First Song/Music That Opened New Worlds Musically For You

I heard it on Brave New Waves on night in 1993, and 16 yr-old me felt a connection that I'd never felt to music before. All my friends were into "serious" indie rock like the Dischord stuff, but this cutting loose, this ass-shake-ability, it spoke to me in ways that "Waiting Room" never would.

has happened a lot since then.

the biggest ever shock was Da Funk. turned my head inside out. and still does.

It must have been 1994?, I was on a field trip with my class and my punker friend handed me a walkman with this on it. The noisy intro, the obvious "nigger," and Jello's voice got me into punk and pushed me past the bubblegum of the Ramones, Green Day, etc.

A friend loaned me Gang of Four's Entertainment when I was a senior in high school in 1982. Never having actually heard any "punk rock," I had always thought it was supposed to be stupid; Entertainment! was really smart, not to mention really good. Somehow that led me to the Ramones, whereupon I realized that stupid was good too. Thank you Doug Miller, wherever you are, for preventing me from going through life thinking Rush was about as good as it got.

Another friend played Monk's "Little Rootie Tootie" for me when we were both working at a college radio station, circa 1985. Suddenly I realized that jazz--which I had previously assumed was gutless intellectual noodle music--could be brash and ugly and funny and, well, punk rock, among many other things. From there on, I tried not to make assumptions about any kind of music.

jon and i have something in common! (except you have to rewind it back 4 years or so.)

a friend giving me all his (then extant) public enemy cassettes in 1990.

being drug - against my will - to my first rave in late 1993.

those are the big ones.

You forgot the '-ed'

At that point I felt incredibly betrayed that Bowie would release such a hideously unlistenable record. But my meager 13 year old allowance didn't provide much means for record purchasing so in musical desperation I attempted to forge my way through it again. "Joe The Lion" was the first one that actually became a pleasurable listening experience and the album quickly became one of my favorites. From then on the idea that 'different' music could also be 'awesome' music was permanently lodged in my head.

Human League: "Don't You Want Me"
Made me discover synthpop and turned me into a major fan of Synthpop/New Romantic

Bruce Springsteen: "Dancing In The Dark"
Made me realise that guitar based music may be good music too.

M/A/R/R/S: "Pump Up The Volume"
and
Run DMC: "Walk This Way"
A bit of a paradox, but if it wasn't for these two songs, both of which I absolutely despised (and still do), I would never have discovered all the great music from the 60s and 70s that I do now love.

Blur: "Country House"
The song that finally brought back my faith in recent music, and also the first song that turned me into a fan of "alternative" music (whatever that means) for real.

Ministry - "Stigmata"
The Cure - "Just Like Heaven"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Siva"
Die Verbanten Kinder Evas - "Einleitung"
Fluke - "Absurd"
Chapterhouse - "Epsilon Phase"

these things are not mutually exclusive!

"ashes to ashes" (and the video!) "psycho killer" (and the stop making sense clip i saw on TV). "just like honey." "don't eat the yellow snow."

all the rest is history.

(a) seeing the video for "ashes to ashes" for the first time as a 14-year old was like intercepting a transmission from a Martian TV broadcast. made me realize that there was more to Mr. Bowie than the blonde-hair-explosion-king doing "let's dance" and "blue jean" yuppie-pop.
(b) spazzy-looking dude in a big suit, coming out on stage with a boombox and an acoustic guitar, and singing a song about someone who kills rude motherfuckers. what teenager wouldn't love that, and thank goodness that it wasn't Burzum or Cannibal Corpse at that impressionable age.
(c) had just got my driver's license, and drove to the Princeton Record Exchange in a snowstorm. was about to plunk down money on something silly (dead or alive, i think), and the guy behind the counter said "maybe you should listen to this instead -- it's really big in England now," handing me a cassette of psychocandy.
(d) listening to college radio one summer night in the mid-eighties -- after a whole lot of the usual mid-eighties college-radio fare (dead milkmen, camper van beethoven, x-ray spex) comes this really long, really weird song with all these fucked-up time changes and a shaggy-dog tale about an eskimo sticking wee-wee in a fur-trapper's eye.

Cos it's hella techno!

1. Styx, KILROY WAS HERE. First album I ever bought. 4th grade?
2. My friend taping 6 albums for me: Led Zeppelin IV, Rush MOVING PICTURES, Van Halen I, Jimi Hendrix STONE FREE, and I'm forgetting the other two. But it was the first cognizance that I had that there was music beyond top 40 (apparently, it hadn't yet occurred to me to turn the dial to other stations). 7th grade.
3. Husker Du, CANDY APPLE GREY. Wound up getting a Bob Mould album through Columbia House, liked it. Heard about Husker Du, and that the were "punk rock". Found this in a bargain bin. Put it in a tape deck in my car with my brother, and was greeted with a wall of noise unlike anything I'd heard before. It was like nothing I'd heard before and I was beyond nonplussed - is this punk rock? It sounds like an airplane taking off! Then the music actually kicks in, which would have sounded like a wall of noise otherwise to me but actually made sense in light of the preceding noise. Pretty much all of my music interests for the next several years spin out of that record. (11th grade.)

Never really got into the Huskers tho. After that for me it was all radio. Listening to radio shows like the CBC's Brave New Waves - first place I heard Public Enemy - and Nightlines, hosted by Dave Wisdom - first place I ever heard John Cage's "Indeterminacy"! And Steve Cushing's syndicated Blues Before Sunrise show on public radio taught me so much. ANd of course my hometown dj ELectrifying Mojo who turned me on to Afrika Bambaataa and Doug E. Fresh and Kraftwerk, and taught me about mixing and juxtapositions and that music could be as much as you wanted to imagine.

2. When i was about 11, a friends older sister showed me some Hendrix and iron maiden vinyl. After hearing hendrix i just really wanted to play the drums :) the hendrix albums sound so oringial even today. And showed me how other other wordly music sounds. Then i started exploring lots of rock from hendrix/zeppelin/cream/velvet underground, lots of 60's stuff.

3. I used to in to a lot of the early chili peppers stuff like freaky styley and blood sugar sex magik (still cool albums IMHO). I read in an interview with Flea and he mentioned how he loved parliament-funkadelic...so i checked out the 2 disc Tear off the roof collection and this started me getting into a lot of old funk and hip-hop. Can't get enough of the funk.

14 yrs. old: Nirvana - Nevermind everywhere -> change of music style

18 yrs. old: Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie at friend's house
Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream at home -> cathartic listening experience, renews my faith in music

22 yrs. old: Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One at a public music "library" -> everything is possible. Here began seriously my music collection.

radio was influence #4 - when I went to college and started djing free form, and I discovered free jazz/avant-classical/bluegrass/all sorts of other shit. Figured I'd leave that off.

That's really an amazing coincidence, though.

Blasting Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" many days in a row in a friend's car on the way to lunch made me realize how my defensive "if it ain't metal, it's crap!" attitude I'd developed in middle school because the kids I hated didn't like it was... way off-base.

Really LISTENING to AFX Selected Ambient Works 2 for the first time about 4:00-6:30am while having not slept all night, all the while getting blissed out/the hell scared out of me, sometimes at the same time.