my way.
12. Rick James ??? Throwin Down
13. Frank Zappa - Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch
The rest
14. Duran Duran ??? s/t
15. PE ??? It Takes A Nation
16. De La Soul ??? 3 Feet High
17. NWA ??? Straight Outta Compton
18. A Franklin ??? Greatest Hits
19. Bad Brains ??? Rock For Light
20. Burning Spear ??? Garvey???s Ghost
21. Velvet Underground ??? VU & Nico
22. The Gruesomes ??? Tyrants of Teen Trash
23. Sonic Youth ??? Burning Spear
24. B Holiday ??? Billie Holidays??? Greatest Hits
25. The Clash ??? London Calling
- van morrison - astral weeks. i used to listen to this record with my dad and just feel cold, trapped and restless. could not handle it. still almost can't.
- ornette coleman - the shape of jazz to come. i remember the first time jazz made sense to me, i was getting ready for a baseball game and my parents were playing this. i just remember hearing a whole bunch of scattershot horns and cymbals and then all of a sudden they congealed. i think my exact words were "what happened there? in the music?"
- the temptin temptations. i remember obviously feeling like this was from another time, a time that didn't exist anymore. it helped me understand my mother, to see her singing along, to think of her as a child like me.
- ice-t - the iceberg. "freedom of speech - just watch what you say." there was some kind of direct logic in that record, the perfect subversive cartoonism to taunt a 7 year old.
- motley crue - shout at the devil. i don't remember the music on this. i don't even think i had it. but the costumes were incredible. i bought a nikki sixx wallet.
- prince & the NPG - diamonds and pearls. the hologram cover, the ridiculous over the top sexual aphorisms. i learned every word to "get off." i really liked the idea of prince as some kind of master of his domain, with the new power generation as his servants. i imagined that he slept with tigers.
- michael jackson - bad. "smooth criminal" with its weird semi-chanted chorus i didn't understand, "liberian girl"... there was a certain foreign quality to this record, something i couldn't quite wrap my mind around. but it was so direct, so pop, so digestible.
- nirvana - nevermind. this was the first music i chose, even if it chose me. cannot underestimate the roads this record opened up.
- geto boys - we can't be stopped. this record actually shocked me. i thought i knew it all as a scrappy little fucker, but no. the lyrics on this record were seriously warped.
- sonic youth - dirty. i learned to play guitar along with this record. the tunings, the open passages, the bad lyrics. it all made sense at the time. i felt like i was really onto something liking this.
- KMD - mr. hood. this was like my rap version of sonic youth. loose and up to chance and singular. and most assuredly not pop. no one in my classes even knew what this was. which made me feel so cool.
- eric dolphy - out to lunch. another record of my dad's that just hit me at the right time. a lot of free space, a lot of chiming, a purposeful meandering. put sonic youth in perspective.
- velvet underground & nico. going back, listening to what came before, this one was very profound. the music sounded almost situational, very performed. but it was so sonically captivating and the songs were so plain. absolute mindfuck.
- television - marquee moon. almost the opposite of VU - this record sounded like some guys who just got together and jammed it. obviously that is not totally the case, but the risk, the buildups, the brinks that they would scurry to with their songs, were so inspiring to me. just that a band could hone themselves to that point, the amount of focus. they really connected.
- anthology of american folk music. not only did this record give me a grip on the function of music as more than expression or entertainment, the songs... the f*cking songs are absolutely unreal. the way they are preserved, presented and revered - i felt like i had found something truly kindred here.
- the meters. oh, ok so this is why rap sounds like that? nice. as far as i can see it, this is still a rock record.
- curtis live. so much presence. a very real tempering of feeling, style, substance and purity. joy and pain. an incredibly subtle, complex recording, with such resonance. humbling.
- kraftwerk - the man-machine. after the beatles, the single greatest pop group to exist. what these guys did with sound, language, image, and their combined communicative power is, to this day, the most apt commentary on technological progress that the world has seen. and the fact that they could say what they said while making simple, beautiful pop truly blew my mind.
- boredoms - super ??. this is more of a live show that changed the way i perceive sound and ritual, but the record itself is pretty good approximation to cross with my memory.
- bernard pamegiani - de natura sonorum. the poetics of pure sound, composed for maximum response. art as music, an expression of a non-specific yet completely tangible idea, requiring rapt attention. i think too much, and this record tells me why.
- musique centrafrique / chants gbaya. the first ethnic recording that hit me, and still the deepest. a pure loss of consciousness in music. almost too raw to listen to.
- ali farka toure - red. so otherworldly, yet so familiar. the crackling gourd-drum and the relentless fluidity of the guitar were just too epic to stand. and then the vocals came in. i remember thinking this music must have come from a very real place. it did.
- animal collective - sung tongs. some kids my age, from my circle, in my world, doing something completely transcendent and personal. this record should have made more of a difference in my life than it did. a record that makes me regret. but still a huge place marker, and a reminder.
- tsege mariam gebru - spielt eignen kompositzien. quite simply, the most beautiful and unique record i have ever heard. solo piano from ethiopia, released in germany with the help of haile selassie. totally irreplaceable. life is simple.
Here's my Top Ten.....maybe will add 15 more when I get some time.
1) Smothers Brothers "Live At The Purple Onion" - I was living in a brownstone in Brooklyn and the girl who lived upstairs bought me a copy of Rubber Soul for my birthday in Dec. '65......I brought it back to the store and exchanged it for a copy of the Smothers Brothers LP....I had no interest in the Beatles but the girl (Ronnie) was the president of the local Beatles Fan Club and was pissed at me for not keeping the LP.
2) Blue Cheer "Vincebus Eruptum" - The first LP I ever bought on my own. I was staying with my Grandmother and I bought this at Red's Toy Store on Utica Avenue. She wouldn't let me play it in the house so I spent a good part of the summer sitting on her front porch blasting this over and over again....I thought "The Parchment Farm" was where they grew paper.
3) Beatles "Rubber Soul" Guilt must have lead me to this purchase whan I was 12 years old...still to this day my favorite Beatles LP.....Thanks Ronnie!!
4) Skillet & Leroy - Grandpa Joe had these hid away in his closet with his Redd Foxx and Nipsey Russell records...whenever I was left at his home alone I'd dig them out and play them....laughed my ass off.....today I don't even find them remotely funny.
5 & 6) Led Zeppelin's first two LP's - This was the first concert I ever attended. I was in the 7th grade and their show at MSG was the first time I ever smoked dope....I still smoke but I don't listen to much Zep.
7) Bobby Fuller Four "I Fought The Law" - Billy Quackenbush and I were walking to the Deli to see if someone would buy us some beer. On the way we found a box sitting on top of a garbage can....it was a 25 count box of the said LP....being the pseudo-Hippies that we were, we made fun of their "square" clothes and played frisbee with every last copy....some only after we drew long hair and beards on the covers....later when I started to seriously collect records I realized we had played Frisbee to the tune of $2K or more.
8) Jimi Hendrix "Smash Hits" - This is what I listened to the first time I dropped acid...over and over again....at one point a green monster came through a big hole in my bedroom wall and I had to take the music off and walk around the block a few times scared shitless.
9) Frank Zappa & The Mothers "Mothermania" - "Yeah, I knew everydamnword to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" and most of this LP.....sitting im my friend Steven's room smoking dope and hoping his older sister would come hang out with us.
10) Thirteenth Floor Elevaators "Psychedelic Sounds" - By the time I got into H.S. I had a definite identity crisis.....I was pretty good at sports so I knew all the jocks....I was into music so I knew all the music heads and I'd take any drug set in front of me that didn't require me using a needle. I met a guy from across town who was a FREAK in every way you can imagine.....he was a drummer and would come jam with me and my friends....first time we went to his house he put on the Elevators LP and it changed my life.
You too, huh?
My dad had their Two Or Three Times A Day album - the one with Skillet coming home and finding his wife in bed with Leroy, on the cover - and I thought it was funny when I was a kid, but only because as a grade-schooler, I wasn't used to people openly cussing and talking about sex.
I came back to it a little later, somewhere between junior high and high school, and it sounded like old stale vaudeville jokes "updated" with curse words. Cheech & Chong were funnier than that.
That is the EXACT Lp I was referencing.....Leroy is headed out the window!!
1. Sam and Dave Double Dynamite/Beatles Rubber Soul: These are my foundational musical experiences. My father didn???t leave me with much but an anger problem and a genetic predisposition to sprout hair from unfortunate parts of my body, but he was a fanatic soul fan and in particular a Stax lover. We used to dance around our little apartment to this record until I collapsed in fits of laughter and exhaustion. My mom loves the Beatles and the Stones. The former are, I think, space aliens gifted who were gifted with an uncanny ability to make PERFECT music. I brought five albums with me when I went to Africa, all of which make this list (except for Cal Tjader???s ???Soul Whiffenpoof?????? who knows, I was on A LOT of drugs) and I just remember walking around Dakar dazed on weak pot and baking in the sun listening to ???I???m Looking Through You??? and thinking that life couldn???t possibly get any better, and really, it didn???t.
2. Television Marquee Moon/Clash London Calling: I file these under ???being a teenager and realizing you???re not nearly as cool as you think you are???. I discovered both of these in my stepdad???s extensive collection, at a time when I was pretty much listening to nothing but hip-hop and Bob Marley. London Calling I latched on to immediately, because it felt bad and good and dangerous and everything I wished I was. Marquee Moon just confused the shit out of me. I basically knew that I wasn???t ready for it at all, but that it was undoubtedly great and amazing. In the intervening years, I have fucked and cried and laughed and read Prosser and Keaton on Torts while playing this record over and over again and I think it???s in a way the most ???advanced??? music I???ve ever heard but never feels sterile or overthought. I cannot figure out how human beings made this record. File under: records I have listened to while watching the sun go down on Rape Donkey???s roof top and ingesting painkillers.
3. Run DMC Raising Hell/Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet: Raising Hell united pretty much everyone I knew across race and class lines as THE ALBUM. I remember going with like 15 other kids to purchase this en masse at Princeton Record Exchange. Fear of a Black Planet was like everything I loved about Raising Hell (and all other hip-hop) turned up to a fever pitch and it felt exhilarating every time I put it in my walkman. Around the time this tape came out, the divide had begun among my friends between hiphop kids and metalheads. Up until this time it was pretty cool to like both kinds of music. I remember my best friend telling me that he liked some metal album better, maybe Anthrax, and I told him that he had shitty embarrassing taste in music and was just bugging so hard. He was a year older than me, a big Irish kid from Queens, he punched me in the stomach and we were not friends anymore (incidentally, this was not the only time that my opinions about music got me punched in the stomach: in 7th grade [?] me and Tremayne F. had an argument on the playground about who was better, Third Bass or K Solo, I was right, but he was already 200 pounds and I got my ass kicked and threw up on the Four Square court).
4. Guns and Roses Appetite for Destruction: Pure adolescent sex, drugs, and bad attitude rolled up into some of the most amazingly written well played records ever recorded. I know it???s not considered cool to love this record in certain circles, and that???s fine, you can listen to Pavement talk about isosceles triangles, and I will listen to Axl wail about whiskey and heroin and, as the saying goes ???I???ll see you at the finish line???.
5. The BUMS Watch The Bumrush (red cassette single, available in the greater Princeton area only) and Koncepts Project Ambershine: Nothing is more transformative and awe-inspiring than the first couple of flesh and blood friends of yours who manage to make good credible music. I thought my friends in the BUMS, and later on the one Johnny Paycheck himself were like magicians, because here they were, people I hung with and smoked blunts with and yet they had somehow managed to make actual SONGS and ALBUMS and to me this was no less remarkable than if they had been able to fly or shoot lasers out of their fingertips.
6. Van Morrison Astral Weeks/Zombies Odyssey/Love Forever Changes and Oracle/Velvets S/T: Out of necessity, maturity, or what-have-you, I???m clean and sober these days, but there was a time when nothing pleased me more than the ingestion of a fine opiate or six followed by four or five hours of narcotized, ethereal bliss. These four heartbreakingly beautiful records were the mainstay soundtrack of my junkie days. I???ll never regret, and always remember fondly (longingly?) the hours I wasted away, lying on my back, staring at the ceiling listening to these records and smiling to myself and saying over and over again ???god this is beautiful???. The moral of this story, such as there is one, is not that drugs are bad (or good), but that when I got sober and put these albums back in rotation, I discovered that the magic was in the records not in the hydrocodone and not a single one of them goes more than two or three days without finding its way on to my turntable.
7. Fela Kuti No Agreement/Curtis Mayfield Sweet Exorcist: An itinerant friend of mine left these in my possession on a stopover in his endless and mysterious travels (along with a big box of sunglasses and scarves??). By the time he reclaimed them they had changed me completely and I had fallen hopelessly in love with the music of both men. If Marquee Moon is the most ???advanced??? music I have ever heard, No Agreement and the rest of Fela???s discography is the most ???perfect??? music I???ve ever listened to, meaning that it if I were able to articulate what I personally think music should sound like, it would sound like the music that Fela made and I feel like he is an extension of my brain, and I of his.
8. Smif and Wesson /Redman Dare Iz A Darkside/ Raekwon Only Built for Cuban Linx: My weedspot triumvirate, and the soundtrack to a city that exists only in the hazy corners of my brain these days. I miss passing out flyers, Tunnel, Palladium, Esso???s, Vinyl, El Flamingo, Sticky Mike???s, Stretch and Bobbito, Polo and Northface, all day all night craze in ???The Ville??? (a mythical place that no longer exists). These records were in constant rotation as I made NYC my own and left my first mark in the clubs and concert halls and started to live my dreams.
9. Jorge Ben A Tabua D???Esmerelda: I got curious about Brazilian music at a time when I haughtily, in all of my post-college self-impressed narcissism had decided that I knew all that there ever was to know about music (yeah, I know, that???s beyond ridiculous and couldn???t have been further from the truth, but what do you want, I was ???full of piss and vinegar??? as my grandfather would say). When I heard this record, I knew immediately that I knew nothing, and the discovery of my own na??vet?? was the greatest and most exciting discovery that I have ever made, because I at that moment I realized that I would be excited and amazed by music forever, and that being jaded is the most pathetic and defeatist thing that a person can be. I have no idea what Jorge is saying with his words, but this music makes me want to craugh, which is the simultaneous act of laughing and crying.
10. Common Resurrection/Main Source Breaking Atoms/ Organized Konfusion Extinction Agenda: I love all kinds of hiphop, from 40 Water to Quasimoto to the Beastie Boys, but I am also an unapologetic backpacker, who spent a long period of my life, walking around hunched over with Sony MDR headphones perched on my dome and a backpack filled with tapes. These albums are the reason why. I???ve still never heard smarter, more soulful music that spoke to ME the way these three records did and I could care less if it???s out of fashion, or regionalist, or pass?? or what the f-ck have you to ride for these records above all others. I don???t care because music should be something that you FEEL and politics, and trends, and pitchfork and soulstrut and the New York Times should never override that feeling. Like Kool Keith said ???I just need what I need???.
no stfu shawnna will not be on my list
Naw, The Burglar In The Bedroom is the one with SKILLET headed out the window...Two Or Three Times A Day is the one where a scared-looking Skillet is pointing a gun straight at Leroy (the fat one), who is shirtless, in bed with Skillet's wife, and has a shit-eating grin on his face!!
Here it is: (POSSIBLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK)[/b]
GREAT POST. I would read at least 300 pages like this. More stories please. I wanna hear more.
You're right....he had that one too.....and the one by Aunt Esther.
I haven't seen them in a long time.
Thanks
2. Michael Jackson Thriller: I saved my own money to buy this--I got it from K-Mart! It had the white cassette holder around it, and I begged my mom to cut it open with some scissors in the car.
3. Guns N Roses Appetite For Destruction: This dude Ernie got the tape from someone, and we listened to it endlessly...the first album I'd ever listened to that had profanity.
4. Faith No More The Real Thing: I was nieve enough to believe that 1) FNM had originally wrote 'War Pigs' and 2) guitarists made different sounds by using different parts of the string. Didn't know much about much for a long time.
5. Ice Cube AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, N.W.A.'s Efil4zaggin, Ice Cube Death Certificate and Dr. Dre The Chronic: Unfuckwithable. This informed my California State of Mind through the early 90's.
6. Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions..." and Fear of a Black Planet: The Bomb Squad were absolute geniuses at this point in their career. Being mixed in a very white area made P.E. seem all the more dangerous, interesting and compelling.
7. Mr. Bungle Mr. Bungle: Sharky, I'm sorry I stole this from you sophomore year. You were a good dude--you didn't deserve that. If I ever see you again, I'm buying you a beer and a shot. This album was so many things rolled into one...LOVE IS A FIST!
8. Faith No More {i]Angel Dust[/i]: "In regards to my usage of the drug...it modified my personality! To the extent that I was highly irritable...I was like a CRACK HITLER!" Thank you, Mister Patton, for saying what needed to be said.
9. Radiohead "Street Spirit": This song still creeps me out--the chord progression and the lyrics made me feel like the apocalypse is outside my window. Radiohead always creep me out, like sonic prophets spinning doom out of shopping centers.
10. Tortoise Millions Now Living...: Straight-up ill band, way beyond my meager expectations of what "post-rock" might be. A complete journey; 'Beyond the Banks and Rivers' as a funeral dirge.
11. DJ Shadow Endtroducing...: Totally blew my mind as to what a record could sound like. It still does. I worked at a little music store and was supposed to order for someone else, but bought it for myself instead. Sorry J****y.
12. Nurse With Wound To The Tiny Man... and Can Ege Bamyasi: This was the beginning of my real musical growth. There was/is a small record shop called Vinyl Revolution in Monterey, CA, where the owner (Bob) would let me hang out and listen to whatever. Sometimes I would buy stuff without previewing, just for the rush of taking it home and (hopefully) having my mind blown. NWW is a tough band to dissect, but fun in certain settings (like light reading, for example). Can is straight up greatness, and I picked it because I liked the cover.
To this day Micheal vocals sound like he was possessed by an old man.
2) Curtis Mayfield - Superfly: My pops would play this even before we listened to ABC. The soundscape and falsetto vocal were locked into my dna.
3) Marvin Gaye - Lets Get It On: another of my fathers staples in the house. Dude had an above average stereo that we couldnt touch until we were old enuff. I would stare at the album cover for a long ass time without really knowing what was goin on. Another dna record.
4) Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 - The Message: We as kids knew the single and partied to Scorpio, but I fell for the R&B joker on there. The Message was like str8 lookin in the miiror. But we didnt have rats,roaches,piss, and broken glass in our building like that.
5) Micheal Jackson - Off The Wall: My first personal album that i got along w/ my own turntable. The emotions on this album shaped/inluenced my ideas of what I thought was love and sex at the time. MJ talmbout being "so cavalier". I looked the meaning up in the dictionary and realized that selfishness can hurt a relationship. Even if dude was "asexual" to the public, Dont Stop Till You Get Enough" was about f*ckin and as a 10 year old i could only imagine what that shit was like.....and to that tempo.
6) Sade - Diamond Life: Even if Promise is my fav, when I first heard the entire album, I was actually kinda ashamed for liking this "smooth jazz" shit at a time I was well into Hip Hop and wasnt "suppossed" to get w/ this brillant UK hybrid of genres. My best friends mom had it and I sat down w/ it. I felt like i was being hugged by a ghost. On top of lookin at Sade's other-worldly beauty. That definitely helped it go down easier. Hooked ever since.
7) The Jungle Brothers - Straight Out The Jungle: after hearing mad promos/single on Red Alert Show, I copped the Cassette when it came out. They were recalling older breaks,wore Banana Republic(like i did), and became another step towards an "alternative" Hip Hop vibe that was still street yet on some Afika Bambaataa, next level steez, w/out isolating the simpletons.
8) Public Enemy - Yo! Bum Rush The Show!: single handedly got me checkin my my fathers libary and pickin up Franz Fanon/Pan-Africanism/Message To Black Man/David Walker's Appeal/etc. Here was an mc that had an old school cadence and voice in a time when new voices/styles where becoming more popular. Forget it.
9) Guy - Guy: Someone finally made an R&B album that aging B-Girls can fusk w/.
Shit was ridiculous. Gap Band vocals over recogizable/chopped James Brown breaks.
This shit opened the door. Even if Bobby Brown set shit off, this was a full album of the new Uptown flavor. Spoke to me and all my peers like crazy
10) Earth Wind & Fire - Gratitude: my pops told me-"put on Reasons and u got her"
Are all live albums supposed to be this good. Years later I would get to play this shit out and realize its power.
11) Mandrill - Composite Truth: yet another Daddy LP. Now EWF had that costume thang going on , but these dude on the back cover looked like the real multi-culti NYC i was seein in NYC - exaggerated. Moroccan Nights as a kid had me open.
My pops would play it and id stare at the cover and ask him what a mandrill is.
Seeing Coffee's intense face had me kinda shook. Dude look hard as hell along w/ the rest of 'em.
ill finish tmmw
Rotary Connection S/T: My mom was a big fan of Minnie Ripperton. This one was passed down to me.
The Best Of Ritchie Valens: Some gas station impulse buy tape that my dad bought for me. I enjoyed it.
Veruca Salt American Thighs
Lou Rawls Natural Man: My mother and my aunt, as young teenagers, had a stint as housesitters for Lou and his hippie wife's house (second? third?). Apparently, both sat in on the session and were included amongst the "live" cheering.
Onyx Bacdafuckup: I stole this tape during an elementary school field trip in Univeral City. Why were cuss words so thrilling at that age?
Extreme Championship Wrestling comp: Yeah, I was into that. So what?
Primus Sailing The Seas Of Cheese: FONK!
Public Enemy It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back: I remember that one of the kids next door taught me what a "basehead" was. I thought the video was funny.
Hole Live Through This
James Brown Live At The Apollo: My dad was the first who hipped me to him. He went to a concert in '65 at the Great Western Forum. Ever since he has played this in the car often. He also played...
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Deja Vu.
That's all I can remember
I'm pissed! Off to bed for me.
Great thread btw...
Frank Zappa - Grand Wazoo
Sitting in the car as a kid, singing along with all the funny voices in "cleetus awreetus-awrightus" with my dad & brother, and just thinking "blessed relief" was the best thing ever, cloud-free summer day soundtrack to paradise type stuff, so nostalgic.
Culture - International herb/Johnny Osbourne - Warrior
My dad had a cassette with these two albums on either side, and I used to walk around in elementary school listening to these just thinking it was so great.
Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones
Also a record my dad used to play and I remember "In the neighbourhood" and how idyllic that neighbourhood sounded, haha. I used to wish I could go there. The accordion/pump organ on "Just another sucker on the vine", and the like mystical "Troubles braids" wich is when I remember really trying to visualize and imagine the music on another level for the first time.
Curtis Mayfield - Roots
I found this at a fleamarket when I was ca 13, and I went home and played "beautiful brother of mine" and "now your gone" on loop for days.
Donny Hathaway - Live
This was one of the tapes always lying in the glove compartment of the car, so we used to play this whenever we went on road trips when I was a kid. I especially remember trips home from my grandfathers house in the middle of the night and the perfect atmospere this record created. A staple of my childhood
Midlake - The Trials of van Occupanther
This came out during my last year of high school and I would just tune out and listen to this, perfect album.
A Tribe Called Quest - The Love Movement
One of the first hip-hop albums I bought, when I was 12, I still remember that day, and I went home and listened to no other album for months.
It got me really excited about hiphop and so many lyrics from this record are etched into my brain.
Redman - Doc's da Name 2000
Another one of the early hiphop albums I got, and I thought redman was the funniest dude ever. I had this in my walkman going down to the trains to check out graffiti and me and my friends would just shout lines from this record at eachother in school hallways etc
Erykah Badu - Mamas gun
I remember my older cousin had Baduizm wich would be on when we went to her house sometimes and when mamas gun came out I bought it and listened to it all the time, doing homework, when i went to sleep etc.
Hellacopters - High Visibility
This was pretty big and made me seek out mc5, the stooges, radio birdman etc and I always played guitar along to these albums
Common - Like water for chocolate/Reflection Eternal - Train of thought
Around the time I got these my dad was in a car accident where both his legs were completely crushed and his best friend died, and they kinda helped me through that period
Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced/Electric Ladyland/Axis/Smash Hits/Etc
Jimi Hendrix was always on the turntable at home since I can't even remember, and is probably what shaped my whole view of music in general. Or something like that.
Patrice Rushen - Straight from the heart
This made me get into the more disco/modern soul/80's side of things, and subsequently listening to more of her stuff just made me think she was a genius musician.
Quasimoto - The Unseen
This record really felt to my young mind "this is what hiphop should sound like" and made me start making beats and really searching for samples and want everything to sound dirty and sp-1200:y in that little dude way we've all come to know and love here at soulstrut. but it is an amazing album.
ps. really looking forward to james post in this thread.
I'm loving it too. I'd like to post, but for some reason, when I think of music that changed my life, I can't think of particular albums...it was more like ENTIRE GENRES that shaped my thinking. Not sure if I can narrow it down to certain records, but if I can, I'll be right in there, telling my story...
You need to give it a try dude. It doesn't have to be definitive or anything, it's just some scribbling on the internet. I am also paging the following people to this thread:
Paycheck, Sween, The Donger, Cosmo, Faux Rillz, Herm, Jacob Wizzle, Dr. Manhattin, P-ro, Doc McCoy, Senior, Soul On Ice, Luck, etc. Everyone really, except for Hemol.
12) The Jackson 5 - Get It Together: I had to jack this from my cousins and gotdamn it just blew my mind. They had finally embraced some psych-steez. Weird ass sounds and edits and track overlaps.
Its Too Late To Change The Time.......talmbout the future is bleak. Black Sci-Fi Soul.
13) Kraftwerk - The Man Machine. I didnt hear much from this album as a kid, but when i heard the joint that The Fearless Four used for Rockin' It. Mad connections were made. The whole robot steez is still ahead of its time. Funk not Funk. They were the doors that opened my interest in Electronica in the 90's.
14) Quincy Jones - The Dude: One summer, the year it was out, my friend Rima from my 6th grade class would call me almost everyday, in the early afternoon. We would play the album over the phone to each other, and talk about how incredible it was. The following year in the 7th grade she became my girlfriend.
15) Tim Dog - Penecillan On Wax: Ultramagnetic to the dark side. This album set shit off. Arguably the best Ultra album. One of the first times that attitude outweighed technical skill. f*ckin masterpiece.
16) Terrence Trent D'Arby - The World According To....: after Thriller there was bound to be a clones out there, and dude came close but on his own steez. Dude had the live shit, could dance, sing fast or slow. Soundtrack to my freshmen year in college.
17) Tracy Chapman - S/T: Critics and the industry loved her. I was part of that impressionable college demographic, even though i copped in high school(sr yr.) She got a little Black radio love but not enuff.
Shit was mad foul how she was froze out by the Black media. Muthafuckas spent their time talmbout "Beige Music" artists, while this sister was right there in the mix w/ social commentary. Ya'll fuckers interviewin Chuck D, but slept on Chapman. If she was "pretty" cats woulda had a different story.
This album made/makes me cry.
18) A Tribe Called Quest - Peoples Instinctive Travels And The Paths of Rhythm: Damn, what do u get when u mix Str8 Out The Jungle and 3 Feet High And Rising.....this shit! I rocked this all the time. All the time. There are still rhymes on this album from Q-Tip that I havent fully digested. Dudes improved on two very important albums. That's crazy.
19) Ultimate Breaks and Etc. - I didnt even own these joints but my boy did. And we would run thru them a realize that so-and-so used it for their routines from the mix-tapes. "Oh shit, dude used this at Tyra's birthday party 2 years ago!" I later got to cop them and play a gang of them out within my Funk sets. So invaluable.
20) Wynton Marsalis - Majesty Of The Blues: I was workin' at this restaurant during the summer in between college. The staff could play CDs. Since we were in the Lincoln Center area, most of it was Classical,Jazz, or Light Rock. One of the waiters was this snobby Brother who sang Opera. And when he controlled the stereo he'd play his shit, and walk around all stuffy. Whatever. But dude was a little theatened by me. Dude was a hatter cause I was on some Hip Hop shit yet I could talk about other shit.
Once i had the chance to pop in The Majesty Of the Blues (which everyone enjoyed), dude ripped that shit out of the cd tray. Just mad cause im stylin. Shit was Too-Black for his ass.
21) Prince and The Revolution - Around The World In A Day. Dude was on some Beatles steez.
How the hell do u follow up Purple Rain? Alot of folks were hattin cuase he didnt deliver a part 2.
I thought it was brilliant. Pop Life had some Black Radio, but after that the album just got pushed to the side by the regular folks. The Ladder is written by his father like Purple Rain was. And Temptation was like some Sex in Hell on Acid shit. I once took a tab and listened. Oh my...
22) Maxwell - Urban Hang Suite: BET had a show during the day that played a whole gang of artists that werent str8 contemporary R&B,Hip Hop Soul, or Hip Hip. from like 11am till like 1pm. This is where you'd get to see Omar. At the time Sade was on hiatus and the Neo-Soul thang started to bubble.
Well here comes this cat who gets the groove right. Modern yet warm. Clear falettos and a fashion sense that wasnt Black Leather R&B gaudy. Till The Cops Come Knockin had me open. Then dude just disappeared. I found the album months before the radio started play ing Acsension. This shit was SADE the lost album. At the time i had gotten over my rookie mistakes at my new gig, and I played the hell outta this shit. Got a whole alot of LES lovin as well. Good times.
23) Steel Pulse - Earth Crisis: i had to attend a summer program before freshman year in college. My roomate Mike"Boogie" couldnt sleep w/out music on. Dude either played this album or some Farakhan speeches. Ay first I couldnt stand it. Music all night - i understand a little something to help you nod out, but at 4am???? Over time i learned that album. I had minimal knowledge of Steel Pulse's catalog, and from there I ended up becoming a weedhead/growing dreads(w/ the fade)/and expanding my Reggae game.
24) Playgrounds-Children of Zoom/Free To Be You And Me-Various Artists: Both are Nursery school staples. Zoom was funky as shit and FTBUAM was accompanied by a TV special that featured the classic Rosey Greir - Its Alright To Cry and the Roberta Flack/MJ collabo - When I Grow Up, which isnt on the album. On my first trip to the TV Museum - my first request was to see that tv special. 2 great Children joints.
25) Ultramagnetic MC's - Critical Beatdown: Bury me w/ this album. Str8 up. Waste ur energy talmbout Rakim, Kane,Kool G. Rap, and all they rest of the same muthafuckas that get kicked around....YAWN.
This has never been cloned - never. Cats have tried, but no cigar. In the "Golden Age" this still stands out as its own animal. The precursor to the Alt-vibe/Abstract/NativeToungue/etc. Forward production and lyrics.
Tom Tom Club
Coldcut: What??s That Noise?
Mano Negra: Puta??s Fever
Clash: Sandinista
Public Enemy: It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
Beastie Boys: Paul??s Boutique
De La Soul: 3 Feet High And Rising
Sly & The Family Stone: Fresh
Curtis Mayfield: America Today
Funkadelic: One Nation Under A Groove
Fishbone: The Reality Of My Surroundings
Massive Attack: Blue Lines
Praxis: Transmutation
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy: Hypocrisity Is The Greatest Luxury
Miles Davis: On The Corner
John Coltrane: A Love Supreme
Bj??rk: Debut
Tricky: Maxinquaye
DJ Shadow: Endtroducing
Beck: Odeley
Radiohead: Ok Computer
Gnarls Barkley: St Elsewhere
MIA: Kala
The Good, The Bad And The Queen
1) Blue Break Beats[/b]
I know this compilation probably looks quaint now...a collection of jazz-funk tunes from the Blue Note catalog marketed towards the hip-hop generation. One summer I was working in a record store where all my coworkers were bigger jazz and hip-hop fans than me. Both of those musics were played constantly (and sold the most). I never got it with the hip-hop, but one day somebody played this comp and something clicked. Prior to this, I never really "got it" with jazz, either...it seemed too aimless and deliberate and without a center. Like something I was SUPPOSED to like, but somehow never got the hang of. I thought jazz-funk was even worse, because it was neither here nor there...just some older cats trying to make some money w/third-rate Kool & the Gang covers. And it wasn't like it was my first time hearing this CD, either. But because I'd just started getting into early-'70s funk by bands like Black Heat and Charles Wright's Watts Band, jazz-funk sorta started making sense. And I eventually made my way to liking real jazz that WASN'T funky. I'm still not the BIGGEST fan of that music, but I own more jazz records now than I did before the summer of '93. And, yes, they got played...
2) Moby Grape[/b]
Another one from that same summer...I'd just graduated from college, but hadn't gotten that Great Journalism Gig In The Sky that I was looking for...I was also trying to avoid a recent ex who I'd seen walking around with her new boyfriend (not that she was checking for me!)...I had just discovered the first Moby Grape elpee, and that was how I got through the rest of the year. I was a huge fan of 1960's garage-rock (more on this later)...although Moby Grape weren't garage, they are revered by fans of that music because they weren't a "jam band" like the other groups from San Francisco ca. 1967-70; you could slip "Omaha" in a set with the bands on the Nuggets anthology and it wouldn't sound out of place...we had two copies of their first LP at the store (WITHOUT the guy flipping off the camera on the cover) and I snagged one for myself...another one I didn't get right off, but when I did, I hunted down every last Grape album that existed(people forget that Moby Grape were popular in their day, and between that and being on Columbia and Reprise, their elpees weren't that hard to find...I don't know about now, but in the '90s I still saw their records floating around for under $9).
3) The Jackson Five - Looking Through The Windows[/b]
My first record ever (not counting a couple of kiddie records), which I got as a childhood birthday gift. I never really got into children's music when I was a child (never mind that the two youngest members of the J5 were practically kids themselves)...I'd go to friends' houses to play, and I'd be entranced by the soul sounds that their teenaged brothers and sisters would be playing, the stuff I saw and heard on Soul Train. When I found out (last week!) that Ebony and Jet started archiving old issues on the Net, the early-seventies issues took me back to that time. This is what got me started...
4) MC 5 - Kick Out The Jams[/b]
5) Flamin' Groovies - Flamingo[/b]
When I was in junior high in the early eighties, I thought these albums WERE punk-rock! And it turns out I wasn't far off-base...I had gotten bored with soul music around this time, because the disco thing kinda smoothed everything out. I turned to rock because it represented FREEDOM, to me at that age...plus, the rock and rollers looked like they were having FUN, which I did not get from the current soul scene. I'd see Chic on Soul Train in their impeccably pressed suits and skirts, lookin' all cosmopolitan and precious...but then I'd open a rock magazine and I'd see Mick Jagger or David Johansen just cuttin' up for the cameras like they were on holiday! I'm like, "F*ck this disco shit, I gotta get over to the ROCK side!" Now the next question is: how would a young black kid in South Chicago know enough to buy records by the MC 5 and the Flamin' Groovies ten years after they came out? Well, back then I devoured all sorts of rock magazines - Musican and Trouser Press were faves, but I was really into Creem, that was the one I followed every month. And around this time, punk and new wave were coming on strong and I liked what I'd heard. The MC 5 and the Groovies were always being played up as bands who were "punk before it was called punk"...I saw the MC 5's album for maybe $3 in a comic book shop, bought it, and played it constantly...saw the Flamin' Groovies elpee in a Goldblatt's bargain bin, bought it, and now I know that album as well as my family (or the back of my hand). All based on what some rock critics said!!! Believe it or not, back then I did know a few black folks who were into rock, but they mainly knew about what was played on the radio, like the Police and Genesis, both of whom I liked back then (not so much now). On the other hand, relative obscurities like the MC 5 and the Flamin' Groovies was stuff I shared with me, myself and I - didn't meet anybody else into their stuff until college...
MAYBE MORE LATER...AND I PROMISE I WON'T WRITE AS MUCH NEXT TIME!!!!
not chronological or well-organized and cheating a bit with a 45 and a 12", but here's the first part of my list (i'll try to get around to the rest later):
the slits - typical girls 12"
i remember reading about the slits a little bit in some article about the sex pistols. i found this 12" at my local record store and was struck by the cover. i noticed there was a cover of "i heard it through the grapevine", which i thought was a strange choice, so i bought it. this record opened my mind way up as a teenager. the feeling of youthful not giving a F*ck about anything and the way it carried into their musical decisions and not just some posturing was a revelation to me at the time. i would smoke grass and listen to this shit incessantly -- they seemed like communal cartoon witches to me, just taking what they could and pumping out something that seemed so magical and effortless.
de la soul - is dead
dj magic mike - back to haunt you
my family moved to rural pennsylvania from jacksonville florida when my father retired from the navy. i was 13 years old at the time. at age 14, i was listening to de la soul is dead over and over in my walkman every single day. this was the first kind of concept album i'd ever spent time with and i loved the music and was amazed at the construction of the album and how it all fit together. that year i took a train back to jacksonville to spend a week and a half with my best friend from my time there. i listened to the de la soul tape the whole way there. when i got to his house, i was so excited to share this discovery, especially since he had always been more into music than i was and was the first person i remember hearing rap from. i played the tape for him and he looked at me like i was out of my mind. he put on this dj magic mike tape and let me know that this was music that really hit and that the de la record was just weird and weak. throughout the rest of my time there, we spent our mornings drinking vodka and listening to the d.o.c., gucci crew, and poison clan while his mom was at work and taking the bus to the mall before she arrived home. i realized on this trip that my friend and i were already growing apart. i also realized how narrow my idea of rap music was, despite thinking that the de la album was so unique and apart from a lot of other rap i knew.
beatles - revolver
unlike a large percentage of people in the western world of a certain age, i did not grow up with my folks playing the beatles non-stop. my folks liked them alright, but were simply not at all into music. they owned maybe a handful of records but that was it. still, i heard this music so much throughout childhood being at friends houses that it is probably the single biggest influence on how i look at music/sound.
suicide - s/t
nico - chelsea girl
kraftwerk - man machine
in highschool, i became friends with this 30 year old former garage punk type dude in my town. i drank a lot of beer, popped some pills and listened to tons of garage, rockabilly, old r&b and such with him. he played a lot of shit that was just totally foreign to me at the time. he also played the above three records for me. i remember thinking it was weird that he was into the nico record especially. all three records became favorites and i will always associate them with a time of realizing just how boundless and endless one's investigation of music should be. realizing that the unifying thread that runs through the music you love isn't necessarily about similarities in sound or style or anything else easily identified.
funkadelic - america eats its young
the impressions - i'm so proud 45
i remember buying both of these records within probably a week or two of each other. living in a small town with one record store that serviced the local university and spending a lot of my time listening to music and reading liner notes and taking little dollar chances on records here and there. i knew the names "funkadelic" and "curtis mayfield" and the records were cheap, so i picked them up. i was really hoping for something that i could draw a direct line to from the music i was currently listening to (rap). i didn't exactly get that (maybe to a degree with the funkadelic record). america eats its young really set my head spinning. i knew the later music of parliament/funkadelic to some extent already, and this wasn't that. it was one of the first times i can remember being totally surprised by a record. the impressions record was also a surprise, albeit a more gentle one. this was a record i played at home by myself but would have never put on when any friends were around. the record really took me somewhere whenever i listened to it and i was sure that it would lose some of its appeal (and that i would get clowned for being into this soft old ballad) if i were to share it. it's still one of my favorite impressions songs.
I, too, appreciate the posts in this thread.
It is hard condensing a collection of thousands and thousands of records into 25 that embody my life. With each record picked, there are hundreds of contenders being cut. The easy part, in my opinion, is writing about the final 25. I could write reams and reams about these records. I've done so elsewhere, already. So I thought it appropriate to try and distill these 25 records to their absolute essence. I'm no Basho, but obviously the best format for such concision is haiku.
The haiku are in 5 sections, roughly chronological and roughly representing different stages of record nerd-dom in my life. Like Zvi said, it's fairly scattershot, as everything I like overlaps, but I imagine this is true of most of us.
I offer: 25 HAIKU for 25 LPs[/b]
SECTION I
"MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN COWBOYS"[/b]
(Formative years. The modern-day-drifter)
cowboys like smokey old pool rooms
and clear mountian moringings
little warm puppies and children
and girls of the night
willie nelson - "shotgun willie"[/b]
hated this back then
drunk uncles yelling at me,
"make 'em be doctors..."
"...and lawyers, and such."
country music was all we
ever listened to
today, though, willie
is an absolute favorite
don't see family much
merle haggard - "mama tried"[/b]
"i turned twenty-one
in prison, doing life without
parole ... ... mama tried"
waylon jennings - "honky tonk heroes"[/b]
toothless dudes in bars
talkin 'bout fucking whores
seemed "normal" to me
"all that i do is
all that i ever will be
old five and dimers (like me)"
kris kristofferson - "kristofferson"[/b]
junkies and juiceheads
complete gangster shit, really
drunk; readin' your mail
bocephus - "family tradition"[/b]
pretty terrible
but i can't throw it away
i love all these songs
"Hank, why do you drink?
And why do you roll smoke?"
Family Tradition
SECTION II
HEAVY METAL VOMIT PARTY[/b]
(File: Furthest From Country)
her stomach bursts
the casket breaks
the seed has taken form
a writhing shape
of twisted flesh
the devil's child is thrown
cassette dub of metallica's "am i evil" [/b]
i listened to this
every morning, showering
practice headbanging
slayer - "hell awaits"[/b]
before i knew about
dictionaries, asked mom, "what's a ..."
"... necrophiliac?"
dropped her cigarette
yelled at me, "what the fuck is
going on in there?"
celtic frost - "to mega therion"[/b]
jesus as slingshot
when you are thirteen, i mean
what could be cooler?
w.a.s.p. - "w.a.s.p."[/b]
i got expelled for
wearing "fuck like a beast" shirt
totally virgin
"i wanna be some-"
"-body... be somebody, soon"
signed, blackie lawless
yngwie j. malmsteen - "rising force"[/b]
so godawfully bad
why oh why oh why
was i into this?
SECTION III
"BE NICE, SAY THANK YOU"[/b]
(Punk/Independent Revelation)
you say i need a job
i've got my own business
wanna know what i do?
none of your fu[i]cking business[/i]
velvet underground - "white light/white heat"[/b]
mimi, my dyke cousin
gave me this when i was ten
"sister ray"? OMG ... WTF?!
circle jerks - w??nderful[/b]
locked up with a dude
he told me, and the name stuck
had to see for self
loved it, but years later
found dude drunk, homeless on streets
and tried to help him
took him to his folks
lived in a fuckin' mansion
"what the? this ain't punk!?"
verbal abuse - "v.a. rocks your liver"[/b]
ran away from home
in skinhead aaron's vw bug
ate dirty hot dogs
smelled a girl's panties
didn't know elton john wrote
"saturday night's alright..."
didn't care, either
i was eating dogs/panties
livin' the dream, man
bad brains - "roir"[/b]
dude fucking my sis
gave me this on a cassette
i woulda sucked his dick
happy go licky - "happy go licky"[/b]
start of everything
really, haiku can't contain
i cheated: go here
SECTION IV
"BROTHER, I CAN SEE MYSELF IN YOU"[/b]
(aka, Learning Dynamics Outside of Extremes)
"suicidio!
. . .
in questi fieri momenti
to sol mi resti"
{ { { translation } } }
suicide!
. . .
the sole resource now left me
bob dylan - "bringing it all back home"[/b]
you can be twice as hard
without screaming / distortion
"have to stand naked"
maria callas as ponchielli's "la gioconda"[/b]
"suicidio!"
act 4 fucked with me heavily
callas' last words
opened me to epics
& all-things spliced, avant, free,
minimal, concrete
public enemy - "it takes a nation of millions to hold us back"[/b]
dubbed this from my one
black friend... (you've heard all the rest)
blah, blah, blah, blah... STEP!
fuzzy haskins - "whole nother thang"[/b]
fuzzy belonged to
my best friend's father -- mine now
gateway to the crates ???
and stuff like gil's 125th
which helped me to realize
i was raised by racists
spent the next decade
vomiting and vomiting
undoing my course
steven jesse bernstein - "prison"[/b]
source of all the best
quotes, "find a hurt place and don't
ever let it heal"
if you were a girl
who fucked me in the nineties
stevie is why you left
SECTION V
"I'M ALL THAT'S LEFT"[/b]
(On Going For Self)
found the things
i crown my favorite things
are just things
and the records
that i listen to
they don't sound so good to me anymore
"you're a slave to your appetites" (unreleased)[/b]
friends make the best music
saw them play hundreds of times
end = swappin' girlfriends
"i laugh, i laugh, i laugh in your faces" (unreleased)[/b]
start new band with friends
recruited a local gal
to be our singer
she thought we were cool
at first, then started asking
troubling questions
like, "why're all our songs
about committing suicide?"
broke up; drunk; poked
now, 8 years later
sing, "intone this, the final . . ."
"...refrain" still slyly sad
judith and holofernes - "abra??a a tristeza"[/b]
best friends suicided
3 in a row, rest of us...
stopped breathing for years
came out other side
recorded really sad songs
drunk, fucking, guilt, "hope"
decided together
to pour our lives into this
for better or worse
brings meaning to words,
part of me you loved is dead
i am all that's left
last of the blacksmiths - "young family song"[/b]
used to dig with nathan
told him once, "i hate records"
"nothing can cheer me"
he thought it crazy
"is there any hopeful song?"
no. "fuck all records"
years later he felt
similarly despaired, and
wrote this song bout me
we released the record
both alive; with a hope song
full circle. who knew?
the future is unwritten [(unwritten)][/b]
never really thought
i'd be alive this long, so
life won and i lost
this fifth space is left
intentionally blank, for
whatever hope's next
1. Michael Jackson - Thriller[/b]
My first musical obsession. I remember nothing of my first house except for the day my parents brought home this giant mitsubishi (yes) stereo and I begged them to play "billie jean" over and over again.
2. Sade - Stronger Than Pride[/b]
3. James Taylor - Sweet Baby James[/b]
My parents definitely weren't jamming Love or Dolphy, but in retrospect mom had decent, if oddly narrow taste (pops on the other hand was into mostly unforgivable tripe). Aside from Thriller these are basically the only two albums I remember hearing in the eighties (though I think I may have buried a windham hill compilation or two in the depths of my subconscious?) Both artists stir up some interesting emotions whenever i hear them in wawa and I think that is because I secretly love these records more than any gangster rap.
4. Dr. Dre - The Chronic[/b]
Dre and Snoop were the first and last celebrities i wanted to be. I later saved up for a penguins jersey so i could look like snoop in the gin and juice video. Since then I've loved a lot of music since but none has ever inspired to engage in that level of hero worship.
5. Nirvana - In Utero[/b]
This is the greatest rock album of the 90s but more than musically, Cobain was the artist that taught me to actively search for other great music. Prior to this record and the surrounding hype (im young enough that i only have the vaguest memories of nevermind...) I was just eating up the acts I saw on mtv or where ever. Cobain interviews set me off on looking for music, dubbing all kinds of weird shit off the older siblings of friends and searching for old vinyl thinking i was going to find the f*cking raincoats album in the bins of the antique malls my parents were dragging me to.
6. Stevie Wonder - Innervisions[/b]
What i did find at the antique malls. set me off on a decade of searching for equally transcendent soul music and mostly failing.
7. Nas - Illmatic[/b]
I wasn't cool enough to buy this record when it came out, probably missed the source buzz by about a year, but I was later gassed off "If I Ruled The World" and It Was Written hadn't yet dropped so I instead got this out of the princeton record exchange budget section. i spent the next five years buying every half interesting rap album in said budget section, trying to recreate the feeling of hearing this for the first time.
8. Mr. Bungle - Disco Volante[/b]
What cobain did for exploration patton and co did for experimentation. I bought this the day it came out, having really enjoyed their self titled album in the way that any 11 year old would like goofy rock rapping about knocking up betty crocker and flaming anuses. The more adventurous musical nuances of that record were lost on me, but this was an unavoidable mindcrush - avant jazz freakouts, disjointed ethno techno loops, long bursts of silence. Anything but traditional songwriting. At first I hated it for its formlessness but just forced myself to accept it because, well, i couldn't really afford to not like an album I just spent sixteen dollars on. over time it opened some damn doors.
9. Outkast - Atliens[/b]
10. Goodie Mob - Soul Food[/b]
Musically perfect, but also took such a subtle and human approach to heavy issues like poverty and racism and the drug trade that they shaped my world view in ways i wouldn't understand until years later.
11. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2[/b]
12. Nurse With Wound - Soliloquy For Lilth[/b]
taught me that the most powerful music barely exists.
13. Curtis Mayfield - Curtis[/b]
This is the time I didn't fail re: #6
14. De La Soul - Buhloone Mindstate [/b]
this made me rethink the way i write words.
15. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme[/b]
the album that upgraded my religious belief from that of a proud atheist to confused/optimistic atheist. i don't really care to believe but at the same time i fail to understand how something like this can exist without the guidance of a higher power. listening to it for the first time was like witnessing a miracle.
16. Jay-Z - Vol. 3[/b]
i was starting to buy into the whole rawkusy pop rap rage around this time but jay totally debunked all that because he was rapping better than anybody else on the planet.
17. Eugene McDaniels - Headless Heroes of the apocalypse [/b]
One of the first records I got off ebay in high school for a then heart stopping price of $50. I did it for teh breaks but then got totally wrapped up in the mythology and the politics of eugene. I know you guys probably mock this for being on some 98 wall record steez and because he's a pretty shitty vocalist but it's still a really intense work that sounds like nothing else. permafiled.
18. Too Short - Born To Mack[/b]
19. E-40 - In A Major Way[/b]
Prior to going to college I could've sworn I knew every damn thing about rap music. The first week of school i met the bay expat homie and would be radio cohost JG and dude started schooling me on all this bay shit I had since ignored (that bicostal ignorance works both ways - just a few months back i was out with dude and we heard "buck em down." he asked me if it was arrested development...) I was aware of Short and 40 and Spice 1 and Mac Dre mostly from source ads and cameos and "5 on it" but they just never were presented as something worth exploring further. (I was on that hierohobolegends.) These records in particular and living in dc (the SOUF) on the whole really helped me better understand hip hop as a localized phenomenon, which has informed so much of my writing.
20. Sonny Sharrock - Black Woman[/b]
I think I told this story here once but I bought this record in baltimore years ago and then my car then broke down. I laid the parking lot of a jiffy lube and listened to it on a portable like a half dozen times in a row. sunlight warped the record, record warped my thoughts.
21. Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges - Clube De Esquina[/b]
When I was younger I never had interest in leaving the united states because I thought the absence of good rap in other countries rendered them worthless. This record and the string of mind numbing brazilian music that I devoured in its aftermath weakened the second half of that thesis. Now I have a passport, grip world music and am growing my hair to ponytail length.
22. Common Sense - Resurrection[/b]
the thing about this album is that i listened to it all through high school as a headphone obsession on some "did you hear he said who he's talking bout yall is hip hop?" punchline sweating alongside a dozen other tapes that haven't held up quite as well but then as i got older and was living in the sort of unemployed mild alcoholic haze that com speaks of it started to make sense on an entirely different level. i fucked with it then but i caught it later.
Had my mind blown by 'Everyday' on the oldies station as one of the first songs I ever heard.
2. Holst - The Planets
My dad is a big classical music fan, I graduated from John Williams/superhero themes to this as a young'n. Mars was always my shit.
3. Oasis - (What's the Story) Morning Glory
I was 11 years old when this came out. It was a big deal.
4. The Beatles - Sgt. Peppers
Knew all the hits, but this was the first Beatles album I really got stuck into.
5. Radiohead - The Bends / OK Computer
Recorded these albums onto one cassette and listened to it on the bus to school for about 2 years.
6. Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
I was young/naive and should have known better.
7. Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions
London, England...consider yourselves WARNED!
8. Tribe Called Quest - Low End Theory
I remember putting this on the communal stereo at school to much derision. I rather naively believed Q-Tip to be the greatest of all-time for an embarrassingly long period.
9. DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
The usual cliched introduction to blazing downtempo and mad raers.
10. The Pixies - Doolittle
A friend lent me this and Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation at the same sort of time. It was all about the Pixies.