I've always had a rather embarrassing penchant for top 10 lists. They're so arbitrary, and yet -- so necessary! And really, is there a greater, more iconic top 10 than the fabled "Top 10 Albums of All Time" list? Mine, as I'm sure yours is too, is in a constant state of flux, but that's why it's so much fun to document it, frozen in time, every once in a while. This morning it dawned upon me that I haven't done this in years, so I figured I'd give it a shot. What I like about this incarnation of my list is how conventional and "obvious" most of these choices feel to me, and yet, how much each of these records mean to me personally, from the bottom of my guts. Here are some brief reminiscences of the first five (in no particular order); expect five more some time later in the week.
Wilco - Being There
I am at least half of the person I am today because the first cable TV package my parents purchased included MuchMusic. I was 9 at the time, but I think it took me a year or two before I began to fully appreciate how much cooler the Canadian music video channel was in comparison to MTV. I watched their weekly Top 25 countdown diligently, I sent in requests to Much On Demand, and, after some help from my dad, rigged up our stereo so that I could record the audio from my favorite songs right off the TV and onto a cassette tape. (Yeah, really.) One of these tapes had the song that went with one of my favorite videos on the channel, which was "Outtasite (Outta Mind)" by Wilco. At one point, it occured to me to buy the album, but I remember looking for it in a Borders one day and not being able to find it. Then about five years later, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot happened, and as a 15-year-old with a subscription to Spin, I couldn't help but notice. I bought it, I fell in love all over again, and then proceeded to go back and buy Wilco's entire discography over the next year or two. Since the end of my days of hometaping, I've come to attach a memory to almost every song on this album; some are very nice, some are very sad, but they all feel incredibly potent to me whenever I hear them, which is the true mark of an album that's made a top-10-worthy impact on your life. Indisputably, YHF is a better album; on most days I will tell you that Summerteeth is as well. But I like this one best, for reasons that don't need to make much sense. I wish there was a less punny way to say this, but I like it most because it's always just been there.
Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
On a very small plane coming back from Colorado, I heard a line which we have all heard hundreds of times, which is this one: "You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." It was a revelation that I can't even try to put into words. I can only tell you what I was looking at in that moment, which was a cloud formation shaped like two lumberjacks playing paddycake. This is one of those albums that is full of tiny surprises like that, and it's pretty magical how they all start to unpetal as you get older.
Liz Phair - Exile In Guyville
I love Mariah Carey but I certainly can't relate to a sexuality like that; I don't own nearly enough miniskirts. I love Bikini Kill, but I shave my armpits. Mine is a femininity is adjoined by semicolons; full of contradictions and strung together by the feeble architecture of expressions that are barely cohesive enough to be sentences. Growing up, I saw this quality in only a few of the female musicians I admired (mostly Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss). I see it, now, so clearly in Liz Phair. Hearing Exile In Guyville for the first time (about a year ago) was huge. It felt like the unearthing of some very plain and simple truth, one that has been on the tip of your tongue this whole time but has seemed to small or obvious to articlulate, let alone sing about, let alone sing about in that deadpan, pitch-perfect, "I-sing-like-a-good-canary" voice. This album is just perfect, and I can't think of another one that even comes close to some of the things it does.
Sam Cooke - Live At the Harlem Square Club
We will dance to this in heaven, I think.
Pixies - Doolittle
Doolittle knocked me down so hard that I still remember what I was wearing the first time I listened to it. Not only is it one of the greatest records of all time, but it completely encapsulates a moment of my life for me. 15 years old, wearing skirts and this grimy pair of sneakers every day, totally weird but still at the moment right before I would meet the kind of people who would fully understand and appreciate my weirdness. There were days then, like when this girl in my Spanish class stumbled over the title Un Chien Andalou when she read it aloud from a Dali biography in our textbook, when I truly believed that the universe was just one big inside joke between me and Black Francis. My 10th grade Doolittle story has a sad ending: a girl robbed my gym locker some time near the end of the year and took my old headphones, my CD player and my copy of Doolittle that was inside. I've always liked to think that she turned on the CD player just to make sure it worked and that it was cued up to that riff at the end of "Mr. Grieves," which made her just melt, because how could it not? And then of course she would sit down to listen to the rest of the album and ultimately decide to forego her young life of crime and just start listening to the Pixies all the time. I bet it didn't happen that way, but Doolittle works in mysterious ways when you're 15, so you never know.
What's your top 10 looking like these days?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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