The Musical Question.....

This is something directly for the music fanatics we have at MoFo, I was thinking about this today:

What is the one CD, Cassette, Album, whatever you wanna call it, that changed the way you felt about music? I mean totally ripped the top of your head, blew your brains out, then put them back in a different order! We had a thread like this for movies, so I wanted to do a music one.

For me, and I'm going to be honest here, it was The Dead Milkmen's Bucky Fellini album. I really never listened to much music before this, I mean, I listened to the Beatles and Elvis, but I wasn't actually into music other than as background noise. Everything when I was in H.S. was corporate hair metal or rap, and I just didn't get it. Then a guy in my shop class gave me a tape of the Dead Milkmen. They weren't very good musicians, the singer sort of talked/screamed rather than sung, but damn it was funny. It was just sick and mean spirited, angry, snotty, almost defiantly bad, as if they were saying, "Yeah, we suck, but we have a tape out and you don't!" This was music made almost exclusively to my tastes and sense of humor. It was a musical middle finger. That tape changed my opinion on music pretty much for good. (I still have it, even though I have the CD now...)

Anyone else?

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"You, me, everyone...we are all made of star stuff." - Neil Degrasse Tyson

https://shawnsmovienight.blogspot.com/

i dont know if any music really affected me in that way. but if anything came close, it would either be 'nail', or 'hole' by scraping foetus off the wheel. 'hole' was the first one i heard, and 'nail' was the first cd i ever bought on my own. the song content and style was and is unlike anything else, and i still think j.g. thirwell has the gnarliest sense of humor, lyrically and musically, of any musician i've ever come across.


ride the wild surf in the bowels of the earth?

COWABUNGA!

Radiohead - The Bends

This album messed me up when I first heard it, I was totally obcessed with it. It changed the whole genre of music I was listening to at the time.

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instrumental rock band that I am in.

I've always listened to music fanatically ever since I was very young. My dad's Elvis and 50's and 60's singles and ep's. Then I was totally obsessed with Kiss from about 8 years old and for a couple of years. I guess Alive made me wanna be a rock star. But I've had two real revelations later in life. The first was The Stone Roses' first album (1989) that I got around 1990-1991. I think I listened to the whole record or at least parts of it every single day for about two years and I still think it's magical. That record actually got me involved in bands with people with similar taste in music and it all became a little more serious. The second revelation was Dinosaur Jr's Where You Been (1993) that had an unbelievable impact on me. That cd pointed out the direction for me and made me realize and understand so much about what approach one should have to making music and what makes music sound cool and good. A sign of a great album is that you adore it ten years or more after you actually got it. And I adore those two albums so much. I think a lot of it has something to do with the age I was when I got them. I was 15 when I got The Stone Roses and around 18 when I got Dinosaur Jr. As with so many other things in life those years are very important for what kind of person you will be as an adult. You are very susceptible ( what a word.... ) for new things during those years.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

Alice Cooper's Trash when I was 9. All of a sudden, New Kids on the Block weren't a passable fodder anymore.

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(signature space for rent)

I think Zappa can be considered for that slot as well.

I had a horribly deprived childhood of nothing but queen's greatest hits, paul simon's gracelands, and various classical stuff being on constantly in the car.

Then, these bands came to my attention, in this order (sorry, really can't settle on one )...

-Pixies - Doolittle. Wow, a band with guts on their sleeve. Made me realise music could speak to how i was feeling at the time. (and i still like their raw see-sawing)

-Nirvana - Smells like..., also helped kick start me into looking for more live-wire music, and fully realising their were alternatives to just ignoring the charts plastic-pap.

-The Bobster and all the other classic reggae spoke to another beat inside me (i think Uprising and Kaya were the main bob ones - the others were all compilations). And blues merchants like Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker did something similar (never did know the names of the albums - but the three-piece stuff by muddy and friends is just untouchable simplicity-complicity-sychronicity in action).

-Santana - Santana. That woodstock performance just meant i had to take up the drums.

-Velvet Underground's first album made me start a band (hell, if they could do it, we could do it, right? Well, we managed to hack/jam a song together called "god is drunk" that was alright )

-Duke Ellington's wonderings brought some peace to those frantic teenage years. (again compliations, not "albums")

-The White Album - i realised the beatles were actually alright, and very varied plus thoughtful

-Led Zeppelins early albums were just so powerfully direct.

-everything else went scatty and electronified for a long while. No albums, just big meandering mashes and mind-spaces.

-During that last patch, and in more recent years.... An afrobeat compilation starring the meters, Fela Kuti, and the Daktaris kicked off my near-never-ending feel for funk.A french-reggae band whose name i don't know (and who's tape i lost on a plane) made me think more about fusions, with their arabic singing and shapes. Leon Thomas's Prince of Peace (i believe) album made me realise yodelling can be fun - Banda Bardo's (italian)only real album brings that optimistic-communal-socialisty spirit to life. Jarabe de Palo (spanish) made me feel soft rock might have its moments . Stuff from Wagner Paus Hablando Alto album (sp?? got it off the radio) made me appreciate the offbeat even more, but also how it's not always the most comfortable listening - and recently Raspigaous's combined efforts have been making me appreciate french activisty reggaeness some more (not that i really know what they're saying - just guessing )

Erm, that's probably more than enough for now

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

I never truly appreciated rock as the ultimate music form until I listened to R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People

Further to that, it took Say it Ain't So by Weezer to make me truly look at music as an artistry.

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Mr M Rides Again

MoFo Survivor - r3port3r66 wins!!!!!!

OK Computer by Radiohead, and Doolittle by the Pixies.

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You're not hopeless...

Hey, I like Graceland!

A brilliant song from a brilliant album. Weezer's debut cd is another of the most important cd:s ever for me. I have a lot of admiration for River Cuomo.

i disagree. zappa is very funny and irreverent, but j.g. thirwell has the irreverence + totally self-loathing factor going for him, and moreover, he preaches about it. he'll sermonize mockingly about topics that nobody in their right mind would tackle [just look at haus-on-fah, or di1-9026], all the while effortlessly turning cliches and popular catchalls on their heads from as many different angles as he can fit into a single song. what's more [and this is perhaps the most important part for me], he often [especially on his earlier albums] does so very convincingly, he can almost make you think he actually believes what he's saying. that's something zappa never was able to acomplish and so a lot of his stuff just seems more transparent and, at its worst, embarrasing because of it. even better are the cases where he mock-plays the preacher [again always fitting the role disturbingly well] and his message is actually sane and persuasive [get out of my house, is that a line, instead i became anenome and exit the man with nine lives being but a few such examples imo]. for all these reasons and more i find foetus the funnier artist, with very little competition. at bottom though, humor is a pretty subjective area [especially style preferences], so of course it takes all kinds [to unwind], meaning what does it for you just might not strike the same chord with me.

on another note, this is also something i hate about jello biafra. he's irreverent but almost never convincing. his sense of humor and style seems tepid by comparison, whatever his politics are.

Well, a simple "i don't disagree" was enough...thanks for the essay though.

On a sidenote, I got Gash from the library.

Me too - tho only about half the songs ultimately - the others go a bit too far into cheese territory to be heard ten thousand times - and my ma always wanted to skip the one with the wicked discorant-ish female backing vocals - that's one of the best ones!

EDIT: Hey Mairi - i'll pay you in rep points to put my GM sig in your ad-space

Less Than Jake - Losing Streak

The first CD I ever bought, I was in 6th grade. When the mall first opened up here, my mom gave me like $10 to get something b/c we were all there looking around. So I went into the music store and they had this CD set up for listening so I checked it out, fell in love with it and bought it. This cd sparked what would be a lifetime love and necessity of music.

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