Let’s discuss any and all music here. Got a new artist who’s rocking your boat that you want to talk about? Post a video! Found out about that unearthed Coltrane album that has the jazz freak in you losing your mind? Lay it out for us! Have a theory about what your favorite band might do for their next album? Let’s hear it! Anything and everything music-related goes here.
This week’s discussion prompt: What is the first album (or one of the first albums) that “changed your life”, or the way you appreciate music?
Fear of a Black Planet is the first album I ever became obsessed with. When I was in grade eight, I pestered a kid in my class named Kyle who happened to own the actual cassette to tape it off for me, and after he relented and made me a copy I must have played it almost every night for months, if not closer to a year. While this was in no small part due to Chuck D’s socially and politically conscious lyrics and intense delivery (as well as Flavor Flav’s lively turns on the microphone and Terminator X’s turntable skills) what really blew my 13-year-old mind was the production. The sound collages assembled by The Bomb Squad are so densely layered that I kept noticing new things every time I listened to the album, even coming off of a taped-off copy of a cassette being played through a crappy boom box or shitty headphones.
While I’d gotten bitten the music bug a few years prior and even owned maybe about a dozen or so albums by that time1 (as well as a bunch of tapes of songs I’d taped off of the American Top 40 on Sunday afternoons) up to that point I still mostly listened to the singles2. But while many of the individual songs on Fear of the Black Planet stood up on their own, the album itself was a complete experience unlike anything else I’d ever heard before.
In the years that followed I subsequently started listening to mostly guitar-based music once I discovered another album that probably changed the way a lot of other people around my age also appreciated music, but from that point forward I sought out the albums over individual songs. And once I discovered trip hop3 and started to subsequently once again gravitate towards rap and other types of music outside of the more straightforward “alternative” and punk genres, I really noticed the production work and what a crucial component it is to enhancing the entire experience. In hindsight, for me it was Public Enemy and Fear of a Black Planet that started it all and forever changed the way I appreciate music.
As always, any and all music-related posts are welcome. Have fun, and rock out with yr guac out!