Juvenilia

I began purchasing music when I was 16, shortly after I started earning money from my first job. I had always enjoyed listening to music, but before I turned 16, I had been content to let the music stay on the radio.

The setting: the tail end of the 80s. CDs were on the store shelves, but being frugal I settled for the less expensive cassette versions of the music I wanted to own. At first, my music purchases were scattershot, including some Top 40 albums from Janet Jackson and Milli Vanilli (!!!). Soon, though, with the help of a local alternative music radio station and MTV’s late night programming, I began to pick up cassettes that in future years I would be less embarrassed to name in a blog post.

I wound up buying about 30-40 cassettes before I finally started buying CDs. I didn’t know how I had ever lived without the convenience of just jumping ahead to the songs I wanted to listen to without having to fast forward and rewind repeatedly. As I transitioned to CDs, I found that there were a few albums that I absolutely had to purchase on CD too (somewhere, RIAA executives are smiling as they recline on their beds of money).

Morrissey: Viva Hate

This album probably deserves it’s own blog post for me to do it justice. Suffice it to say, this was the seminal album of my teenage years. “Suedehead” was my personal theme song. I bought the cassette version of this album while on a spring break ski trip, and I seriously considered bringing my Walkman with me while I skied just so I could listen to this over and over. Buying the CD version of this album was a no-brainer.

The Sundays: Reading Writing and Arithmatic

I used to say that I wished Harriet Wheeler were my sister. I had a sort of platonic crush on her back in the day as I found her voice and her lyrical persona absolutely irresistible. RW&A is an album about youth, and Wheeler’s lyrics displayed a precocious cynicism that in a lot of ways captures the teenage mindset. It’s a shame that this band only made three albums, but maybe the limited output was inevitable.

The Cure: Disintegration

The release of Disintegration coincided with the beginning of my music purchasing, so this album was my entry point into The Cure’s body of work. Interestingly, while I’m a fan of their earlier work, I’ve never been particularly impressed with anything that came after Disintegration. This really is their magnum opus, and I suppose I should be grateful that I experienced this album for the first time in my teenager years, that time of life when Robert Smith’s darkness and angst are best appreciated.

Talk Talk: It’s My Life

In a sense, it’s not this album but the three Talk Talk albums that followed it that really deserve to be on this list, but It’s My Life was the first Talk Talk album that I bought (after hearing the eponymous one-hit-wonder-ish single) and the only one that I bought on cassette. For me, Talk Talk represents my interest in more underground, more esoteric music. Through them, you can trace my interest in prog rock, David Sylvian, Dead Can Dance, Stereolab, Sufjan Stevens, and Joanna Newsom.  This album was where that journey began.

Other cassettes were better left forgotten (I’m looking at you, Milli Vanilli), but these four albums were among those that I couldn’t live without. By the mid-1990s, when I had committed myself to buying CDs, I had to have these albums on CD too.