Thought me to be patient, that really good music sometimes needs a few listens before you can get into it.
Then the following three all came at the same time and thought me to be more open minded towards non-rock music.
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And now here we are today....
There are some albums that I'm sentimental about (like () or Bon Iver) but they didn't change my life, they were just there at the same time as other stuff happened to me. _________________ If you're reading this, that probably means that I had something to say.
For me, this is Nirvana's In Utero. I first listened to it in high school. Before this album, I strictly listened to classic rock. I was 16, my little brother was 13 and he was learning to play guitar. My mom played this album for him to try giving him some songs to learn. From another room, I overheard the album and it caught my attention. A couple days later, I popped it into my Walkman, and listened to it straight through. It was unlike anything I had heard before (I know that may sound strange being it's such a well-known album, but try to imagine what's like to have grown up with only The Beatles, Alan Parsons Project, America, Don McLean, Bob Dylan, CSNY, James Taylor, etc...and then hear Nirvana for the first time.). In Utero opened my ears to a new style and a new era. Nowadays, I can't imagine my life without '90s alternative. In Utero isn't best album I've ever heard, but it was the most influential.
I bought this in WHSmith in 1989. It was RIDICULOUSLY expensive for a double tape. Blue Monday had me hooked, but the rest of the collection was amazing to ears exposed to SAW ad infinitum. It was the start of my own Revolution In The Head which saw me embrace everything from techno to post-punk. I still give it a spin occasionally but to my 12 year-old self it was a game-changer. _________________ 'Reggae' & t'ing Folk 'n Stuff SHAMELESS RECORD DEALER PLUG
I would have to say there are about five albums that "changed" my life. Not really sure what that means here, but to me it means they made me appreciate and start a life long love affair with music. My dad had a few albums that he listened to that did nothing for me like, The New Christy Minstrels and The First Edition.
But I would have to say these really caught my ear as a youngster whenever my dad played them:
The orchestration, the drums, the singing, the songs. This was late 60's, early 70's Neil. He still looked cool in his jean jacket on the cover of the album.
Works of music regularly inspire paradigm shifts for me. There are aesthetic paradigm shifters. The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Robert Wyatt, Captain Beefheart, Slint, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the early phases of my musical development were key. GZA, Nas, and OutKast helped inspire me to listen to more hip hop. Following the Kraftwerk and Robert Wyatt arcs, I was introduced to a variety of electronic vectors. Jazz was spurred on mainly by Mingus and Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, with Peter Brotzmann's Machine Gun serving as the catalyst for going on three or four years of intense love for free and avant-garde jazz. Classical was probably instigated by composers like Bach and Beethoven for the power of their pieces and Feldman for the cerebral pleasures he offers.
Just as important for me, however, are the intersections between music and philosophy and politics for me. These shifts are much more satisfying. The Velvet Underground and their punk lineage and fans of that sort of thing introduced me at a pretty early age to Marxist ideas and resistance to existing structure. Frank Zappa, for as dramatically flawed as he was in many of his political views, helped to ignite a spark of questioning that led me to be curious enough to explore a lot. Brotzmann and really all of that crazy plane of jazz he occupies helped me to cement feelings about anarchism and the beauty that comes with true freedom. Lately, listening to classical music has done a lot to shape my views of the transcendent and to reel further and further from descriptive modes of art that seek merely to lampoon ideology and instead to find those third ways between academic tedium and incredibly elevated compositions. Here I speak specifically of Scriabin's work.
Ugh kinda rambled so here's the short list of what I think got me to where I am today, politically and aesthetically:
The Beatles - Revolver, Abbey Road
The Velvet Underground - & Nico, White Light/White Heat
Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
Kraftwerk - Trans Europa Express, Die Mensch Maschine
Frank Zappa - Freak Out!, We're Only in It for the Money
OutKast - Stankonia
Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Nas - Illmatic
GZA/Genius - Liquid Swords
Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom
Captain Beefheart - Trout Mask Replica
Can - Future Days
The Peter Brotzmann Octet - Machine Gun
John Coltrane - Ascension
Current 93 - I Have a Special Plan for This World
Annapurna Devi - Debut Surbahar Recital
AMM - AMMMusic
Keiji Haino - C'est parfait...
Fela Kuti - Roforofo Fight
Twa Toots - The Peel Sessions
Basic Channel - BCD, BCD2
Bach's Cello Suites
Beethoven's Late String Quartets, Piano Sonatas
Schnittke's Symphonies
Morton Feldman - String Quartet No. 2, Crippled Symmetry
Sofronitsky's interpretations of Scriabin
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