Music Takes Me Up

When I owned my one and only car, this was one of the bumper stickers. My other bumper sticker was the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. When I was driving around Cherry Hill, NJ and Ithaca, NY between the ages of 17-19, I apparently wanted the world behind me to know one thing: I am a hippie. Well, those days are behind me now, gone but not forgotten. I like to think I'm a pretty responsible and mature adult now, but if any part of that hippie in me has survived, if any one thing has grown with me and remained close to my heart all my life, it is music. My tastes have evolved, but music has always been extremely important to me: playing it, learning it, listening to it, dancing to it, living it. Bill Cosby said, "Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes." Nietzsche said, "Without music, life would be an error." I couldn't agree more with both wise men. Sure, without music, life would still be worth living, I guess. Nature and stuff is cool. But to me, life without music would be sad and boring.

Why am I telling you this? Today a note thing was going around on Facebook - 20 Albums That Changed Your Life - and I have just been thinking about how important music is, and how hard it is to pinpoint the 20 most influential albums in my life thus far. Music has been crucial in my mental and emotional growth, in so many ways. I've gotten through the hardest and saddest times of my life by finding solace in music; I've had the best, most fun times of my life experiencing music.

I did make a list on the fly:

1. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
2. The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
3. Radiohead - The Bends
4. Daft Punk - Live at Coachella
5. Charlie Parker - Bird
6. Younger Brother - Last Days of Gravity
7. Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia - Friday Night in San Francisco
8. Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
9. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
10. Nirvana - Nevermind
11. Michael Jackson - Off the Wall
12. Joni Mitchell - Blue
13. Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
14. De la Soul - Stakes is High
15. Jay-Z - The Black Album
16. Fiona Apple - Tidal
17. Kleptones - 24 Hours
18. Weezer - Pinkerton
19. Pixies - Doolittle
20. Velvet Underground - Peel Slowly and See

There is a story for every album listed, and I can remember where I first heard it or at least a specific time in which I was listening to it and realized that it had profoundly affected me and deeply moved me in some way.

...but all day since I made the list, other albums have been popping into my head that I feel should be there too. Jethro Tull's 'Benefit', for instance - I heard this when I'd started studying the flute and it blew me away that a flute could be part of a rock and roll band (not to mention Jethro Tull's awesome musicianship, lyrics, and overall kickassness). Rusted Root's 'When I Woke' - I listened to this album at least twice a day for over a year straight. They were one of my first concerts. Digable Planets' 'Reachin'(a new refutation of time and space) and Jurassic 5's EP were two of the albums that made me fall in love with hip hop (I'm white and grew up in Cherry Hill, so cut me some slack if I was a little behind the times). Fela Kuti's 'Expensive Shit' turned my world upside down freshman year of college (and the same can be said of everyone in my Political Economy of African Diaspora Music class in which we were all introduced to Fela - it spread over Ithaca like wildfire). Countless recordings of the orchestral works of Debussy, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel... these all had a major impact on my life throughout high school and influenced me and my music education in huge ways. And motown! What would I do without motown?!

I could go on and on, forever, and the list will be never-ending and ever-evolving, as my tastes evolve, as I discover music I haven't heard before, and as new music is made. If it's frustrating, it's the most pleasant frustration I've ever known. I will gladly revise my list forever and be changed by music in different ways forever. More than anything, it's what gets me out of bed every day and helps me dream peacefully at night.

And on that note, today's song is, for once, applicable.
I'm *this* close to figuring out how to embed an mp3 so you can press play right here in the blog, but still bear with me. And anyway, this video has a singing lemon and a dancing banana and I like it.