Sorry this is so late; I had a lot of work/love/life shit to get out from under, and was only really able to get into this starting this past weekend.
Anyway, in the interest of playing along:
25 (Give Or Take) LPs That Shaped My Life:
(in alphabetical order)
Laurie Anderson -- Home Of The Brave
The B-52???s -- The B-52???s
The Beastie Boys -- Paul???s Boutique
Big Black -- The Hammer Party
Booker T & The MGs -- Greatest Hits
James Brown -- Revolution Of The Mind
John Coltrane -- A Love Supreme
De La Soul -- 3 Feet High and Rising
Earth Wind & Fire ??? I Am
Billie Holiday -- Lady In Autumn
The Jungle Brothers -- Done By The Forces of Nature
Curtis Mayfield -- Super Fly
Nice & Smooth -- The Jewel Of The Nile
Parliament -- The Mothership Connection
The Pixies -- Doolittle
Prince -- Sign O??? The Times
Public Enemy -- Fear Of A Black Planet
The Red Hot Chili Peppers -- Mother???s Milk
Lou Reed -- Magic And Loss
The Replacements ??? Let It Be
Sly & The Family Stone -- Greatest Hits
Sonic Youth -- Goo
Soul II Soul -- Keep On Movin???
Steely Dan -- Gold
They Might Be Giants -- Flood
Various -- The Big Easy Soundtrack
Various -- Red Hot + Blue
Various -- Repo Man Soundtrack
The Violent Femmes -- The Violent Femmes
Tom Waits ??? Rain Dogs
And in the interest of taking my own advice:
25 LPs That Shaped My Adult (Post-College) Life:
(in the order in which I wrote them)
Kate Bush ??? The Whole Story
When I bought this at the old 2nd Hand tunes, Big Mike with the tattooed hands laughed at me, and may have even called Pete out of the back to laugh at me, too. But fuck them. Kate Bush was probably the first all-around female musical obsessive I was really exposed to; before that, it seems like it was always women who sang but didn???t write, or wrote but didn???t produce, or did it all but not extraordinarily. The love and the character that went into these meticulously crafted little worlds was revelatory, and even as I found her voice sometimes trilling and her lyrics sometimes cloying and her overall preciousness sometimes intolerable, the vision in the combination nonetheless left me utterly magnetized. I hear lots of echoes of her influence, but no one seems to get the whole thing: They get the witchiness but not the love, or they get the magic but not the muscle, or they get the eccentricity but not the hooks. And as a frequent trafficker in the typical record-nerd equivalencies (???If you like ______, you might like _____???), it???s always jarring in the best possible way to be faced with something so resistant (???If you like this Kate Bush record, you might like...uh, these other Kate Bush records.???). A perfect illustration is in the bottom half of ???Running Up That Hill???: She sings that unbearably clarion chorus over and over as the track expands more and more, trying to subdue it, until at last, the only thing that can overtake her voice is a massed chorus of...her voice.
Clipse ??? Lord Willin???
Almost all of the gangster rap I???ve ever heard holds at its core a gospel dread, or at the very least some kind of essential dissatisfaction. At the center of Lord Willin???, though, there is a deadness. All of its threats and promises and regrets and remorse and apologies stop short of its full depth; beyond them, there is this absence that cannot be filled. The production vaults around it, the voices go flat against it. At some point before this record was made, the Clipse threw something away, something important, and it is gone now. Their unacknowledged pursuit, through relentless application of skill, of whatever it is has resulted in some of the most absolute blues I know. During times when life feels like an endless dig toward a vault that has most likely already been emptied, I find this to be a record of great sympathy. It feels weird to say that about something that bears the words ???featuring Jermaine Dupri,??? but shit, it???s like that sometimes, isn???t it?
Ghostface Killah ??? Supreme Clientele / Camp Lo ??? Let???s Do It Again
These two records changed the way I think about language. I write a fair amount, I listen a lot, and I read a whole lot, and I have for a long time, and even though I encountered both of these records several years after I???d stopped expecting to have my mind changed about this kind of thing, straight up: these two records fundamentally changed how I think about the ways in which words fit together and what they can accomplish. Along with, I think, the negative example provided by some of the lesser works of (the often-mighty) Dave Tompkins, these records sparked my realization that the best writing doesn???t cuff itself with false choices: it can be dopey and powerful, it can be dynamic and immaculate, it can explode in a thousand different directions and still be focused, it can transcribe as literal nonsense but still convey with utter clarity. Supreme Clientele is the rock, and Let???s Do It Again is really the only thing that???s built on it. Astounding records, both. The second verse of Ghostface???s ???One??? is my favorite verse ever.
DJ Shadow ??? The Private Press
I???m a pretty steadfast believer in the old line about how great artists must create for a great audience. I think music is pushed forward and made better when the people responsible for its creation understand???or even just hope???that it???s going to be heard by a broad, disparate, critical audience, and I???m consistently less interested in how a record resonates with its true believers than in how it does with everybody else, and whether there???s an ???everybody else??? at all. I will always think Fear Of A Black Planet is a better record than It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back in part because when Public Enemy made Nation they knew rap fans were listening, and it sounds like it; but when they made Fear, they knew everybody was listening, and damn, it sounds like it???it???s still a rap fan???s record through and through, but it also contains an awareness of that ???everybody else,??? and the record???s implied response to them gives it a tension, an electricity that Nation simply does not have.
I hear a much smaller but equally compelling version of that same dynamic in The Private Press. Before it???s anything else, it???s a gorgeous, nuanced record that shimmers, bangs, and surprises. At the same time, I???ve always heard this record as a response to the teeming community of obsessives/imitators/would-be assassins that DJ Shadow midwived with Endtroducing however many years before; not a ???fuck you??? exactly, but definitely a challenge. Like how the incredibly open, emotional nature of the vending-machine self-recordings that punctuate the record remind the copycats that you need heart, while simultaneously the recordings??? one-of-a-kind nature renders all the rare-record shit kinda moot. Unrepentant pop swellings and huge sampled chunks of uncut earnestness deflate any pretense of the dj???s cool remove. The last handful of songs on this record make the most striking constellation: A bouncing, coolly agitated warning to overly cautious and timid, uh, ???drivers,??? into a palatial and mostly drumless nine-minute elevation of affectingly sincere self-help that seems to stretch the very idea of time before imploding under its own c
rystalline beauty, into a transportational and heartbreaking slab of muscular New Wave that kicks in with ???And...here???s a story about...being free.???
All over this record there???s a revelation of ego and a rejection of limits that gave me the same kind of buzz as Buhloone Mindstate: bookish dude/s who came into their careers humble, just happy to be at the party, finally saying, ???You know what? I???m going to stop pretending that I don???t entirely believe that I???m really fucking good at what I do,??? saying, ???I???m staying here, but I???m going to be bringing in some other shit???I need more.???
Everything I???ve heard from Shadow since has felt like a retreat from this record, and it breaks my heart.
The Avalanches ??? Gimix
Mixes that are ???eclectic??? and ???fun??? are like kisses: They don???t seem like a big deal...until you stumble into an absolutely perfect one???and then it seems like a very big deal indeed. When I first stumbled into this one, I was on the downward spiral into abject obscurantism, monkishly pursuing ridiculously rare 45s to depressingly diminishing returns. In the bright, recognizable chaos of this mix, the sheer radiance of its mongrel generosity, I re-realized that there is nothing like the vitality in common music (???common??? as in ???readily available??? and ???common??? as in ???shared???). Whatever you need, it???s right there for you???all of it. Gimix came to represent for me, as Francois K said about something else, ???the kind of freedom that I think people need to know exists.???
Talk Talk ??? Laughing Stock
Hushed, tremulous, and obsessed--for vast stretches, this music seems to barely exist at all. Which on the one hand is unnerving: listening to this, it doesn???t seem inconceivable that with just a step in the wrong direction, everything could go away. But on the other hand, it???s dizzying: listening to this, it also doesn???t seem inconceivable that with just a step in the right direction, you could start over.
Joni Mitchell ??? Blue
In high school, I got into Joni???s ???Big Yellow Taxi???-era stuff in an effort to get next to a girl who liked same. That went well until it didn???t, at which point all that stuff started sounding hokey and intolerable to me, so I set Joni down for a while. Many years later I was watching a lot of commercials on late-night tv, with occasional interruption by brief bursts of The Band???s Last Waltz movie, and I saw for the first time Neil Young???s performance of ???Helpless,??? backed by The Band and with Joni singing background from, I think, somewhere offstage. She was shown only in silhouette, and her vocals were swooping and almost wordless???windswept and otherworldly, like one of those chromed women perched atop some skyscraper. Shortly thereafter I picked up Blue and found myself pretty bewitched by its cool, slightly alien quality. There were still a couple moments of the giggliness that had soured me in the first place, but this time they seemed beamed in from farther away, from the far side of something far more interesting than it was back then. Mostly, though, I was taken by how the intimacy of the sound seemed to always be cloaking an essential remoteness. Sometimes it feels like a leopard following you only with its eyes, sometimes it hovers enigmatically like the Cheshire frown of office lighting in Alex Katz???s Varick, and sometimes it seems as close as whatever is said when you leave the room, but there???s always something about it that???even in the face of all that confession???is ultimately unreachable. It still fascinates.
Rotary Connection ??? Hey Love / Archie Whitewater ??? Archie Whitewater
Let???s get one thing out of the way: These are both square records. All that shit about collector/digger cachet, all that shit about pedigree (Riperton, Stepney, Chess, etc.), is all just a bunch of smoke. That???s just some shit for when it???s you and your boys. Call it what you want, but these are slightly more progressive (though not that much more progressive) Fifth Dimension records and/or slightly sloppier Blood, Sweat & Tears records. They traffic in the frontal, the unsubtle, the shrill, and the obvious, and no matter how much weight one gives to ???sonics??? or ???atmosphere??? or any of the other devices we use give ourselves some distance, these records come from and go to a place where there is no cool. They are incorporated studio endeavors, fully orchestrated and largely without grit, populated exclusively by bright-eyed co-ed choruses and overwrought lead vocals singing with goodwill about love and the sea and she and friends and neighbors and the seacoast and sitting-rooms. ???Hey, my busy friend / can you slow down???? Oof. No distance, no remove, no cool. Making this realization a few years ago was hugely important in my thinking about what exactly it is I had come to want from music. I felt strongly drawn to these records, but had snowed myself that it was all about ???textures??? and ???funky accents??? and ???concepts??? and ???Chicago, yo??? and whatever else. At the same time, I had this creeping fear that these were in fact some deeply corny records???that I???d been tricked into sitting at the not-cool table. I was confused, though, because I???d recently picked up an instrumental edit of ???Cross Country??? expecting to be excited by it, because it was what I thought I wanted??????That great track without those cheesy vocals???finally!??? But instead, I found it empty and unsatisfying. Then one Saturday morning I was listening to one or both LPs for the umpteenth time, and the twin truths revealed themselves: First, that what I???d been fearing was corniness was actually openness. And second, that such openness is nothing to be afraid of; it???s a rare and beautiful thing, and as I get older and older is something I need more and more. And there???s no cool way to say that. And that???s all right.
In a side note: I received my copy of Archie Whitewater several years back from the hand of DCastillo. There may be one or two dudes left around here that can feel me on the appropriateness of that.
Donald Fagen ??? The Nightfly
My mom has always been a big Steely Dan fan. One of my first memories of any outward manifestations of her individual musical taste that I can remember???maybe the first time ever that I was struck by the thought of my mom as even having individual musical tastes???was when I was about ten, riding along with her in her Olds Ninety-Eight while she did her errands on a sunny weekday afternoon. She heard a Steely Dan song on the radio, and seemed to make up her mind right there: she said, ???You know what? I really like these guys, and would like to have one of their tapes.??? It was a simple thing, but still jaw-dropping to me???you mean Mom actually has music that she prefers? Mom? My mom? We dipped into Record Bar at the Anderson Mall, then listened to Gold for the rest of the afternoon, in between picking up dry cleaning and stopping in the fabric store and whatever else. I didn???t really understand what I was listening to, but it all had this louche, confident allure, and alongside my mom I would listen and nod knowingly, ten years old, sage and ridiculous, now confident in the knowledge that adulthood must be an exciting secret club???shadowy, but where everything worked out???a great cosmopolitan jigsaw puzzle, complex but perfectly interlocking. Yes.
In recent years I???ve re-discovered Donald Fagen???s first solo record, and have caught a deep echo in its underlying meditation on Cold-War America???s fixation on the great, shining future that must have seemed, in the early 1960s, to always be just around the corner. It???s become cliche, but all those domed cities and rocket trains an
d wheels in space, all supported by a unified and visionary general populace, are all now so obviously parts of The Future That Never Was And Never Will Be. Just last year, I learned there???s a word for this: Gernsbackian. Derived from the name of science-fiction writer Hugo Gernsback???the guy who begat all that sci-fi where people in lurex togas speak rationally in the endless breezeways of the clean metropolises of the distant future while various hovering things whisper past, which in turn begat all that fedoras-and-flying-cars stuff, and so on and so on???to be Gersbackian is in part to put stock the essentially flawed belief that even as the world changes and technology advances and the pace of life accelerates, we will nonetheless remain the same at heart, will retain the same admirable morals and olympian ideals, that the way to the future lies in our current selves and sensibility. That???s what I hear at the root of this Donald Fagen record, that faith that even as things complicate and quicken, we will remain clear and steady, that everything will work out, will interlock perfectly. Along with the record, I smile sadly and shake my head. No.
Wild Style Original Soundtrack / Chocolate Star ??? Gary Davis
I grew up liking disco because my parents liked it. They liked it in a wholly typical late-70s/early-80s suburban manner, but they were serious about it in their own small way: They played lots of commercial disco records at home, and a couple times a month they would drive an hour into Cleveland to go ???disco dancing??? at The Big Apple, coming home in the wee hours, not turning the lights on, and smelling like cold weather, cigarettes, and unfamiliar perfumes. I saw pictures of them looking good in their disco regalia, and heard an eight-track recording of the audio from a local news broadcast where my dad got interviewed about why he likes dancing at the disco. It all seemed very grown-up and glamorous, some mysterious big-city ritual. I was hooked.
I grew up liking hip-hop because I liked it. When I was about eleven, there was an assembly at my middle school (some anti-drug thing, I???d guess???they all were back then) and part of the program was two kids from my school???from my very own school!???rapping and breaking. At the end, they mentioned that they???d be opening for Kurtis Blow at Skateland that Friday. I went to check it out. Kurtis was well into his post-???Basketball??? slide at this point, but this was semi-rural South Carolina, so we got shit late, so he was still a pretty big deal; a lot of folks came out, and Skateland put their custom-cut dun-colored carpet over the skating rink just for the occasion. Kurtis came out with both guns blazing, spitting hard staccato while his dj just hammered the drum-machine-based tracks off the album. It was electrifying, but folks just were not into it. Shit was kinda awfully intense, you know? After a couple failed attempts to get something going, Kurtis went over and conferred with his dj for a minute, then came back to the mic with a ???one two, one two,??? the dj dropped thunderous doubles of some disco break, and Kurt ate it alive???just straight party rhymes over some Ultimate Breaks & Beats, on and on and on, and it tore the lid off the place. Ladies were dancing, guys were hollering, someone had some firecrackers...Man, a couple folks pulled up the carpet off the back half of the rink and a fucking skate pit broke out. It was the best thing I???d ever seen. I was hooked.
Later on, once I started actually buying records of both those types, I felt like the stuff I was listening to was always at least one degree removed from the actual, capital-s Stuff that I felt sure must be hiding somewhere: As much as I loved Odyssey???s ???Native New Yorker,??? I didn???t get that adult, dark-room vibe off of it; as much as I loved Furious Five???s ???Freedom,??? it felt a little too scrubbed, a little sterile.
I can???t say that hearing the Wild Style soundtrack several years later ???renewed my belief in hip-hop,??? or that hearing the Chocolate Star bootleg a few years after that ???renewed my belief in disco,??? because I never stopped loving either of them. But up till then I had been kinda cut-off and isolated, both personally and geographically; no one I associated with really liked this stuff, so no one was putting me up on anything, and although I???d occasionally read some tantalizing reference to the existence of ???real, deep disco??? or ???real, old-school hip-hop??? (shout out to World Of Beats???on newsprint, you suckers), I grew up in a small town, and even after I came to the big town, I was real late to the internet, so I had no idea how or where to actually get it. All I can say, really, is that both of these records are important to me because they were???at last???powerful, tangible affirmations of something I???d been taking on faith for so long. Paul Westerberg: ???I didn???t know you, but I knew you were out there.???
Ike Reilly ??? Salesmen And Racists
Like a lot of folks who live in big cities, there???s all sorts of worthy Chicago shit that I???d never get around to of my own volition, that it takes someone from out of town to get me into. Had my mom not visited from Ohio, would I ever have gone to Shedd Aquarium otherwise? Doubtful.
Similarly, a few years ago my dear friend from Minneapolis gave me a cd-r with sixteen albums on it that he felt I should be up on, one of which was Salesmen and Racists, this great Chicago record that I knew nothing about.
I don???t see a lot of my city, and I don???t see a lot of my dear friend, but I listen to this record a lot and think about my city and about my friend. It???s a spiky, wordy, Chicagoland rock record (shouts-out to the Lincoln Mall and DJ Jesse de la Pena) that???s occasionally a little much, but that I love, but that I really wouldn???t recommend to anyone, but that I love.
Arthur Russell ??? Calling Out Of Context
A few years back, when I found out that he had a copy of the St. Vincent???s Latinaires record that was my grail at that (pre-bootleg) time, I pestered soulstrut???s own MikeFreedomRock for a burn of it. Mike is a swell guy (and a good sport, too: though he was willing to just do it on the strength, I insisted on sending him in exchange a fucking cassette compilation [I was working with very little back then???a couple of dudes here know] of what I thought were some good records, and he was nice enough to not laugh at me), so he hooked my lame ass up and sent me the cd burn, filled out with some unlabelled selections from his collection. One of the fillers was Loose Joints??? ???Pop Your Funk,??? which was weird and spacy and sexual and faintly evil, and which completely split my wig. It took me a while to figure out who it was, and it took me a while longer to make the connection that this male-led, erotically menacing Loose Joints was the same Loose Joints behind the diametrically opposed sunny-side-up of ???Tell You Today??? and the spent-diva throb of ???Is It All Over My Face,??? and it took me yet another little while to stumble upon some Arthur Russell article that made everything clear(er). A very short while after that, I saw something about the release of Calling Out Of Context, Russell???s never-released album from the late 80s/early 90s. I took this succession of events as a sign, and bought Calling more or less blind, having not heard any of it.
It was, and remains, like nothing I???ve ever heard. Processed cello and waves of fuzz over Montronix-level drum programming, vipered through by this questing, heartbreaking voice, all of it sad and futuristic, sexy and distorted, open-hearted and perfect. At a time when my mind was at its muddiest and most cluttered, this gave me a glimpse of still-open territory. I was jaded and calcifyi
ng, and it burned me clean. This record gives me peace like few others. My ark.
Kevn Kinney ??? The Flower And The Knife
This one is tough to explain. I grew up mostly in a small town in upstate South Carolina, and there were very very few good local bands, so our listening and road-tripping leaned pretty heavily on the loose conflagration of mid- to late-80s college-rock bands from North Carolina and Georgia (The Connells, drivin??? n??? cryin???, et al.) that would come to play in somewhat larger towns not too far away. In the early 90s, toward the tail end of high school, this college-rock scene started to share some territory with another scene we were only just becoming aware of, which was more jammy, roots-rock kinda stuff (Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, etc.). It wasn???t ultimately a sound I could get with, but a number of my friends got deep, deep into it, and this kinda hastened the sort of splits that tend to happen anyway toward the tail end of high school. They were already headed one way and I was already headed another, and although this particular difference in musical taste certainly didn???t cause the division between us, it did illuminate it in a way that I guess we could no longer deny.
Anyway, years and years later, I picked up this Kevn Kinney record on a whim, on the strength of a song I???d heard on a compilation cd that I got free with a magazine. I was unprepared for how completely this record from 2003 would encapsulate and evoke the previously described time, the path I did not take, more than a decade after the fact. It???s a solo album by the singer from drivin??? n??? cryin???, with guest spots by the dude from Sister Hazel, liner notes by Col. Bruce Hampton, harmonica by motherfucking John Popper, and god knows what else.
Now, here???s the part that???s hard to explain: I like the record a lot because I like Kinney???s voice a lot, but nothing about the record???s pedigree makes me especially happy???I???m not excited because I recognize all these names; but nor does anything about it make me sad, exactly???I???m not bummed because a lot of these guys were in precisely the bands that my now-distant friends liked but that I didn???t. All I can tell you is that, you know how it can feel when you run into somebody that maybe you knew a long time ago and it somehow energizes you? You didn???t especially like the person, but nor did you especially dislike the person, and bumping into this person isn???t going to rekindle anything???it???s not like you???re gonna start staying in touch now???and your connection to this person isn???t such that you???re plunged deeply into nostalgic reverie, but somehow the encounter gives you just enough? Just enough of a glimpse of where things used to be and where things are now, and even though the glimpse is brief it comes through clear enough that you can see it, deep enough that you can feel it, but neat enough that you can set it down and move on, feeling a little crisper? For me, this record is a lot like that.
The John Coltrane Quartet ??? Africa/Brass
I???m sure there???s some view that says the presence of Creed Taylor???s brass arrangements somehow compromises the music at the core, but to me, this record has always been the sound of Coltrane???s inside world being brought outside, and proving that it???s just as incredible in our daylight as it is in its own dark room.
More to the point, when I got this record I had moved home after college to help out with some family stuff and it was just my mom and I rattling around in this rental house, and when I put this record on, it carried through the place and singlehandedly made life seem a lot fuller.
Garbage ??? Bleed Like Me
Straight-up raw-power brass-knuckle test-tube modern-pop-radio shit. Like I said earlier, great artists create for a great audience, and as much as I love my independents and my obscurities, there is a potency and a hunger in music like this???music that???s hell-bent on getting heard by everybody???that I cannot get from my beloved failers. There is much to be said for music that challenges and surprises, but there???s also a lot to be said for the compressed telepathy that only really occurs in pop music: just when you want to hear the chorus again, there it is; you want the guitar to come up a little, and here it comes; you need something different, and a chord change flowers. There are worse things and there are better things, but there really is nothing quite like that completed circuit. As calculated and as scrubbed-clean and as fake-dangerous as this record may be, as much as I know it???s mostly a musical science experiment, I cannot deny it. Like Butch Vig???s clean-up man said: ???I tell myself I will not go / even as I drive there.???
Apart from being maybe the last great radio-pop rock record I bought, this one is important to me for two reasons:
First, I bought this on a Thursday, and that Sunday morning I had to hustle my procrastinating ass out to an art theater across town to catch the last showing of Masculin/Feminin, which my man r_d had recommended with a fervor that I wanted to see if I could feel for myself. I was in a poor frame of mind, and was out among folks during a time of the morning when I shouldn???t even have been out of bed, especially on a fucking Sunday, and the trip out there was a train and two buses that took like a day and a half, and I spent almost all of that transit time listening to this record, mostly the part in ???Metal Heart???: ???My sweet Lord, take care of me / for I think I???m done / Kiss my mother on her cheek / and lay my burden down.??? Despite the heavenly weather, it was a heavy day, and it has stayed with me.
Second, I bought this record on a Thursday after work at a store here on the South Side, and in line ahead of me were two teenage black girls, each buying two copies of this same record and squealing like it was the new Pretty Ricky or something. This convinced me that I don???t know anything about anything anymore. And that, too, has stayed with me.
Ben Folds Five ??? Whatever And Ever Amen
All of us have those Moments Of Clarity wherein we realize that shards of the hammy, sentimental, and obvious things from our past are being forged into weapons against our current resistance, and, to our great shame, are succeeding. The shame gets worse when we realize that we will let them???dear god, we will let them. For me, this record occupies one of those moments. I can do without almost all of this guy???s ???funny??? material, but the rest of this record comprises a trojan horse hammered from every keyboard-based thing that I would ever deny???the PM Magazine theme song, Todd Rundgren, Alcoa commercials, the melodica at the start of The Hooters??? ???And We Danced,??? ad infinitum???smuggling in a payload of honest goodwill, deep promise, and sheer heartbreak, sometimes all at once. I give.
Also, this record has ???Smoke??? on it. As one who???s constantly struggling with friendships too long in abeyance, I can barely stand to look this song in the eye. ???Leaf by leaf / page by page / throw this book away... / And we / will / not write a new one.???
Curtis Mayfield ??? Curtis
I???ve long given Stevie Wonder extra credit for being responsible for what I most days consider to be the single saddest moment in music (the simple, inescapable, bottomless last line of ???I Never Dreamed You???d Leave In Summer???: ???Why didn???t you stay???? ) and the single happiest (the first joyous bloom of the chorus in ???I Am Singing???). Similarly, Curtis gets his own room for delivering???on the same record, no less???a song that is the end-of-days apotheosis of what I???ve called elsewhere Judgment Soul, as well as a song that is the ultimate musical manifestation of belief in huma
n potential. My man Dave and I used to have an ongoing debate regarding whether Curtis or Super Fly was the superior record; I always pulled for the former, because while Super Fly is definitely the more flawless of the two, there is nothing on that record as terrifying as ???Hell Below,??? and certainly nothing as transcendent as ???Move On Up.??? If push came to shove, I???d probably say that ???Move On Up??? is my favorite piece of music ever. It is the miracle, the glory of the sun, the human heart open beyond all limits. It is the first piece of music that my first child ever heard, when I hummed the horn refrain as I held her in the first minutes after she was born, knotted in my arms and looking up at me with eyes the color of a river bottom. It is the promise.
But at the same time, man, this is just an exceedingly great Chicago soul record. It???s personal and huge, expert and awkward, bright and dark, sounds great on the radio, at the bar, in my home, out of other people???s cars, has good songs, beautiful vocals, perfect horns, strings both tasteful and otherwise, and bongos under everything. And, I mean, Super Fly was the first non-kid???s record that I ever put on a record player and played (I???d crawl under my bed and play it at the lowest possible volume; I was sure that the bikini chick on the cover meant this record was somehow ???dirty,??? and I didn???t want to get caught listening to it) and is thus untouchable in its own way, but this most recent stretch of my life has been in Chicago, and this record is, I think, My Chicago Record. From its flawed, fractured, powerful nature to its cover photos to the circumstances of my purchase of this particular copy just a few blocks away to the fact that it???s probably a VG at best and I will nonetheless probably never ever mint up, in my mind this record is just effortlessly and inextricably woven into my time here.
Van Morrison ??? Astral Weeks
This record is endlessly and obsessively reaching for what it so clearly already holds in its hands. I can relate.
The New Radicals ??? Maybe You???ve Been Brainwashed Too
The first central truth of this record is that it sounds fucking great. Well, a certain kind of fucking great: it???s supremely talented radio pop, buzzed on studio sheen, giddy and spendthrift???the kind of record where even the choruses have choruses.
The second central truth is that its songs aren???t proper songs as much as they are aesthetic manifestos, which means that it spends a lot of its runtime dancing on the very edge of intolerability. For long stretches, this record often seems to exist mostly as an overt rebuke to a world that it clearly feels is neither smart enough nor perfect enough to contain it. It???s genius shit, but it???s also really narcissistic and snotty, and seems like the kind of thing that wouldn???t make anyone who???s listening feel anything other than pissed-off and/or unworthy.
It seems like it would feel that way, but that???s not really the way it ends up feeling. This record pushes things so far???it???s so smartass and so shameless, and so slick, with so many hooks, it???s belief in its own perfection always so absolute???that almost immediately, within the first sixty seconds of the first song, it hits its saturation point and begins to accomplish something wonderful: it begins to transfer its gift to the listener. First it becomes clear that, no, there is no world in which a record this unrepentantly poppy, this manufactured, could amount to anything; no, there is no world in which lyrics this smart-dumb and self-helpy and sloganeering could mean anything at all. But as the sound takes hold, and as the record???s own smooth mania pulls you quickly and deeply into the whorl, it then starts to feel like, yes, this is all amounting to something, yes, this all does mean something, and then you realize: you are effectively becoming the world in which this record makes sense???in listening to it, you are becoming something more total.
This record is so self-consciously immaculate that it should make me feel a little less perfect, but instead it makes me feel a little more perfect. It really is something.
Miles Davis ??? Dark Magus
By the time this record got officially released in the U.S. in the mid- to late nineties, I???d been hearing little vague, intense things about it for a long time, but had never actually heard any of the music. The day it came out, I ran out to buy it on my lunchbreak, but didn???t want to listen to any of it until I had time to listen to the whole thing (remember those days?). That night, I went back to the rental house that my mom and I were in and made for myself a vast pan of kashi that was good-looking but ultimately so fucked-up and flavorless that I ended up throwing almost all of it away. After that, I laid on the floor of my room in the dark with my head between the two speakers, and listened to the whole thing.
It undid me, simple and plain. The sound came on like disease, insidious and evil. The opening charge was panicky and shrill and furious, but when the rhythm turned slow and seismic, viscous, it was worse, like a malignant one-ton tar baby squatting on my chest. I felt like I was drowning. It was not my custom at the time to pay too much attention to group dynamics when listening to music, but here I heard instance after instance of a small space being cleared and a soloist being disgorged briefly only to be re-devoured by the group, who seemed to always waiting faithlessly and ravenous just outside of the light. It was like watching a horror movie: ???Oh shit--if he doesn???t run faster, they???re gonna get him.??? And time and time again, they did. They got him. It was the most harrowing listening experience I???d ever had.
After it was over, it was ten o??? clock at night and our dryer was busted so I had to drive some bulging garbage bags of wet clothes out to the laundromat across town. The record had already creeped into me like some black lung of the mind, and I was all jittery and afraid. I felt a great imbalance of the nighttime world, like I was moving through fog and that nothing was fixed, that everything I was seeing had only gathered itself in the instant just before I looked at it, and would slither off the instant I looked away. I sat in the fake daylight of the empty laundromat like a man clinging to the mast. Just to have something to do with my hands, I started rifling through my pockets. I found an antique-store receipt folded in half, with the previous day???s grocery list written on one side, and on the other side some phrase I???d copied out of some book that I didn???t buy: ???Kill the wizards.???
Television ??? The Blow-Up
The only reason I ended up listening to Television in the first place is because I???m a big Tom Waits fan. I saw one of those Elektra/Asylum Year Of The EAR comps in a dollar bin somewhere, and bought it for the novelty value of seeing Tom Waits pitched as one of the newest, hottest, most commercially viable things, complete with a caricature of dude by Sam fucking Viviano. On some slow news day several years later, I eventually got around to actually playing the record, and later on that same side was ???Marquee Moon,??? which I???d never heard but really liked. They didn???t have Marquee Moon when I went to the store, though, but they did have this, a then-recently reissued live double cd, and I bought it just on the strength. It was dark and lyrical and cosmic and uptight and often poorly recorded and mostly unfamiliar, but for whatever strange reason, it ended up becoming a regular listen for my wife and I for about two months??? worth of Friday nights. Always Friday, always night. For months. Weird. (A
notable outcome of this period was my discovery that my wife has very different ears than I do, and very great ones: She???d say something like ???What???s that song that goes ???doo doo-doo-doo duh doo-doo...???? I like that one,??? and I???d have no clue what she was talking about, and then after much back-and-forth we???d figure out that the difficulty was due to the fact that beautiful she was identifying ???Marquee Moon??? by the lovely, complicated, open part that precedes the chorus, where simple me could only think of that song in terms of its basic, staccato intro.)
Anyway, I love this record greatly but with an odd exclusivity, by which I mean that these six or so years later I still don???t really own any more of these vintage NYC gee-tar records. In my collection, this one stands mostly alone, a ferocious little walled city.
I???m leaving my twenty-fifth spot blank, as a gift to anyone who???s read down this far. Jesus. Sorry about all that.
