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Thursday, June 08, 2006

Top 10 Albums of All-Time According to My 15 Year-Old Self

If you are a regular participant in this segment, you know that my father keeps showing up at my house with crap to pawn off on me. On occasion, it's actually mine. Most recently, he gave me a box of books. Not good books, as nearly as I can tell having never read any of them. They are mostly sports books, things my mother collected, possibly for me, possibly just because she was compulsively acquisitive. They include a pictorial overview of Michael Jordan's career and Bobby Knight's autobiography and three gazillion commemorative issues of something celebrating the Broncos' Super Bowl wins. High art, in all cases. Amazingly, I was a little slow sorting through the box, but there at the bottom was more memorabilia of my life - scripts and programs of plays I did dating back to middle school. There, written on the Mousetrap script from my sophomore year in high school, is the 10 greatest albums of all-time. There are also phone numbers of girls I don't remember and a day, time and restaurant for an occasion I cannot name. And a note that mysteriously reads "I am Wednesday" - I hate to think that's still true. Anyway, the list...

10. Actually, there is no 10. The number is there, but there's no album. I don't know if this was some kind of deep statement about leaving the list open-ended to invite more music in or if I was interrupted or if I had only heard nine albums to that point. And I am not making this up just because number 10 was Soul II Soul or Depeche Mode or something.

9. The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me - A lot of this list is kind of embarrassing, but this gives me real indie cred. It was the Replacements' first Warner Bros. record, but I'll take the cred anyway. We saw them on this tour bombed out of their gourds, a horrible show redeemed only slightly relative to Black Spot, their unlistenable opening act.

8. Split Enz - History Never Repeats - What a tool. A really brilliant record, but you can't put a Best Of album on your Top 10. "Message to My Girl" reminds me so much of a girl from this time...not very well, since I can't remember who it was, but it can still conjure up that feeling, which is neat.

7. Sisters of Mercy - First and Last and Always - I can't imagine why this album was this low. I must have just purchased it and then tried to live it for the three years subsequent to this list. Ever tried to live a Sisters of Mercy record? Without drugs?

6. Bauhaus - In the Flat Field - In retrospect, not their best or most interesting album, but certainly their most accessible. It was more punk and less experimental than their later work.

5. The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - It seems like the Cure is getting their due of late, which is nice because unlike some 80's acts, you can listen to them now and appreciate their creativity and innovation. This album was their great balancing act between pop Cure (Head on the Door) and weird Cure (Pornography).

4. The Cult - Love - Ian Astbury probably took himself way too seriously at this time, but it wasn't as unbearably obvious at is eventually became. I loved "Rain" and "Big Neon Glitter" but neither of them had the gravitas of "She Sells Sanctuary" which is improbably more pervasive now than it was at the time.

3. Jane's Addiction - Nothing's Shocking - Really an incredible album - maybe the best rock record ever made in the strictest sense of rock (a Led Zeppelin kind of sense). Proud to see this on here, too.

2. David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - This is like Bowie's eleventh best album and I am almost positive that it is on here in case anyone was looking over my shoulder. It is to this list what Zappa or King Crimson would be on a critic's list. Look at how cool I am. It's a good thing I didn't know of the existence of Brian Eno's first two albums, or they'd be here, too.

1. Love and Rockets - Express - For the most part, I am totally incapable of making an objective judgment on the worth of music from my childhood, because I still hear it as I did then. I still think the first Flock of Seagulls album is great, even though I recognize that it probably wasn't. This album is the exception. It sucks. Flat production, imaginationless songwriting, quasi-deep Live-style lyrics. 35 minutes of talentless hackery.

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