Which Albums Have Shaped You?

A recent post over at Good Readings (the new blog of Ryan Williams, a Grinnellian once removed) mentions the 15th anniversary of Liz Phair’s album “Exile in Guyville” — an album containing such classics as “Divorce Song” and “Fuck and Run.” Ryan links to an article by former Sleater-Kinney rocker Carrie Brownstein describing the album’s influence on her when she first heard it in 1993. He then goes on to describe his own relationship to the same album, one whose adult themes were enjoyed clandestinely “alone in my bedroom with my headphones on, listening with a uniquely teenage intensity of focus and emotional engagement.”

Is there anyone among us who cannot sympathize with that statement? Each of us could identify a few sentinel albums in our lives: those calling out to us clearly with their music, vocals or lyrics and which, despite the onward march of time, soldier on inside our heads and hearts and on our playlists.

So fellow geeks, which albums have shaped you (your world view, your understanding of music) significantly? Please also share which song you believe to be the most underrated on the album — never a hit, rather the kind of gem you discover only by purchasing the whole disc and (perhaps warm up to) listening to it incessantly.

-posted by poetloverrebelspy

Carmina Burana

I first fell in love with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in the spring of 2001. I was taking a seminar on medieval German literature, and our professor brought in a CD player one day. Without saying a word, he pressed play, and out blasted “O, Fortuna!” It was thrilling, and at the end he beamed around the room and said, “Aren’t you ready to go fight something now?” We all yelled “Yeah!” (or perhaps, “ja!”)

Most of you would probably recognize “O Fortuna” when you heard it, whether you knew that’s what it is or not; it is often used in commercials and movie soundtracks and is one of the most dramatic choral passages I know of. Unlike most choral works I am familiar with, though, Carmina Burana was not written as a mass or other form of sacred music. No, this is one of the bawdiest pieces of classical music out there, but since no one can understand the words it usually passes muster without anyone batting an eyelash.

Yo-Yo Ma on Transnationalism

Last week’s “This I Believe” essay on NPR was by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who had some interesting things to say about transnationalism: A Musician of Many Cultures. Given that I just went to a conference on international education, this seemed particularly relevant, especially since the sessions I attended focused a lot on why study abroad experiences and cultural competency skills are important for more than just foreign language majors. Some excerpts:

I believe in the infinite variety of human expression.

I grew up in three cultures: I was born in Paris, my parents were from China and I was brought up mostly in America. When I was young, this was very confusing: everyone said that their culture was best, but I knew they couldn’t all be right.

I felt that there was an expectation that I would choose to be Chinese or French or American. For many years I bounced among the three, trying on each but never being wholly comfortable. I hoped I wouldn’t have to choose, but I didn’t know what that meant and how exactly to “not choose.”

Britney Spears and the human spirit

I’ve masturbated to Britney Spears.

How many of us haven’t?

Nobody thinks she’s been just another starlet, I hope. There’s always been something different, something exceptional, something terrible about Britney. I’m not sure how many people have come to terms with that.

It’s not that her name was the most popular Web search in the English language in 2000. It’s that her name has never left the top 10 Web searches. It’s that she was the subject of more Web searches than any other woman in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2007, when she was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 25.

That’s more than fame, more than notoriety. This country has a profound and — I’ll say it — mystical relationship with Britney Spears.

Eyes wide shut?

This weekend, we got to see a taiko drum performance. Despite some difficulty making it out the door in time, a required stop for gas, and driving in freezing rain turning to snow, we made it more or less on time. Unfortunately, we ended up with seats that left something to be desired. Entering when we did, we ended up sitting behind the sound board in the theater. Normally, this wouldn’t have been so bad, except that the person operating the sound board was also filming the performance, and spent most of it standing in front of us in order to operate the camera. Perhaps the reason she was able to spend all of her time filming was because it was a drum performance, and the sound equipment was completely unnecessary. It looked like it was turned on, but it wasn’t actually in use.

Even when they were playing quietly, the drummers were entirely audible even from the back of the theater. When they really put their weight into it, I could feel the sound rumbling through my chest and vibrating up through the floor into my feet. It was exactly the effect that people with very expensive sound systems in their cars try to duplicate at stoplights, without any of the distortion that usually makes a mockery of such attempts. As I sat, looking at the back of the camera operator and feeling the sound roll through me, I spent some time thinking about how I tend to experience these kinds of events.

Avenged Sevenfold: Second Place is a Stunning Achievement

In 1996, I became aware of the music of heavy metal band Metallica by hearing their song “Until It Sleeps” on the radio while visiting Lowell, IN to attend my grandmother’s funeral. It sounded good, and I thought it was a good enough song to warrant further research. I purchased their “Load” album and was enamored of the bluesy lead guitar solos of Kirk Hammett played over the crunching rhythm guitar riffs of James Hetfield on songs like “Bleeding Me” and “The Outlaw Torn,” both introspective masterpieces lasting over eight minutes. By the time my family was preparing to move to Illinois from Fall Branch, TN the following summer, I was letting out my frustrations with the heavy metal classics “Sad But True,” and “Harvester of Sorrow,” and playing extended air guitar renditions of the amazing, haunting instrumental “Call of Ktulu.” When we finally moved to Illinois, I got pumped for football games by absorbing the powerful parent-hatred of “Dyers Eve” in my veins. In addition to moving away from my parents emotionally, I had moved away musically; I could no longer stand the adult contemporary garbage that should not be, on which I had been raised.

Ever since finding Metallica, and being mesmerized by the complex and breathtakingly fast guitar play of Hetfield and Hammett, I have been in a bit of a musical rut. No other artist in any genre has been able to speak to me the way that Metallica does. A few songs here and there have lit up my appreciation in a variety of ways, but I have never been able to say that an entire band has risen to the status of second-best; a few bands, like the Foo Fighters, System of a Down, and Shinedown are very good and helped keep some diversity in my musical palate, but none even came close to rivaling the extent to which Metallica just spoke to me.

Along came Avenged Sevenfold. I learned of the quality of their music, interestingly enough, from Guitar Hero II, in which “Beast and the Harlot” was one of the clearly superior contemporary tunes. Obsessed ever since, I have bought each of their four albums in the five months since I first heard “Beast and the Harlot.” But can Avenged Sevenfold overcome the weaknesses of so many other bands and find a place next to Metallica in my heart? In their most recent eponymous album, and in their concert last night at The Pageant in St. Louis, I have found my answer.

Till Up Then Started Young Tam Lin

One of the oldest - if not the oldest - Halloween stories extant is also one of the best. Anyone who’s spent a lot of time hanging around the library fantasy section has probably had an indirect encounter with Tam Lin, because the story has been adapted and novelized so many times - Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, set on a seventies campus, has probably gotten the most attention but at least ten others have published on the subject. It’s easy to see why these writers wanted to use the story, and also why some wanted to modernize the setting. A song with rape (maybe), accidental pregnancy, attempted abortion (or was it?), fairies, and human sacrifice ending with a curse all in one supernatural Halloween is hard to resist. But inevitably something is lost in translation, and the original version is still the most powerful - or so I’d say if it were certain which was the original version! There are about fifty versions out there, five or six of which have genuine claims to being very old. You can read them, and a lot of other things, at this site which is a Tam Lin gold mine and to which I’m shamelessly linking for the text of Child Ballad 39A, tentatively supposed to be the oldest extant version. According to the website, it was recorded in 1729, and probably had been around for a few hundred years before that. And now that you’ve read it …

Shakuhachi: Fighting Flute, Meditation Tool, Musical Instrument

Last week, I went to a lunch talk in a series running at the university where I work on the subject of “Globalization and the Artist.” This particular talk was by James Schlefer, one of the few non-Japanese people to be recognized as a Grand Master player of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. He played two pieces and talked about the history of the instrument and how it has changed over time. (The title of his talk, after all, was “The Evolving Shakuhachi.”)

Like many cultural items in Japan, the shakuhachi originally came from China, in the form of the xiao. The xiao, though, traditionally has six finger holes, whereas the shakuhachi has only five. When asked when and why the sixth hole disappeared, Schlefer said that there is about one hundred years (or more, I forget) of lost history between the arrival of the flute and its first real appearance in Japanese writings.

The shakuhachi was originally predominantly used in Japan as a Buddhist meditation tool. Schlefer described the practice as one that encourages the player to concentrate on breathing, individual notes, and the silence between the notes and phrases. The Buddhist monks who used the shakuhachi the most were also itinerant monks, and many of them were ronin, or samurai who had lost their masters, but were still required to keep up their status as members of the samurai class. Becoming a monk was allowed, but they might still need to defend themselves, and for this, the shakuhachi was handy. The end of the flute is the root end of the piece of bamboo the flute is made from. Musically speaking, this is because the hollow inside the flute needs to taper toward the end, which bamboo naturally does at the root. But practically speaking, the type of bamboo used to make the flute is quite thick, and if you leave the root end unshaved, you can get a nice club. A manly flute, it was.

Jonathan Coulton

I like the nerdcore and all, but when it comes down to it I prefer the nerd rock. I was never really exposed to too much popular music as a kid. One summer I went to camp and heard a friend’s They Might Be Giants CD (Apollo 18), and I was sold. I somehow went years without actually hearing the songs again, but through all that time I never forgot the haunting melody to the Fingertips song that went “Please pass the milk please” and my all time favorite, “I’m having a heart attack.”

Well, I’ve found a new obsession. Jonathan Coulton is a one-man nerd brigade. For one thing, he’s embraced the Creative Commons copyright system, which speaks to the decidedly nerdy interest in intellectual property. He gives away many of his songs for free on his website, and the rest can still be listened to for free at the site.

Hyperwhite Rap

As a timely follow-up to the NYT article about Mary Bucholtz’s linguistic research on geeks as a subgroup, yesterday they had another article about the phenomenon of geek rap, better known as nerdcore hip-hop. While Language Log has already covered more of the strictly linguistic aspects of this, I had to write about it as well.

I was glad to see an article about this so soon after the first article. When I was discussing the first article with some friends, I thought that Bucholtz (and the writer profiling her) had missed something with the emphasis on the way nerds eschew “cool”/”black” slang in their language. “Hasn’t she ever heard of nerdcore?” I asked. Given that her study group was just in high school, and studied nearly 10 years ago, I suspect the answer is no, but even so, Weird Al was around back then. (Witness his song, “White and Nerdy.”)

The NYT nerdcore article strikes me as a little weird, because it focuses so much on MC Chris (aka Mr. Ward), who appears determined to bring nerdcore into the mainstream.

In conversation, Mr. Ward was quick to point out that the term “nerdcore” — coined by fellow rapper MC Frontalot in 2000 — may be too self-limiting, because “nerds” are hardly the only children of the ’80s who were raised on Transformers, Indiana Jones movies, and Public Enemy.

It also opens with a scene of MC Chris tut-tutting at his fans for being unable to join him in a singalong of a mainstream pop song.

And when MC Chris invited the audience to join him in a campy singalong of the saccharine Sean Kingston hit “Beautiful Girls,” the boisterous crowd suddenly grew uncertain, devolving into an awkward mumble that sounded like a few hundred high school wallflowers simultaneously being turned down for a slow dance.

“We nerds,” MC Chris clucked in mock-disapproval. “We got no rhythm. We can’t do nothing right.”

This seemed really weird to me, because it seems to be quite counter to the feeling I get from both my own geek community and the nerdcore I listen to. The bit of the article focusing on MC Frontalot, (who I admit I am partial to, hence his presence in the sidebar,) seemed more representative of the less apologetically geeky community: