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I also have love for this thread.
What it mainly got me thinking about was how your choices reflect not just the development of your own musical tastes, but the time and the resources you had when you started and how long ago that was. With that in mind, most of these seem to me like very well known choices, not expressing any idiosyncratic “me-ness”, but they are important to me in terms of what I was listening and responding to, which I suppose is the point.
Getting it down to ten was fucking hard though. P J Harvey’s This Mess We’re In misses the cut mostly because relatively recently I’ve rambled on about her elsewhere. Excluding jazz and classical I finally managed it, if this was a charting interest in music as a form thread or even just a list of music that moves you they’d have to be in there, but in terms of biographical interest I guess I identify periods of my life a lot more with songs that have a combination of music and lyrics. If they were allowed something from Sketches of Spain would be in there about halfway in and Schubert and Arvo Part’s Alina would be somewhere near the end. It’s not cheating. Not really.
So anyway, here goes:
R.E.M. - I Don’t Sleep, I Dream
On holiday with the family somewhere in the Mediterranean, quite young. After a day where I probably got too much sun, we went back to the apartment and I fell asleep with a tape of my parents’ Monster album playing on a walkman. I think it was the first time I really noticed the effect music could have on you; I woke up and I felt changed, my memories of falling asleep with the heavy, imposing guitars reverberating in my mind and being disordered by them, but… lacking the power to move in turn, being held down by the music and spoken to. The album was unmistakably adult, menacing, capricious, Stipe’s tone by turns threatening, accusatory, angry, fragile, full of longing and unspoken hurt. I probably didn’t have much comprehension of what a “secret life of indiscrete discretions” (from the equally oppressive Bang and Blame) actually was, except that I was ever so gradually moving towards it. I Don’t Sleep, I Dream would also be my first experience with lyrics that were so suggestive and yet remained oblique, and it was that song that best combined the sense of invitation with the weight of the music and the ironic delivery of the rest of the album.
The Cranberries - Sunday
From the first CD I bought. Which, derision inducing as it might be, I remain oddly proud of, and still quite like. Appropriately enough, this song was literally about romantic confusion and inarticulate longing, which would entirely describe my growing predilection for music of a melancholic disposition for reasons that I certainly couldn’t describe at the time.
Skunk Anansie – All I Want
Another great album where it’s difficult to pick out a single track – how could you try and argue that “Everyday Hurts a Little More” wasn’t the perfect soundtrack to those troubled early teenage years? [One of the other things I like about this thread is that it’s made me go back and listen to the albums I’d have been playing semi-obsessively and try and work out not what I prefer now but what most spoke to me then.] But All I Want’s defiant, all-consuming, all I want to do is DESTROY and start over again rage, fitted perfectly into my increasing dissatisfaction with the world and need to ROCK. This would also be the second (but far from last) time I felt drawn to an artist whose own identity and experience was so clearly alien from mine, however ignorant I might have been about what being “queer” meant.
Alanis Morrissette – I Was Hoping
[Slight interruption]: Lots of songs by depressive female singer/songwriters that I cared about and listened into the ground at the time and that overwhelmed me didn’t make the cut. Tori Amos didn’t make it, Fiona Apple and Kristin Hersh didn’t make it. Despite the fact that at nineteen, with a new place and new friends, a boyfriend, a newly shaved head and the feeling of starting to construct my own sense of my life Ani DiFranco’s first album, with all the quiet, precise songs about the heartache of lost desires and needing to tie off certain relationships as if they were wounds, even the iconic, defiant image on the cover, had a particular resonance for me, there was no one song that I related to as defining that part of my life. And I think in general while these singers are themselves quite unique and don’t deserve to be lumped together in even a broad category, for a period of 2-3 years I was listening to them in quite a homogenised way, using them repetitively to return to and refresh feelings of grief, and perhaps related to that I don’t think there are many songs by these singers that I associate as turning points in my personal life, so much as iterations on a theme. [/interruption]
So why a song from the chronically uncool Alanis’ second album? Because this was the song I cried over most and first. I cried and cried and sobbed and cried, playing the same tracks over and over again. Going back in time again, I was still at school, desperately unhappy, and the person I had been pinning my hopes on of making me a good person, of transforming me, inevitably proved not capable of performing that function. The song itself is a breathless, confessional narrative of looking for empathy, punctuated by mortifying, desperate admissions of need, and again we’ve got that idea of grief as something that says the same distressed thing over and over again; and in tone more than anything else that entirely described my life at that moment in time.
Marilyn Manson - Minute of Decay
I remember scribbling the lyrics to this into one of my folders, to my schoolmates’ confusion and dismay. Definitely not cool. By this point, righteous teenage anger and disappointment had turned towards lyrics that dealt with cruelty, revulsion, hatred for others directed inwards, and most of all aggressive, empowering, irreversible difference. Incoherent rebellion with pretensions of irony and sophistiphication. This song stood out in that it summed up how empty either choice of normalcy or degeneracy the album presented felt. The jagged, militaristic sound of most the other songs gave way to a plodding, sodden inevitability of sound. The other reason was that the idea of conforming to other people’s expectations was so tempting, the idea so comforting and so obviously futile, was very easy to immediately identify with, and at that point of lacking any hope of or desire to return to those expectations so was the idea of deliberately striking out that identity. Not much point trying to sugar-coat it: this was the song that confirmed (at the time) that everything once valuable was lost and if there was any reason to continue at all it’s out of sheer spite.
The Stooges - Dirt
The long, slow dirge at the end of the first side of Funhouse, ‘Dirt’ isn’t the most obviously uplifting song on an album which has the pounding ‘down on the street’ and the frantic mix of rock, punk and jazz of the title track. But I remember putting this on for the first time and thinking that if I had anything I had this: a song which describes being utterly shattered and yet continuing to live and be creative and even if you didn’t have things to long for then to have longing. It made me the happiest I think I’d ever felt as an individual to feel there was this starting point that no matter how broken up you got as long as you held onto that longing whatever hurt you would always be worth it. I think it was that idea of a starting-point, important lyrically, that mirrored the slow build-up of the song - a sort of gathering immensity that could reach outwards but whose amplified pulse remained as the source, powerful and constant.
Minor Threat – In My Eyes
Along with Black Flag, Minor Threat meant resistance, personal survival, deliberately choosing a sense of community different to the norm, rejecting the traditional “change for the same” incoherent alcoholic rebellion that you’d grown up around. Also probably the first steps in trying to appreciate music that was violent, jarring, difficult to listen to, and a further mark of difference in trying to explain to your friends why you were listening to music that was maybe sometimes more historically interesting or challenging than it was enjoyable. And partly I’m sure, because being even moderately into the twenty year old DC hardcore scene was something no-one else around me at the time was doing, or even aware of, so I’m sure that adopting that perspective was partly just out of trying to differentiate myself, and in some ways just another way of rejecting, rejecting, rejecting.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Hallelujah
I gave the no more shall we part album to my best friend before I left for Greece on holiday in the first summer between university terms, and bought a copy for myself as well, so it was the last thing I listened to before I left. As a suite of songs which sonically, lyrically and thematically hangs together, and in terms of following an emotional narrative throughout the songs, I think it’s the best album they’ve produced, and I’d generally find it difficult to pick out any one song above another. I had the lyrics of several of the songs running around my head, and in contrast to such a relentlessly morose album, that summer was the best I’d ever had and the most light-hearted and clear-sighted I’d felt. There was that sense of having survived the teenage pitfalls and moved on, established a new identity that not just allowed for happiness, but allowed for reflection on unhappiness which wasn’t so, well, morbid. And no more shall we part was somehow the soundtrack for that survival, and for the recuperation and longing to go back to loved ones refreshed. And at some point, wandering around Crete, I was walking back along a deserted road after getting some water from town cheerily singing the refrain from Hallelujah when a group of young Greek guys drove by. I didn’t think much of it until they returned, clapping and cheering, which from that day has left me wondering whether my singing was so praiseworthy or laughable, or whether beautiful, warm, blue-skied Crete is a secret enclave of gloomy Nick Cave fans. Anyway, a vicious wind blew hard and fast and when I got home me and my best friend were on our way to going down different roads.
Gang of Four – Damaged Goods
Move forward to a couple of years ago, and this is what’s playing when I play my first game of poker, when I decide to quit my first job, the accompaniment to any number of changes and new experiences. Musically it reflected a more difficult, more chaotic sense of life, energy searching for a way to escape inevitable enclosing structures, music that’s hard and intricate at the same time. This was me wanting glorious, violent music whose precision is so complete and fast that I can’t follow it but makes me get up and try: being jerked around in different directions and trying to keep up. Gang of Four are standing in here not just for the other groups that I became interested in over the interceding years, following that chain of associations with past groups and recommendations, but also as one of the finds that comes from exploring different styles of music where your musical taste has broadened while individual finds may have ceased to be always so significant. Lyrically, ‘Damaged Goods’ were only the things that by this point I was starting to leave behind and beginning to replace, and Gang of Four are probably a decent placeholder of where I shifted towards being less invested in the narrative qualities of songs showing me things and where they became a way of energetically enacting things I already knew, I’d stopped feeling guilty for the wrong things and I needed a different sort of movement to loosen me up and sweat out those angry feelings of recrimination. Disappointments, hopelessness, guilt, embarrassment, stasis, settling for less: “I’m kissing you goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…”
Talking Heads - The Book I Read
A year and a bit ago. And by now having acquired most of their back catalogue, I’m all about the Talking Heads, so picking one song misrepresents slightly: but if I get only one, then the live version of ‘The Book I Read’ from The Name of This Band is Talking Heads. This song makes me dance. And Talking Heads were designed to fill you with joy as this thread will attest.
Anyway, one year ago or so, my hair grown long enough again to slick back, chunky glasses, I’d never looked so preppy or felt more confident, and for a moment in time I felt very assured about the role I was occupying even aware that it wouldn’t last forever, and having a young David Byrne as a personal culture hero just seemed to fit into that: this thin, nerdy, slightly offbeat guy that went from nowhere Scotland and conquered New York (for a time) but kept changing, transforming, exploring, but retaining that self as well.
Which is partly what I think of when listening to the music, preservation of memory, bonds of affection, letting go of things that weigh you down. Lyrics that were literate, funny, clever, compassionate, earnest, unrehearsed: certainly all of the things that I aspired to be. Being aware of being young and entirely glad to be making mistakes and doing embarrassing things, at least while the music’s playing, not being afraid of being honest, energising, ceasing to see things in the same patterns, becoming unselfconscious in a conscious way. The music seemed to open up this much freer emotional landscape that reconfigured familiar romance into something else and that I finally felt ready for.
I remember my Dad had a Talking Heads video with David Byrne doing Once in a Lifetime in the big white suit, so I guess it must have been Stop Making Sense, and I remember how it made me feel sad and funny at the same time: being drawn to something but not being able to process it yet: so in some ways a rather circuitous backwards route through Punk and New Wave has got me back to at least one of my starting points, but more than that: moving through various much more structured genres and I’ve arrived at a point where, a bit like the Talking Heads, my tastes are much more malleable and eclectic, and much less likely to reject music that I don’t entirely identify with.
And the song! The gentle yet somehow declarative opening that hints at the precision, the fitting-together-ness of each note, the driving disco beat ordered by the drums, Byrne crooning, yelping, whooping, singing, the rhythm escalating, relaxing, speeding up, approaching losing control yet getting more complex, more and more information in a smaller space, Byrne’s voice soaring through it and above it, bringing it under control again, hard and decisive one moment and tender the next, eventually an incoherent accompaniment that punctuates, dives into, even melds with the music: continue until exhaustion.
Oh...I’m living in the future.
I feel wonderful.
I’m tipping over backwards
I’m so ambitious
I’m looking back
I’m running a race and you’re the book I read so…
A love song that was the perfect combination of intellectual understanding meeting emotional, unselfconscious longing, pop music that goes straight to your hips and the soft spot in your heart. This song was singing to me my own feelings about racing towards the future, being full of an unfulfilled desire, being someone quite rigid learning to loosen up, feeling slightly uncertain, out of control, being happy with that, being in love with that. |
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