an album that shaped me

For me, Brian's set the tone here - any one of us could pick Big Loada, Tri Repetae, or pretty much any other album by the Big 3 Warp Motherfuckers or Those Other 3 Planet Mu Guys (I'm thinking of Paradinas, Jega, and Funk here) as a formative album. I don't think we'd be here talking about this crap otherwise. I propose we try to go for albums that the others probably haven't heard, or didn't really like. So we don't all end up having a big circle jerk to Booth/Brown et al. (We can save that for later, sweeties.) This means shit like Stone Cold Rhymin', Dark Side of the Moon, Thriller, etc. are off-limits, too, unless there's some new spin to bring to them. Go all David Cross as Pitchfork on it and come up with some story involving whale orgasms and tiny tiny pomegranates, I don't know. (Read that link if you haven't, though - shit is hilarious. Two different Warp acts are mentioned.)

Shortly before the time period Brian refers to in his tales of Col. Bruce Hampton, one of the main things I did after high school was ride around in a friend's Jeep with as many as 4 other people. Pretty much every day we'd go up to the Parkway after school and either smoke cigarettes or get stoned, and just ride around and listen to music. Weird array of shit, too. Sometimes it'd be hippie crap; sometimes it'd be stuff like Warren Zevon or Ween or Johnny Cash ... there was one guy that really loved Jethro Tull (Brian knows who this is), so we ended up listening to a lot of different stuff from the late 50s all the way up to the present day (at that time, about '96/'97).

Occasionally, especially when you're young and stupid and on two or three different kinds of drugs and haven't heard all that much music, you have some sort of near-transcendent experience with certain sounds, and it's not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the music, even, just the way those sounds fit with a particular time and place, and they open the door to the Black Lodge or turn wine into urine or some equally explosive shit happens inside your brain. Once that happens, it's kind of impossible to ditch those records in any meaningful sense, short of ECT / lobotomy. (This imprinting is partially how I attempt to explain to myself the presence of Rammstein in Lost Highway - I think Lynch got way deep into meditation one day and somehow Rammstein was playing down there, so he had to honor the idea.)

For me, one such album that has stayed with me, and probably influenced me more than I know:


There was a tape that we listened to (until it broke) of all of Ruby Vroom and a few songs from Irresistible Bliss as well. I still hear a lot of these songs in my head today at those random moments when I catch myself moving a body part rhythmically without thinking about it. It was one of the first (non hip-hop) albums I heard where it was very, very obvious that sampling was a large part of what made the "backdrop" of the production, and it actually worked. That (of course) led me to whip out the SK-1 my family had owned since I was 6 or 7 and do what you normally do with an SK-1 (fart melodies, etc). So in that way, it probably primed me for what was to come.

More than that, some of the lyrical content (although I'll readily admit a good portion of this album is pretty nonsensical and/or silly) made the first real mark on me of time-relevant culture disdain. I'd read Nietzsche and Jonathan Swift and other such downtrodden satirical stuff, but it required a certain degree of synthesis to apply that to the world in which I lived. "Screenwriter's Blues" was probably the first good musical satire of a portion of my culture, where instantly I perceived it as scathing, humorous, and just plain "fucking A" - without any intellectual bridge-building required.

And if you all think this album sucks, then I blame the LSD.