Picture Albums (Part I)
Mar. 28th, 2009 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldThe latest Facebook meme going around -- perhaps not the latest, exactly, as I am hardly on the cusp of these things and in any case by the time I am actually finished writing this there will be 14 other Latest Things -- is the commandment to "list 25 albums that changed your life."
Right away, this seems like a hyper-romantic and unusually ambitious exercise. Maybe I'm being too literal here, but are there really people out there who have had their lives changed 25 times? And each time by a record album? Are these the same socially manic people who enthusiastically extol the virtues of absorbent shammies on television infomercials and communicate their deeply-felt grievances in weekly letters to the editor of their local pennysaver?
Apparently not, because many of my otherwise well-adjusted friends have chimed in on this particular query with a disconcerting lack of irony. Or honesty, for that matter -- my money says that at least half of these people experienced monumentally life-altering heartmake or heartbreak to something like Richard Marx's "Repeat Offender," but you never see that on any of these top-25 lists. I mean, seriously. I don't even think the Clash sold that many albums.
As I've written before, there are certain songs that are intimately linked to particular people, places and things. (Incidentally, Marx's "Angelia" is one of them.) But truly transcendent, destiny-shaking, Hearing-the-Voice-of-God-type albums are far more rare in my personal catalogue. I can think of only three. Here's the first:
1. George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice, Volume I
In late 1990/early 1991 I was in the eighth grade, departing my lumpy adolescence and entering the full-blown Awkward Phase. Perhaps more than most 14 year old boys -- or perhaps simply no less than any 14-year old boy (an admittedly solipsistic lot) -- I was generously posessed of self-awareness and self-consciousness but lacking any sense of identity. My personality, such as it was, was little more than a loose conglomeration of involuntary tics, popular television programming, and peer pressure.
That peer pressure was applied by a relatively small social circle. I was an unattractive and anxious young man, qualities that effectively discouraged and in any case precluded interaction with girls, admired or not. So I held fast to a band of three boyhood chums, two of whom, it would turn out, were sociopathic assholes.
Of course, once I finally realized this and divested myself of their abusive brand of friendship, my social circle had shrunk to the point where you could fit its constituents in a mall photo booth. Feeling lost and more than a little lonely, I stumbled into a sort of purgatorial malaise.
Then I heard George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice, Volume I, sort of by accident. I actually bought the cassette for my mother, who was a feverish fan of his solo debut album, Faith. It's hard to remember this now, but in 1988 George Michael and Faith were galactic smash hits, spawning four number-one singles (plus a scandalous tune with the word "sex" in the title -- and which my mother initially tried to fast-forward through when we were in the car).
As it turns out, Listen Without Prejudice was an calculated departure from the Faith formula; it was a dark and deeply introspective meditation on truth and identity. My mother nonchalantly removed it from her rotation, but I eagerly made it a Walkman staple.
It spoke to me. I can still remember watching the world premiere of the video for the lead single, "Praying for Time". The video itself was a confrontationally minimalist approach that presaged his retirement from the sex symbol business and whispered "fuck you" to the MTV image factory (I don't think they ever played the video again). Reasonable people can disagree on what they think the song is "about" -- charity, justice, God -- but I always thought it was about survival: doing the best you can, trying to keep it together, holding on long enough to find the moments of joy scattered among the legion of frustrations.
On the dancier-but-still-brooding "Freedom '90," his voice seethed with anger and frustration at the mass media and the mass marketing that pigeonholed him as a rock star. (I know, poor guy, right? But apparently -- and I was oblivious to this at the time -- there is a lot of subtext here about his coming to terms with his sexual identity.) More conventionally, the song is all about the struggle between his personal and public persona. This dichotomy is probably too sophisticated to be fully appreciated by a mere teenager like me, but it nonetheless appealed to a guy who yearned to be seen as more than a neo-maxi-zoom dweebie.
His cover of the Stevie Wonder song "They Won't Go When I Go" was a dark trip through the looking glass, a decidedly un-George-Michaelish dirge about the pain of solitude and persecution. It's certainly melancholy and morose, which oughtn't appeal to anyone, much less a 14-year old. These lyrics in particular, from the song's bridge, haunted me:
Unclean minds mislead the pure
The innocent will leave for sure
For them there is a resting place
People sinning just for fun
They will never see the sun
For they can never show their faces
There ain't no room for
The hopeless sinner
Who will take more than he will give, he will give, he will give
He ain't hardly gonna give
I wasn't really sure then what it meant and I'm not sure that I do even yet. I just know that it made me feel better about telling those two assholes to go fuck themselves. And it made me feel better when they taunted me with religious epithets. And when they defaced my eighth grade yearbook with the most vile descriptions of unnatural acts.
The last song on the album is technically a reprise of an earlier song, but it has its own meter and its own message. It functions effectively as an epilogue, preaching patience and, not unironically, faith.
All those insecurities
that have held me down for so long
I can't say I've found a cure for these
But at least I know them, so they're not so strong
You look for your dreams in heaven
But what the hell are you supposed to do
When they come true?
For me, the "dream" was freedom and the challenge was -- as I grew more responsible for my own life -- living with my own choices. And in the most stark relief, that included getting rid of some of my "best friends" without much to fall back on.
This album found me at a low point, put me back on my feet and set me in the right direction. Within a year I had cleaned myself up, discovered my diversions, made a few friends and charmed a few ladies. I can't give all the credit to George Michael -- there are people out there reading this who certainly helped -- but I'm sure glad my mother wasn't a Michael Bolton fan.
Right away, this seems like a hyper-romantic and unusually ambitious exercise. Maybe I'm being too literal here, but are there really people out there who have had their lives changed 25 times? And each time by a record album? Are these the same socially manic people who enthusiastically extol the virtues of absorbent shammies on television infomercials and communicate their deeply-felt grievances in weekly letters to the editor of their local pennysaver?
Apparently not, because many of my otherwise well-adjusted friends have chimed in on this particular query with a disconcerting lack of irony. Or honesty, for that matter -- my money says that at least half of these people experienced monumentally life-altering heartmake or heartbreak to something like Richard Marx's "Repeat Offender," but you never see that on any of these top-25 lists. I mean, seriously. I don't even think the Clash sold that many albums.
As I've written before, there are certain songs that are intimately linked to particular people, places and things. (Incidentally, Marx's "Angelia" is one of them.) But truly transcendent, destiny-shaking, Hearing-the-Voice-of-God-type albums are far more rare in my personal catalogue. I can think of only three. Here's the first:
1. George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice, Volume I
In late 1990/early 1991 I was in the eighth grade, departing my lumpy adolescence and entering the full-blown Awkward Phase. Perhaps more than most 14 year old boys -- or perhaps simply no less than any 14-year old boy (an admittedly solipsistic lot) -- I was generously posessed of self-awareness and self-consciousness but lacking any sense of identity. My personality, such as it was, was little more than a loose conglomeration of involuntary tics, popular television programming, and peer pressure.
That peer pressure was applied by a relatively small social circle. I was an unattractive and anxious young man, qualities that effectively discouraged and in any case precluded interaction with girls, admired or not. So I held fast to a band of three boyhood chums, two of whom, it would turn out, were sociopathic assholes.
Of course, once I finally realized this and divested myself of their abusive brand of friendship, my social circle had shrunk to the point where you could fit its constituents in a mall photo booth. Feeling lost and more than a little lonely, I stumbled into a sort of purgatorial malaise.
Then I heard George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice, Volume I, sort of by accident. I actually bought the cassette for my mother, who was a feverish fan of his solo debut album, Faith. It's hard to remember this now, but in 1988 George Michael and Faith were galactic smash hits, spawning four number-one singles (plus a scandalous tune with the word "sex" in the title -- and which my mother initially tried to fast-forward through when we were in the car).
As it turns out, Listen Without Prejudice was an calculated departure from the Faith formula; it was a dark and deeply introspective meditation on truth and identity. My mother nonchalantly removed it from her rotation, but I eagerly made it a Walkman staple.
It spoke to me. I can still remember watching the world premiere of the video for the lead single, "Praying for Time". The video itself was a confrontationally minimalist approach that presaged his retirement from the sex symbol business and whispered "fuck you" to the MTV image factory (I don't think they ever played the video again). Reasonable people can disagree on what they think the song is "about" -- charity, justice, God -- but I always thought it was about survival: doing the best you can, trying to keep it together, holding on long enough to find the moments of joy scattered among the legion of frustrations.
On the dancier-but-still-brooding "Freedom '90," his voice seethed with anger and frustration at the mass media and the mass marketing that pigeonholed him as a rock star. (I know, poor guy, right? But apparently -- and I was oblivious to this at the time -- there is a lot of subtext here about his coming to terms with his sexual identity.) More conventionally, the song is all about the struggle between his personal and public persona. This dichotomy is probably too sophisticated to be fully appreciated by a mere teenager like me, but it nonetheless appealed to a guy who yearned to be seen as more than a neo-maxi-zoom dweebie.
His cover of the Stevie Wonder song "They Won't Go When I Go" was a dark trip through the looking glass, a decidedly un-George-Michaelish dirge about the pain of solitude and persecution. It's certainly melancholy and morose, which oughtn't appeal to anyone, much less a 14-year old. These lyrics in particular, from the song's bridge, haunted me:
Unclean minds mislead the pure
The innocent will leave for sure
For them there is a resting place
People sinning just for fun
They will never see the sun
For they can never show their faces
There ain't no room for
The hopeless sinner
Who will take more than he will give, he will give, he will give
He ain't hardly gonna give
I wasn't really sure then what it meant and I'm not sure that I do even yet. I just know that it made me feel better about telling those two assholes to go fuck themselves. And it made me feel better when they taunted me with religious epithets. And when they defaced my eighth grade yearbook with the most vile descriptions of unnatural acts.
The last song on the album is technically a reprise of an earlier song, but it has its own meter and its own message. It functions effectively as an epilogue, preaching patience and, not unironically, faith.
All those insecurities
that have held me down for so long
I can't say I've found a cure for these
But at least I know them, so they're not so strong
You look for your dreams in heaven
But what the hell are you supposed to do
When they come true?
For me, the "dream" was freedom and the challenge was -- as I grew more responsible for my own life -- living with my own choices. And in the most stark relief, that included getting rid of some of my "best friends" without much to fall back on.
This album found me at a low point, put me back on my feet and set me in the right direction. Within a year I had cleaned myself up, discovered my diversions, made a few friends and charmed a few ladies. I can't give all the credit to George Michael -- there are people out there reading this who certainly helped -- but I'm sure glad my mother wasn't a Michael Bolton fan.
The Minds Eye
Date: 2009-04-01 01:37 pm (UTC)