Vee Laughing Alone With Cats

09. "Music" by 311

The year is 1996. I'm a freshman in high school, about to go on summer break. My best friend Gretchen has just broken up with her boyfriend, Brian, and like all "true love" high school couples I'm sort of devastated that their love did not endure to the ends of time. However, before fucking off to be a right-wing nut who married a minister's daughter, Brian bequeathed Gretchen with one last gift that would, indeed, endure to the ends of time: the knowledge of a little band called 311, straight out of Omaha, Nebraska. Of course, we were already aware of 311 - their breakout hit, "Down", was a hit the prior summer, and came from their second album. But Brian left Gretchen with the band's debut CD, titled "Music".

I became such a hardcore 311 stan during high school, from the influence of this album, that I felt the need to scrawl their lyrics all over my notebooks and preach the gospel of the band to everyone I met. I was just coming off a middle school Beatles kick which culminated in the 1995 "Anthology" revival, and 311 blew me away because, despite the massively dissimilar music styles, they modernized the very thing I loved about the Beatles - positivity.

Seriously, if you only know of 311 from recent albums (I haven't honestly listened to anything past "Evolver"... I fell out of love with the band majorly, though I respect them for still doing what they love and doing it the way they want), you don't know 311. You don't the raw early raps of S.A. Martinez, the strange hybrid of reggae, SoCal punk, and hip-hop that turned my teenage world on its ear and made me believe that I could do anything as long as I believed in myself and didn't let anyone fuck with that confidence.

I have so many feels invested in this album. Let me show you them. :B

( Victory draws near, but no fear, my dear, I'll be here another year )

Hint for Part Ten: I fell out of my connection to this artist prior to the release of this album. When I heard this album, I not only fell in love with it, but the artist has since become something of a life's obsession for me.

...sorry this part is a little short. It felt rushed because I was sneezing my head off most of the time while I was writing it. I don't know if I have an allergy flare-up going on here or what, but it needs to STAWP.

Also, sorry about being absent from Angeltown, even though the Open Scene is up. D: Life has been CRAZY HECTIC but I'm trying to make the time. Feel free to play without me! And hey, if you want to go ahead and start threads with each other, go for it!

07. "B'Day" by Beyonce

I don't know if anyone's going to be shocked that this album is on here. Beyonce has had a special place in my heart ever since the first time I laid eyes on her in the 1999 Destiny's Child music video for "Bug-a-Boo". It also helped that she was the stand-out performer of the group and, by 2002, my favorite lady in American music.

If you know of Beyonce and know she's good, but don't really know Beyonce the performer or Beyonce the personality, you are sincerely missing out. Beyonce is the closest Western approximation I can find to the style, heart, and love for life that Ayumi Hamasaki has. That's how much I love her - you know I hold few, if any, artists in the same esteem as Ayumi when it comes to pure humanity and kindness.

I truly believe Beyonce loves her fans, and I truly believe Beyonce loves what she does. Yes, she's gorgeous, and yes she's talented. But she brings it all together in a package that really does merit the legend status.

"B'Day" is her finest album for me. From start to finish it is a classic, something I can and do tend to listen to over and over without skipping to the next track. The USA CD release included only 10 tracks, but the iTunes International Deluxe version includes 19 tracks. It's remarkable that almost every track really does belong on the album. I couldn't imagine it without songs like "Check on It", "Beautiful Liar", or "Flaws and All", and that's just to name three.

Not only that, "B'Day" has one of the most exciting visual canons of this whole list. I just can't wait to write this; obviously I'm not going to be sharing my musical criticism of the lyrical depth of social commentary in this album. This is just... pure... fun.

( WAIT. LET ME FIX MY HURR )

05. "Black Holes and Revelations" by Muse

I begin to wonder, five albums into this series, why the latter half of the 00's saw me discovering my favorite albums. I was certainly a music lover before then, right? I downloaded scads of music I'd never heard of from various p2p sites just to try it out, borrowed random CD's from friends, feverishly recorded songs off of the radio, sifted meticulously through my parents' old vinyl collection spinning everything I could, etc etc. And then it occurs to me: starting around 2005, the days of the sampling form of musical discovery were mostly over for a good chunk of five or so years. Luckily the tide has turned once again with the easy access of satellite radio, but once Napster and Kazaa died, YouTube began ot get privatized (hello, VEVO. Fuck off, VEVO), and radio was already in its dying gasps, there was very little to be done about discovering new music other than to take your friends' recommendations. To that end, I was left with little choice but to download entire albums. I could no longer go to Kazaa and grab just the tracks I had fallen in love with, leaving me to figure out the rest later.

Surely, there are a lot of bands I discovered in the late 90's and early 00's that merit also-ran status in this list, and I'd like to tip my hat to them after all this is said and done. Still, my days of discovering albums were relegated to my early-to-mid teens (during which I discovered most of the standard building blocks of anyone's music appreciation library - The Beatles, David Bowie, Velvet Underground, bands I don't feel I have enough unique and personal feelings on to include here) and my mid-to-late twenties. I leapt right from classics to contemporary artists, skipping that whole time in between, with a few exceptions which appear on this list.

For the most part though, it's staggering to be compiling all of this and see what an effect the years of 2006-2010 had on me, musically.

Which brings me to Muse.

( A love letter nearly seven years in the making )

Hint for Part Six: My mom called it "that scary sheep record"

03. "Graceland" by Paul Simon

The mid-to-late 80's weren't the best time for musical experimentation. New Wave had passed its prime, rock 'n' roll had given way to glam rock and hair metal, and not nearly enough of it was legitimately good, much less great. Rap was in its troubled childhood as a viable genre, and grunge was still a good half a decade away. When artists tried to recapture something classic it turned into the detestable genre known as Adult Contemporary. It just wasn't a great time for mainstream music, in pretty much every genre.

Paul Simon made his name in the 60's as one half of the multi-faceted singer/songwriter duo Simon and Garfunkel. He graduated to a successful solo career in the 70's with well-crafted, memorable, and heartfelt songs like "Kodachrome", "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", and "American Tune". Popularity began to wane for Simon in the 80's, and his album Hearts and Bones had only mediocre success.

He hit artistic and inspirational rock bottom. He resigned himself to his fate as a fading star, and then the following happened (taken from Wikipedia):

While driving his car in late 1984 in this state of frustration, Simon listened to a cassette of the Boyoyo Boys' instrumental "Gumboots: Accordion Jive Volume II". Interested by the unusual sound, he wrote lyrics to the number which he sang over a re-recording of the song. It was the first composition of a new musical project that became the celebrated album Graceland

Paul Simon essentially took the sort of risk every artist wants to take, when they feel they have nothing to lose. Only for him, it paid off. It paid off with one of the most consistently lauded albums of the last 30 years.

( Give her the wings to fly through harmony, she won't bother you no more... )

HINT FOR PART FOUR: The first female artist on the list, and also the first Japanese album on the list. It's not who you think.

I forgot the hint for Part Two of "Fifteen for Thirty"... here it is!

Hint for Part Two: A full-length response to fame culture from a band that should never have been a one-hit wonder. ♥

Any guesses? :D