Top Ten CDs I Pulled Off My Parents' Shelf (Part One)

By Emmett Booth

This piece will come in installments. Hooray for installments!


I'm a college student, and a devoted music fan, and an older brother.

So, logically, I should be deluging my little bro with more sound than any reasonable, non-obsessive brain could hope to handle, taking part in the grand tradition of the cool older sibling warping and expanding the younger from a distance. But I'm not doing that, and I've rarely felt the impetus to.

This is partially out of respect for his own, independently burgeoning musical preferences, and partially because I know I would take it personally if he was uninterested in any of my most sacred touchstones--Husker Du, XTRMNTR, "Ignition (Remix)." But mostly, I refrain out of quiet reverence for the particular method by which I wormed my blind, curious, intimidated way into music obsession. That would be the way of the white wooden shelves, the one sturdy constant in a living room my family has never been fully satisfied with. What they hold is a lodestone of contemporary American suburban culture, as much so as every new television and increasingly globe-conscious car: the dusty, sprawling CD collection of two fortysomething parents.

Due to your favorite death-of-the-music-industry manifesto, my parents have largely stopped buying CDs. But the monument is still there, and quite a monument it is. My parents have defineable musical tastes, but fads, flavors, phases, and fickle red-herring debuts all have as much a place in that well-ordered mess as do the prominently displayed rows of Grateful Dead and Donna the Buffalo cases. There's history, variety, and strangness there. And the most wonderful thing about cluelessly approaching a new medium is that everything is equally strange, non-standard, and potentially delightful.

"Clueless" certainly sums up my relationship to music in my early adolescence. My 13-year-old self was a fair distance from spinning "House of Jealous Lovers" over Liquid Liquid beats, and I wasn't terribly interested in sharing what my friends had to offer--not because they had bad taste (they could have, I understandably don't remember), but because I took up my time with books and my PlayStation, and didn't see music as playing a large factor in my life.

Six years later, that has changed, and I owe it to those shelves and their monolithic burden. Once I caught the bug, I caught it bad, and have since recommended music to my parents far more often than the reverse. But it started with my parents' collection, timidly nosing into the pile for essentially random splinters of sound, trying to understand the one connection I had to a massive, complicated world. I found some of my favorites in that collection, but that's not what prompted me to list these particular ten CDs that I found there. These ones changed how I thought about music, how I could relate to it and how it could change, with time, with perspective, with the endless listening sessions that accompanied my rise into high school and beyond. These ones really mattered to me, a lot, and one of my deepest wishes is that my younger (no longer so 'little') brother can one day make a similar list, composed of treasures that are entirely his own.



R.E.M--In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003

(Warning: This entry contains footnotes. Footnotes remind me of R.E.M. Lots of incidental, unconnected things remind me of R.E.M. for reasons I can never explain, but still comprehend in their entirety, which strikes me as the perfect metaphor for R.E.M.)

Like I said, I wasn't especially cool. Other than Around the Sun, I cannot imagine a less hip first exposure to R.E.M. than this, a best-of collection (1) of their major label years (2) that focuses almost exclusively on singles (3). But hey, this was the one R.E.M. CD in my parent's collection, and if it oughtn't to have been the perfect introduction, it became so.

I'd vaguely heard of "Everybody Hurts," mentioned as one of the great nineties standards, and so the day after my first high school romance exploded, I impulsively pulled down In Time. I stared for a second at the blurry moon cover (4) and hit fast forward in a measured pace, unknowingly skipping past songs I would come to know better than my heartbeat, until I hit track 16. And with that, that was it. I was an R.E.M. fan, even though it took me an absurdly long time to get around to the original source albums for In Time's 18 tracks, and even longer to reach the indie stuff. It didn't matter--R.E.M. got into my blood, and would amiably refuse to leave now if I ever had reason to ask (5). The songs on In Time related to me differently than anything I'd ever listened to before, and that subject-object setup is key: these songs seemed alive, in the literal sense. They were living beings, in and of themselves, elements of their common creators but utterly separate from each other. And they were eager to talk to me.

"Man on the Moon" jumped out for its perfect, rutting chorus, but stuck around for the utterly unabashed "hey ya! hey ya! heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy......" and for the strangely affectionate reading of the encyclopedia-spewed facts of the verses. "Losing My Religion", flawless and gutsy and as lyrically rich as any other rock song ever, Stipe spooling out a dozen different beautiful, barely-in-control vocal melodies before we (or he) can draw breath. "Daysleeper", the reason Radiohead seemed so strangely familiar upon their own introduction into my life, the perfect balance between the absurdly (wonderfully) specific and the utterly, gut-crunching universal, something R.E.M. does so well. "E-Bow the Letter", so strange and ancient-sounding and deeply, deeply adult; I had never heard of its parent album New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which would become my favorite of the band's major-label LPs, but even that song seemed to me to hide the longest and loveliest road out from behind it. And at the bottom of the pile, the glistening gem of "Nightswimming", which struck me with such complete, emotional images, one after another, that I had to cry and run to talk about it with my father, who as it turned out, had held that song close to his heart for years.

Music, previously, had been something that came and went, and I had let it go. This wasn't the critical cliche of music taking me over, seizing me, owning me so that I couldn't turn away. This was music, for the first time, becoming someone I could call friend.

(1) Strike one, in most-but-not-all cases.
(2) Strike two, for while they've still had quite a run on Warner Brothers, R.E.M. has always suffered from a commercial and cultural scorched-earth career division that leaves millions of well-meaning fans stranded, unaware of their career pre-"Losing My Religion" and Automatic for the People. This almost inevitable syndrome has hit bands from the Flaming Lips to Modest Mouse, but it's most tragic in the case of R.E.M., and the most frustrating, because I don't care how biased or indie-kid-blind I am to pop culture, I am convinced that Reckoning could go platinum if marketed correctly. Come on! If the Shins can change lives, we can get "Talk About the Passion" beyond college radio. Band together! Form a human wall! Get Michael Stipe to come by and scatter flower petals made of baked tofu!
(3) For most bands, I honestly wouldn't find this problematic. Singles are singled out for a reason, after all. But for a band with such deep, endlessly rewarding album tracks as R.E.M., strike motherfucking three.
(4) Which reached for the classic R.E.M. knack of turning the seemingly meaningless into the serenely beautiful, but just turned out kind of unmemorable.
(5) I don't, not even after Bill Berry left, not even after "Leaving New York". I don't.


Jeff Buckley--Grace

Lists like these inevitably bring out the most shameful and squirm-inducing admissions of adolescent biases and failures. So, here's mine: around the age of 15, I was terrified of music. Most of my little library sprang from enthusiastic recommendations or direct, sit-down-and-listen-to-this exposure; rarely did I make the independent leap to an "Everybody Hurts", and even when I approved of what I was given, I almost never pursued it further. I didn't go out and buy their earlier stuff, didn't seek out artists who influenced or were influenced by them, didn't even listen to the other songs on the album. It wasn't out of apathy; my musical awareness and palette was miniscule, but my adoration of, amazement with, and faith in songs had already begun to flourish. Looking back, the problem was self-doubt. For movies and paintings and even long books, I could dismiss with equinanimity that which didn't strike my fancy as boring, flawed, overly confusing, or simply not meant for me. I could not face music with the same confidence. If I grew lax enough to let an unfamiliar song slip into my ears, and I didn't like it, I was shaken. I was convinced that there was something crucial I was missing, that I had screwed up somehow and lacked the talent that one clearly needed to succeed as a music fan. I wasn't afraid that new music would fail me. I was certain that I would fail it. And so I tucked away my skimpy treasure trove of songs, greeting each newcomer suspiciously, as if songs were eggs I was juggling and one more could bring the whole precarious affair crashing down.

But if the songs came slowly and with difficulty, they still came. Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's deathless "Hallelujah" came because I had seen Shrek, and when my parents obligingly bought the soundtrack, I spent quite a bit of time with the song that had struck me so in the theater: not Buckley's version, but Rufus Wainwright's. When my parents learned how much I liked it (how they coaxed that confession out of my reluctant little self, I cannot recall), they eagerly informed me that there was a more definitive version and that they, in fact, possessed it. One of them dashed to the shelf and brought back a cracked CD case. It bore a cover I am still trying to understand: a singer, that much is clear, whose passionately closed eyes and somehow unmistakeable 90s-ness put me at first in mind of Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain, but whose aura is leagues away from theirs, expressable only in the album's title.

So I took it up to my room and stuck it in my starving CD player and skipped (frantically fast but hyper aware, lest I accidentally hear a fraction of a wrong song) to track 6. In the six minutes that followed that first inviting, frightening intake of breath, I could recognize the skeleton ghost of the Wainwright version--same chords, same allusive, unflinching, stupendous lyrics. But this was something entirely different from Shrek, and from anything else I'd ever heard. It was Romantic; these days, I can tie that term to an artistic and historical movement to which Buckley unquestionably belonged, but then, the capital R was simply my best attempt at describing a voice that transcended every love song I had ever heard, by imparting every one of Cohen's perfect words with throbbing sorrow and painful, almost helpless sensuality, by showing, rather than telling, love. He repeats the song's title endlessly at the close, but I never felt it was indulgent: why would I ever get tired of hearing him? He could have gone on for half an hour and my attention would never have wandered.

So I loved it, and put it back on the downstairs shelf (I almost never kept one of my parents' CDs in my room, for reasons which had nothing to do with deference to the disc's owners), and came back and took it back upstairs again right after school, in the morning right after my shower, in the post-dinner peace, every day for months. As with all truly great music, repeated listening hasn't destroyed "Hallelujah"; the only imprint my past obsession has made is ancient ripples of emotion, sliding down the years back to me every time I return to that song.

And so in retrospect, it is not at all surprising that Grace was the first album on which I didn't firmly hit the stop button after The Song was over. One day, that last crystalline syllable faded, and I sat and waited.

Then: a faint whirring noise, suddenly overlaid by beautiful woodwinds, chord-waves of contentment and quiet age. It was lovely and it was new, and for a few disorienting seconds, I was without gravity.

Then the acoustic guitar struck, short notes but unmistakeable, like drops of sudden rain in the puddle you've been staring at. And I felt the song, its shape and range, and for the first time, felt musically comfortable without a drop of familiarity. After I had ridden the ecstatic pushes and pulls of that first song ("Lover, You Should've Come Over"), I perhaps went on to explore the rest of the album from the beginning. Or perhaps I let it ride out to the end from there, or perhaps I stopped the album dead and soaked in the unbeatable silence that follows the last song of the day. I don't remember, which is of course precisely the point--from then on, I loosened up, I let my music spread horizontally instead of observing strict vertical practice. I explored, not with trepidation, but with eagerness, and found that there was way more music out there than I had ever imagined, and more importantly, that I liked an absurdly high percentage of it after all.

And some examples were "Mojo Pin", whose intimidating, unknowable name no longer mattered when set against that aching chorus and that murderous, bone-shaking stomp. And the flawless "Grace", which like R.E.M. taught me the invaluable lesson that a voice can say far more than the words it's saying (even when those words are impressionistic and utterly beautiful). And "Lilac Wine", all character and mood and steady images of dusky, elegant objects half hidden in Buckley's crooning shadow. It took me so long to reach Grace's closers, but they quickly became my favorites: "Eternal Life" stomps, howls, and tears, entire universes beyond the usual sensitive singer-songwriter attempts at hard rock, and then "Dream Brother", refusing to come down to Earth as so many closing tracks assume they have to, the only track that reminds me, every time, that Buckley only outlived his debut record by three years.

My newfound desire to explore music has taken me to some awesome and divergent places since, but Grace has rarely left my side. Of course, this constancy is an element of what many people scorn in the album, dismissing it as MOR mediocrity, a keystone of the slew of yuppified dinner-party musicians that commercially took over from 90s altrock. I can't fault their objective history, but my relationship with Grace is inevitably more isolated and personal. To me, it never sounds boring, edgeless, or limiting. To me, it sounds like my freedom.


PJ Harvey--Rid Of Me

I was astonished to find this, rooting through my parent's least-used CDs to see if I could find anything salvageable before they made a donation run to the local library. My parents have excellent, enthusiastic taste in female musicians, but everything I had always read about this record (usually, the word "feral" was involved) made it sound like one of the last things to ever end up on their shelves. And I had read a lot about Rid Of Me, much of it from SPIN (who gave it a 10 out of 10, one of the very few things they got perfect post-Nirvana), but also from nearly every corner of the critical network I knew about then. At that age (17), I was still heavily dependent on such established critical sources to guide me through the various fluid, intersecting canon-interpretations of what was good (or rather, important) music. Given Rid Of Me's exalted status, I had always felt odd for not owning it. But my initial fanboy-focus on the early 90s punk-crossover icons had faded rather sharply by the time I was 17, and Rid Of Me had happened to miss that boat, as has happened to a few touchstones of every section of music I've crested and descended (see also: Archers of Loaf, the Rolling Stones). So it had existed in a strange little limbo-world of my musical mind--I respected it and could have cogently argued on its behalf, without having ever heard a note of it. I was glad of the opportunity to change that, and so Rid Of Me stayed behind while its equally neglected fellows were driven off to the quiet, earnest life of a library CD. And that, of course, fits Rid Of Me perfectly--it would rather stay on, as yet unloved, to needle and cut at a stranger, than accept graceful retirement.

And yeah, when I first spun Rid Of Me, it needled, and it cut, and it was utterly, unambiguously ungrateful that I had saved it from a dignified scrap heap. I don't remember the sensation of listening to it for the first time, but I do recall the lingering aura of metallic distaste, and the rarely-felt sensation that my critical godfathers had ripped me off. Polly Jean's work was one-dimensional, wrong-sounding, and ugly beyond the shielding powers of artistic integrity. I read Steve Albini's name in the liner notes and felt distinct irritation with a man I'd previously revered. This wasn't an opening up, a road to musical possibilities that I could explore. This was a dead end, and a dead end I'd passed without slowing on my way up the hill. And I'd evidently been right to do so after all.

So I buried it, like my parents had before me, and moved on. Some weeks later, I bought Fugazi's Repeater and had a similar initial reaction, but seduced by the band's ethics and backstory, I stubbornly gave it time. And in time, it revealed itself to me, not as just a kickass punk record (although it is perhaps the reigning kickass punk record), but as a work that grew as I listened to it, as I noticed both the virtuosity and humility of the instrumental arrangements, as if musical skill was nothing other than the most diverse and powerful method of communicating a simple but urgent message. And that message wasn't over-the-top, exclusive rage: "You are not what you own" is actually as different as can be from, say, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Fugazi yelled a lot and was absolutely uncompromising in their polemics, but far from castigating us or tossing us a vague-but-anthemic way out, the band was actively exhorting listeners to invest in their own, equally subtle and tiered message: if you're not what you own, then you have to go find out what you are.

I could talk about Repeater and Fugazi all day, but the most immediate impact that record had on me was an instant desire to revisit Rid Of Me. Some ghostly, evanescent similarities between the albums led me to think that I had erred in my impatience.

And I had. If Rid Of Me is about any one thing to me, it's not dismemberment or brutal sex (although those are very key), it's that a seemingly monochrome, aggressive front can be the freshest and most effective way of exploring emotional depth and songwriting range. Rid Of Me has angry songs and contemplative songs and despairing songs and devious, enjoying-my-own-hatred songs, and songs that are all of those at once, too. But it doesn't have Angry Songs or Despairing Songs, and despite its surface reputation, it's not an Angry Album. It doesn't plot out the song types for the listener, which will throw off anybody who can't hear past the sharpness of the guitars and the weight of her voice (and on first listen, that's pretty much everybody). Every song on this album gets loud and sounds harsh, yes. Hell yes. But that's the language of the record, and what it's actually trying to get across with that unifying tongue sounds more like fraught, instant, emotional in-between spaces than the obvious peaks and pits. The moment between sex and murder--"Legs". The moment between regret and independence--"Missed" (and also, remember "I Will Survive "). The moment between breezy momentum and stopping off for some commentary--"50 ft Queenie". The moment between hero worship and scorched earth--"Highway 61 Revisited", of course, of course. These aren't contradictions to be resolved. These are real-life shots, and if you're uncomfortable, it's because you're familiar with them.

And musically? Look beyond the (excellent) Dylan cover, and you'll still find plenty of gnarled folk roots. Making these songs noisy and punk isn't some "juxtaposition", it's a natural outgrowth of the emotional heart of those old folk songs, which are always way harsher then you recall them being. The most common genre-term for Rid Of Me is art-punk, and it definitely has those qualities that makes one compulsively stick "art-" in front of the base tag. What are those qualities? After the first born-again listen, I went back to the backstory. Harvey was in retreat from the success of her own debut, Dry, and was facing some serious major-label pressure while recording the follow-up. So she made an album so seemingly about the obvious and sensational but became revered for the details, the timing, and the edge-of-art nature of some seriously strange songs. "Missed" is dominated by a circling, draining riff, absolutely unwilling to release its tension; I knew Slint when I heard them for the first time, not long after. "Legs" ends on a whisper, and not a stage whisper but a completely human, exhausted ending where a more climactic one might be expected. The string-laden "Man-Sized Sextet" ought to stick out like a sore thumb as the obvious weird song, but after a few listens, it sounds like a complete coup--strings, the most obvious and bemoaned sign of big-money acclimation, are used like saws to further enhance the spareness and oddity of Harvey's jabbing descriptions. It sounds organic, a natural part of the album, somehow. "Somehow" is a good word for this record--reflecting both a struggle against steep odds and a triumph that defies easy explanation.

This album has made me (made me) turn down the volume during the quiet sections to a near-nonexistent hush, and then give it a terrifying jolt upward just as the band does the same--as on the opening title track, again and again. Rid Of Me achieves dynamics that explain, enhance, and are the weight and memorability of the song, rather than act as a cheap sonic crutch that was all too common by 1993.

As I delved into Rid Of Me, I was afraid of music again, but for all the right reasons. I've had to abruptly stop this record more times than I can count to give myself a moment of contemplation or rest, to slowly re-enter its deep, complex viscerality.

It is visceral, and powerful, and heavy, and if one part of my relationship to his album has stayed the same since I first heard it, it's the sense that Rid Of Me is out to destroy me. But Rid Of Me isn't out to murder you while howling (like In Utero) or hack you to bits while grinning (like Surfer Rosa). It exists to do for you what it did for its creator: to grind away at a simplified, falsified outer shell, destroying not you but your layers of bullshit, until you can step out and forward, unencumbered, driven by emotions and sounds as fascinating as they are furious.