1. ABBA - Greatest Hits (1977). Current music was kind of lacking in the house I grew up in. My parents had a stack of pop 45s they had accumulated through the 50s and 60s, of course, but they hadn't really jumped onto the rock-LP bandwagon. Most of the full albums on the shelf had to justify their presence by being designed as longer-form works -- namely, classical music and Broadway musicals. Three notable exceptions to this were Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, and ABBA. And while I make no apologies for my Fanilowism, what's really remained most fresh in my mind is the Swedish quartet that was once offered one *billion* dollars to mount a reunion tour (they declined, for some reason). I think the reason it does, is that it was a logical pop continuation of the full-orchestration trend that classical and musicals had already set me up for. An ABBA single is full of harmonies, wide washes of sound, and seemingly every instrument they happened to have lying around the studio. Few of their songs sound much alike, and it instilled in me a tendency to pay close attention to other style-hopping kitchen-sink-including artists (see: ELO, late-era Beatles, Jellyfish, Arcade Fire, Janelle Monae, and almost every other artist further down this list).
2. The Police - Synchronicity (1982). This was the first cassette that was bought when my brother got a boom box for his tenth birthday, and we conspired to take full control of our listening habits. "Every Breath You Take" was ubiquitous at the time, but I think I was more interested in the thrashier "Synchronicity II" and its accompanying apocalypse-of-garbage video. What we discovered, though, was a varied record of surreal randomness, bouncing from the obvious radio hits to the Middle-Eastern freakout of "Mother" and the the jazz-leaning "O My God". It was a gateway album for all manner of unapologetic weirdness that I loved during the 80s, and still try to seek out today.
3. Asia - Alpha (1983). For the first ten years of my pop musical education, MTV was the beginning and end. Even now, I'm stumbling across unknown (to me, anyway) aspects of what else was going on in music at the time. With this kind of televised tunnel vision, I was frequently exposed to musicians who had already enjoyed long, storied careers, but with no context I accepted them as just as new as everything else I was hearing. I had no idea who prog-rock titans such as Yes, King Crimson, and ELP were yet, much less that it had taken various members of those groups to form "supergroup" Asia. All I knew was that I loved their expansive sound, the way Geoff Downe's stacks of keyboards and Steve Howe's thrashy guitar sensibilities balanced and spun off of Carl Palmer's thundering drums. It all came together to sound gloriously *huge*. By the time I heard the orchestra come in at the end of their massive ballad "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes", I was sold. Talk to folks who knew me in high school, and you'll learn that this one rarely left the little cassette-holding pocket in the door of my Honda Civic. One of the best closing tracks ever, "Daylight", still gives me goosebumps.
4. Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith (1984). If you're twelve and starting to learn about heavy metal, JP ain't a bad place to start. Following my predetermined M.O., their influence is due to the way they could fill an arena with sound (Two lead guitarists! *Two*!), but for the first time I also was fascinated with the edginess of the lyrics (single entendre "Eat Me Alive" and the chilly vampire-as-metaphor ode "Love Bites" come immediately to mind). This was the first album where I sat down, put the headphones on and actually tried to figure out how they were doing what they were doing, through repetitious study. Seriously, give me a tennis racket, and I can still air-hammer every one of those Downing/Tipton crossfire guitar solos.
5. Level 42 - World Machine (1985). I've already talked in a different blog entry about how I first came to hear Level 42, but looking back, I can now see that it also changed the way I listen to music, and by that I mean how I *physically* listen to music. Now, if you don't mind my setting the Wayback Machine a little, you'll recall that cassettes had two sides, and had to be flipped and rewound/fast-forwarded appropriately if you wanted to listen to something on the other side. The lead single, "Something About You" was the first track on side 1, but the tipping point of deciding to shell out the cash to buy the album came when I heard the first song on side 2, "Hot Water". So for a while after buying it, my brother or I would play "something About You", flip it over, rewind to the beginning of side 2, and listen to "Hot Water". Repeat ad nauseum. After a while, we'd get tired or distracted and let the tape roll farther and farther into the respective sides before turning it over, and that was when I found that the second songs on both sides were good, too. And then the thirds. And the fourths. To this day, I still feel that I've listened to the first track on this album about twice as many times as the last. But this process made me more inclined to look beyond what singles were being hyped, beyond the videos and into what I think are still referred to as "deep cuts". There's much more risk and reward, I found, in discovering things for yourself. It was the first little break in the headlock MTV had me in.
6. They Might Be Giants - Lincoln (1988). Ironically, it was MTV that made me fully realize that there was music out there that it wasn't telling me about. Late on Sunday nights, the show 120 Minutes would play "college radio" videos that wouldn't get played at any other time. It's where I saw XTC's "Dear God" for the first time (as outlined in another blog entry) and also where I discovered "Ana Ng", the opening track from TMBG's second album. The next day, I bought the cassette (I think I made a quick detour into a record store while Christmas caroling downtown with my high school choir) and listened. This album broke so many rules... there should be ten songs at most, not eighteen! Songs need to be around four minutes, not two (there's only one song that tops out at well over three)! Songs shouldn't take left turns and play bridges that seemed totally unrelated! In the span of 40 minutes, TMBG handed me sushi-proportioned bites of rock, jazz, samba, military marches, and even a Christmas song, thereby upending everything that seven years of televised pop indoctrination had drilled into me. I still love them for that.
7. XTC - Oranges and Lemons (1989). Everyone has that one album that defines their high school years, and this is mine. Even if it hadn't been the shared soundtrack of my and Amy's early relationship, I would still have been entranced by it. I listened to it so much that I haven't actually played it in years. I know it so thoroughly that I think I'd just end up listening to it on autopilot. Maybe if I put enough time between me and it, I can experience it somewhat anew when I finally return to wander across Andy Partridge's chrome-plated Technicolor soundscape. Until then, I can at least acknowledge how good it felt to find an album so finely tuned to my spirit. It's somewhat contradictory in its style, utterly cohesive in its variance, a surprisingly upbeat collection considering that it contains songs like "Here Comes President Kill Again" and "Cynical Days". Maybe that's because it's bookended by the psychedelic explosion of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and the introspective, soaring "Chalkhills and Children". Both are songs that marvel at the breadth and depth of the world, but in totally different ways. Splattered everywhere in between is wordplay, immaculate production, and hooky songcraft. It's like all the music I heard in the 80s was leading up to this.
8. Fishbone - The Reality of My Surroundings (1991). It's hard to come up with a better album opening... a multiplied, distorted voice intones what I think is "We will save you now!", followed with a spinning guitar hook that keeps repeating over and over, picking up speed until it smashes into the opening riff of "Fight The Youth". You know you're listening to a great album when there just about every other track would also be an equally epic opener. Honestly, every song here (except the live, silly, and kind of icky "Babyhead") can do no wrong. It's political, it's celebratory, it's punk and gospel and thrash and funk and jazz all rolled into one sparkling package, albeit with sharp edges. Fishbone taught me something that I didn't realize through much of the formal, studio-pristine eighties... music that's fueled by exuberance and enthusiasm is *so* much better.
9. Prince - The Gold Experience (1995). Prince is magic. This we know. But when I take a look back over the advanced-to-expert level of completion I have of his music, this album stands out the tallest. Not bad, considering it was a contractually obligated release (and thus marked not under his given name, but his rebellious 0)+> symbol). With songs strung together by a loose concept of "The Dawn", which is apparently some kind of virtual reality jukebox, he dives headlong into his id-vs.-ego shenanigans with a shot of adrenaline he hadn't had since Diamonds and Pearls. He starts with the 1-2 punch of "P Control" and "Endorphinmachine", and doesn't let up much until the closing number "Gold", in which he takes the spirit of his excellent earlier song "The Cross" and cranks it up to 10. I could just write a list of why every song on this album is awesome, but I'll spare you. I'll just say that it could just as easily be called "The Human Experience", because it ranges from the profane to the sacred, from isolation to connectedness, and the whole time glows under its own power. This is what artists do when they buck the system and become beholden to no one but themselves.
10. Bjork - Homogenic (1999). There's something to be said for an artist who finally cracks the code of what their true voice should be, and you can actually hear that happening to Bjork here. It's appropriate that she opens the album with "Hunter", where the refrain "I'm going hunting" means more than just looking for someone to love... it's looking for inspiration, a new way of existing. Up until this point, Bjork had sort of been comfortably defined by her Iceland-pixie image, with songs that were menacing and silly in equal measure. But on this album, she dives so much deeper... Here's my theory about it. I could be totally wrong, but I think all these love songs are her singing to *herself*. When she says, "You lift me up to a state of emergency" or "This is an alarm call, so wake up, wake up now," when she sings of love unravelling in one song and being woven back together in another, she's being self-reflective, issuing a personal challenge to accept and love herself right before our ears. Don't believe me? Then consider the video that Chris Cunningham made of the final track, the ethereal "All Is Full of Love". It features two china-and-chrome robots kissing each other in slow motion, and both have Bjork's face. Knowing this, these songs ring even more deeply, and show me how the right music can reveal a person's soul.
After the turn of the century, things get fuzzy. Of course, it's hard to pick an album that you've lived with for less than ten years and analyze how it's influenced you. If it's done its job, if it's burrowed its way into your soul and taken up permanent residence, guiding you along the path of your personal future, it takes more time than that. But while there are always new paths to explore, your past will always inform your present as much as you let it. Choose wisely and forge ahead.
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