So without further ado, these are the ten albums that most impacted my life.
What can't be said about this album. It came out in my early teens and thanks to heavy rotation on MTV, it became the biggest album of the decade. It doesn't matter how cool you think you are now, you know you loved this album. Jackson didn't follow trends, he created them. Remember the parachute pants and red zipper jackets? Remember how all the kids you hung out with were teaching each other how to moonwalk and pop? Yeah, I knew you did.
Remarkably, I didn't see the "controversial" Thriller video until a year or two after it was released. I had to sneak over to one of my few friends' house that were lucky enough to get cable and MTV to catch it. That's growing up in rural Florida for ya.
Somewhere, my parents have a videotape of me at 13 or so singing "Billy Jean" and moonwalking. If I ever find it, I'll burn the fucker.
It wouldn't be fair to write this list and not acknowledge the impact of Christian Contemporary Rock on my teen years. Let me give you a little background. Growing up, my devout Christian parents were pretty strict about the amount of 'secular' music we were allowed to listen to. So began what I call my "evangelical" years. Instead of wearing those devil-loving AC/DC shirts, my friends and I proudly sported our "Won by One" Jesus shirts. Instead of Rolling Stone, we were hip on The Holy Bible. Stephen King was replaced by Frank Peretti...and as far as Christian music went, my favorite rockers were not hair-band lame-o's Stryper, but the hard-rocking Petra.
Beat the System was the album of choice by these guys. I can honestly say that the band's mix of keyboards into their hard rocking sound influenced my love of electronic and synth based music. These guys played "God Made Rock and Roll" before Kiss made it cool.
I first heard The Joshua Tree at my sister's house, in LP form. The record was a thing of beauty. The photography that graced the album sleeves fit so perfectly with the sparse, pleading snapshots contained in the lyrics. I really felt like this album stood on it's own against anything that was released in the 80's. It still feels fresh listening to it today. My favorite tracks weren't the radio hits like "With or Without You" or "Where the Streets Have No Names", but the stormy "Bullet the Blue Sky", the portrait of an addict "Running to Stand Still" and the somber eulogy "One Tree Hill". It's really hard to find a bad egg on that album.
I first heard PHM in a friend of one of my roommate's Honda Civic. I remember it distinctly..we were headed to a rave somewhere and this weird character Thomas put PHM in the CD player and rocked the car all the way there. The first thing that stuck out was the album's full embrace of techno and electronic sounds, mixed in with over compressed guitars and screaming vocals. It seemed that Trent Reznor had taken all of my generation's angst and compressed it into one howling scream.
Ten. What else can I say. This album still means so much to me this day. The first time I heard PJ, I was working at McDonalds in San Luis Obispo, CA, while trying to go to school. One of the managers I worked with gave me a mix tape with a few grungworthy bands on it, but Pearl Jam stood out more than any of the others. I soon after bought Ten on cassette. I remember walking four miles to work at five in the morning, listening to Ten on my walkman. There was something almost spiritual about watching the fog slowly lift off the streets while Vedder crooned, "Oh....dear Dad....can you see me now? I am myself, like you somehow..." Ten helped me get through some very difficult years and gave me the strength to get through the breakup of my first "real" relationship. I still love that album today.
In part two:
6. Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
7. Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
8. Tool - Ænima
9. Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam
10. Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
