My favorite music year

Periodically The Onion AV Club runs a recurring feature called 'My Favorite Music Year.' In this feature one of their staff writers rhapsodizes about the year a bunch of the favorite music came out. This is my take on that feature.

My favorite music year was 1978. But don't think I'm stuck in 1978, I enjoy new music and I'm constantly on the prowl for new bands and singers to enjoy. However, in 1978 some of the albums that shaped who I am today came out.

Among them was this album:
Smart, funny, deeply acerbic, and musically brilliant are just a few ways to describe the late Warren Zevon. I had already come to know about him through is session work for Linda Ronstadt who I adored at that time. This album had his biggest hit Werewolves of London on it, and it was deservedly a hit but to me Excitable Boy and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner were even better songs. Mr Zevon died a few years back and there's been a void in our music scene ever since.
I've written how this album changed my life before on this blog and if you want to root around through my archives you can read about it. This album came out when all you heard on the radio was disco, sugary pop songs, and bloated prog rock shit. The music I heard on this album was so totally different, so new, so captivating that it hit me between the eyes like a hammer. It woke me from my late '70's slumber and pointed me in a new direction.

Fronted by every straight 16 year old boy's sexual fantasy, I was 16 in '78, Debbie Harry, Blondie was a breath of fresh air. They had radio friendly hits but they also rocked. And no one was sexier than Ms. Harry. Her breathy vocals made me swoon with teenage desire.

In Elvis Costello I saw someone who looked like me (a geeky gawky guy with huge black horn rimmed glasses) and had issues with women like I did back then (I was desperately shy and when I did make a move on a girl I was usually turned down which made me more self conscious and less likely to try again later). He was all attitude, snarling about lost love, shitty jobs, and had a general sour outlook on things, and I loved it. It was like he was speaking to me about me. It took me many years to fully appreciate this album but I finally do. Like many of his other works, it's classic.

Nick Lowe is the flip side to my Elvis Costello worship. He's more poppy, more fun, and more accessible. I loved his sound, his look, and his production of other rock and roll albums, he produced many of Costello's early albums and his fingerprints are all over many other artists of that time. I didn't come to know this album until many years after it came out, my introduction to Nick was 1979's Labour of Lust. When I finally got this album on cassette, I wore that cassette out from paying it over and over again. Due to fears of a backlash by Christians in this country they changed the name of this album when they released it over here in the USA, they changed it to Pure Pop for Now People. It's a stone cold classic.
On this album Springsteen finally lived up to the hype the press had heaped on him a few years earlier. Gone were the wordy ballads about fucking in the mud, catching the bus while drunk, and hanging out on the boardwalk in New Jersey. In their place were finely crafted songs that didn't take twelve stanzas to tell the story. And the songs were backed by blistering guitars, heavy duty bass lines, and tight drums. I still get a chill when I hear the 'Badlands', 'Adam Raised a Cain', and 'Prove it all Night.'

Other seminal albums that I love that were released in 1978 include:
Waylon & Willie (Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson), Easter (Patti Smith Group), Squeeze (Squeeze), FM Soundtrack (various artists), Street Legal (Bob Dylan), Peter Gabriel (Peter Gabriel), Some Girls (Rolling Stones), More Songs About Buildings and Food (Talking Heads), Who Are You? (The Who), One Nation Under a Groove (Funkadelic), Time Passages (Al Stewart), Dire Straits (Dire Straits), Outlandos d'Amour (The Police), Give 'em Enough Rope (The Clash), and Midnight Oil (Midnight Oil).

I could have just as easily went with 1979 but for the fact the Blondie and Springsteen released their classic albums in 1978.

What's your favorite music year?

Meme Madness

Sometimes I fucking hate Blogspot and it's won't let you take out all those damned big ass white chunks of nothingness in the posts. I apologize for big ass chunks of nothingness and I curse the dark gods that bore Blogspot.

Becca over at No Smoking in the Skull Cave tagged me with my first meme. Here are the rules:

1. Go to http://www.popculturemadness.com/

2. Pick the year you turned 18

3. Get yourself nostalgic over the song’s of the year

4. Write something about how the songs affected you

5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

Since the lovely Miss Becca's blog was one of my blog inspirations, I am honored to obey her wishes, although since I am so old some of you may think that my song choices are off a playlist from a classic rock station. But here goes anyway:

The first song I pick from the year I turned 18, which was 1980 by the way, is Bruce Springsteen's Hungry Heart.

It's off his double CD, though then we would have called it a double album, The River. This song is important to me because it showed the longing for something different that a lot of us were experiencing at that time. Reagan was swept into power in the USA in 1980 and not all of us liked it or liked what he represented. This song, and the album, told me that I was not alone and that there were others with me. Plus, I danced , very badly mind you, to it at about a million college mixers. I liked this version I found on You Tube because it also has Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Little Steven, Nils Lofgren, and all those other musicians on it. I defy you not to at least sway some when you hear it.

The next song I choose is the first rap song I ever heard The Breaks by Kurtis Blow.

Yes, Rappers Delight finished higher on the charts that year, but this was the first rap song I heard. There was no way of knowing then just how big rap would become and what it would mean to so many people, both white and black. I knew I was hearing something different that first time I heard it in Dave and Alex's dorm room and I was kind of scared of it, but in a good way. I thought, man that's neat but it's not what us white folk are supposed to be listening to. It was like a way to secretly rebel and be in solidarity with my black brothers and sisters, which I am sure would have been great news to them. I can't say I like all rap, just like I don't like all rock or all electronica or all country, but I do love the political rap of groups like Public Enemy, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Wyclef Jean, and others.

The next song I choose is Rock Lobster by The B52's.

I always felt like I was very different from the kids I went to high school with in that I wanted to get out the countryside as soon as I could after graduating. I wanted the bright lights, the big city, the wild experiences of living a fast paced life. I wanted to live in NYC or Paris or London, you know where the action was and I wanted to hang out with people like the B52's. People who I thought were hip and artsy and socially aware yet fun as hell too. I never got around to living in NYC or Paris or London, yet, and I never got to hang with the B52's, yet, but when I do we're gonna stay up and party all night long, sing this song at the top of our lungs, and laugh and drink like they did in the Weimar Republic or in 1920's Paris.

My next choice is ACDC's You Shook Me All Night Long.

I never really got into ACDC much until I got to college that is. When I heard this song for the first time, and for the rest of the album that it came from, Back in Black, it struck something deep and primeval in me. It sounded so raw and nasty that I felt like I need to shower after I heard it. I had never seen Angus Young thrash on his guitar the way he does when he plays ever before then, but I hung my head and let the crunchy chords sweep me away, like Angus does when he plays. In those days heavy metal bands were a dime a dozen but there was no one else quite like ACDC and no other band had quite the same effect they did on me and my friends in college.

My final selection is from "the only band that mattered." My last selection is The Clash's Train In Vain.

The Clash were a group of pasty faced hard living, hard drinking, hard smokin' punk rockers who were political as hell. They played fast, and hard, and they had a unapologetic left wing view of things. The Sex Pistols may have been more provocative than the boys in The Clash, but they were really just poseurs compared to Joe Strummer and his motley band. The Clash were like a breath of fresh air to me after I had suffered through years and years of music put out by groups like Styx, Kansas, Boston, and sensitive singer songwriters like Dan Fogelberg. Finally here was a band that played hard core rock and roll that did not fit into a neat little pigeonhole. I dug it like crazy that in those early days top 40 radio did not play most of The Clash's songs, because that meant that others had to do some work to find out about them and that they had to get off their asses and stop listening to the pre programmed crap the corporate machine was spewing. This song was one of the few Clash songs played on mainstream radio in those days, in fact some radio station in Atlanta dedicated it to our senior class when they played it on the first night of our senior trip in May of 1980. I recall thinking through my pot and vodka induced haze that night, "Damn how cool is that? They just dedicated that Clash song to us, we rock."

Okay, now I tag the following people: my pal D Cup over at Politits, everybody's sweetheart Blue Gal, my liege Cap'n Dyke, because I think it's funny Jesus Christ (though I doubt He reads my little blog), and Peacechick.

We all know Jesus has all the time in the world to do His is He ever does it, but you ladies feel free to take your time.