Pick ONE record that most influenced/changed your life..
 

Fuck this was hard until suddenly it came to me quite clearly..


For me, Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus Nyahbinghi...

So i picked this record up from a bredren stepping up when i was 16 just getting into reggaem i had been exposed to radical reggae like Marley and Peter Tosh so i was increasingly interested in more of this music as it seemed to reflect my world view. Then the idren drops Nyahbinghi on me.. i went to the homiez pad who had a tabletop CDR burner andcmade a copy.... dude.. this is the most powerful spiritual music i had ever heard! I was enraptured and converted. Within 6 months i was growing dreads and sitting up on the hill in the East Los with the rastafari people.

Ras Michael is my friend now, i am as mystified when i am at his house as i was when i first heard that record. Ras Michael is the person who introduced me to the Orthodox Church.

To me it´s Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland. It´s the first record that has experimental elements and I get fully into it. When my brother loaned it from a friend, he didn´t even listened as a whole, he just said "I think this is one of those mess records Hendrix made within using drugs too much". I didn´t also listened it then. But it had woken my interest, so I loaned it again maybe after year and then it hit me! I think I was at the age of 10 then.

The Cramps, Bad Music for Bad People

Got it in my mid teens (before any of their 'proper' albums) and it seemed to join the dots between lots of stuff I was starting to get really interested in, not just in music but films, books, a whole culture.

This album got me away from Heavy Metal/Thrash music, and showed me complexity that punk did not have, and scared me with the bizarre sounds they pulled from guitars. It changed everything for me.

Yeah, the same is true for me.

Plenty of albums have influenced/changed my life, but I think Daydream Nation actually altered the way my mind functioned and perceived and experienced sound.

I think I had been secretly harboring some fear that I wouldn't like or understand it. I felt that same fear about certain literary works when I was a teenager, but I'd never felt that way about music. I was clearly afraid that my intelligence was somehow at stake, and that I was going to fail some crucial coming of age test if anything went over my head.

So I can't really express how utterly euphoric it felt when "Teen Age Riot" kicked into gear, and sounded exactly the way I wanted music to sound. I could hear the discordant elements in the songs, and somehow I understood that this was a test of sorts, if only to determine whether or not I was the kind of person who heard beauty in static and noise and ambience and deconstruction.

Turns out I was and always would be that kind of person.

But every track got my heart pumping like a fight song. There was beauty in the ugly moments and there was something much more complicated and almost scary in the beautiful moments. I'd never heard anything like it.

Not only did Daydream Nation help my mind connect the dots between the SY albums I'd already investigated (Jet Set, Washing Machine, Bad Moon Rising), it also equipped me with a context for records like Loveless and Psychocandy, which I owned but did not yet fully appreciate. It also showed me exactly why Nirvana's sound never seemed complete to me, because it showed me what I wished was there. It helped me to understand the inherent limitations imposed by "coloring within the lines."

I'm not sure any other album has ever communicated so much to me. It's not even my favorite Sonic Youth album!

"I was the kind of person who heard beauty in static and noise and ambience and deconstruction."

YES

Great selections! Hendrix and SY were also very life changing for me but i realized that Ras Michael indoctrinated me!

Electric Ladyland is epic, that post Woodstock Hendrix is on a different wavelength, channeling what would become No Wave and Noise

Exactly! I was just thinking about it last night so i decided to post about it

There quite literally millions of people who completely agree with you. I am one of them, i listened to Nirvana in elementary school and i think its very formative


I just wish someone had introduced me to John Lennon solo shit before i ever heard the Beatles. Man i couldn't stand the Beatles.. SOOOOOOO BORING and bland. Lennon solo shit is much better, indeed it made me come to appreciate what other people found in the Beatles.
Im glad so many of us picked this Hendrix. It is much better than the earlier stuff, better crafted yet more experimental.

Oh, i don't listen to Beatles at all, just John Lennon solo and occasionally some George Harrison but through my liking of Lennon solo i learned to at least appreciate what Beatles fans like. I "get it" even if i don't like it

Should i not take this chance to say i don't like Zeppelin either? Ok... i like III but THAT'S IT

SY hasn´t been me the band that changed my life. Not even Sister. The reason is that I just had listened so much epoch-making music before I heard a single SY-album (for example Hendrix, the Who, Pink Floyd, Wigwam, King Crimson, Beefheart, Tom Waits, Joy Division, Velvet Underground). But some reason I don´t quite understand SY came to my favourite band maybe in 2006.

I really would have wondered if Rob hadn´t put some SY album in this. It´s not any rebuke, it´s really great thing. I think he´s much bigger SY-fan than I.

About the Beatles, I think no-one of them could do as great albums alone as they did in Beatles.

I'll show my age with this reply but I couldn't care less. In grade school I liked music, but as a relatively minor interest among many. But around the time I started junior high school, in the waning days of summer, I was in my bedroom listening to the radio when Sly and the Family Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime came on. I had heard the song before but this time something clicked--I thought, "This is a REALLY good song". Yes, it praises warm weather fun, but it goes deeper than that. That's what started my fascination with music. I began listening to songs more closely, which led to my searching for stuff (pre-internet, you understand) beyond what you could hear on the radio, which led me to a lifetime of musical fanaticism. All that money on recorded music and concerts, and probably not being as far ahead in my career as I would be otherwise...was it worth it? Yes!

Sonic Youth hasn't been the *only* band to change my life. Nirvana had already done so in many ways, perhaps having a greater impact on my future than anyone else. But I realize now that part of my fascination with them was due to having a father whose love of the Beatles was like a deeply engrained personality trait. I grew up listening to the Beatles, and hearing the old man (when he was kind enough to grace me with his presence) tell stories about seeing them in the '60s, and being on the front lines of the greatest pop culture phenomenon in history.

I saw something of the Beatles in Nirvana, being just old enough and just interested enough to understand that they were occupying a position of similar significance, though on a much, much smaller scale.

So, like any good son of an absent alcoholic father, I took shelter in denial and hero-worship, and I emulated him. I really did fucking love Nirvana, and still do (more so than even, actually), but looking back on it, I can see how some of my Nirvana infatuation may have been a result of environment and circumstance. A coping mechanism. And therefore not entirely "me" or my own. And while I was sincerely smitten with that music, and I certainly felt Kurt's death shake my worldview like an earthquake, there was something archetypal about the whole thing.

But my experience with Sonic Youth was different. knew that there was no universality to their sound. I didn't have friends who listened to them... I knew that to some (many?), much of their music was virtually unlistenable. But I also knew that there was a large community of people who felt that they made perfect music. I already enjoyed the first few albums I'd picked up, but I would never have played them alone in the car for a long drive. And to be fair, they were fairly challenging records. This was back when albums like Antichrist Superstar and Life is Peachy were more or less what teenage boys wanted to hear. So I think SY was special for me from the get go because I couldn't talk to my friends about them, and if I put their music on, it was in the background.

Daydream Nation was definitive and personal and my love for it was unique, something I'd never felt in response to music before. I knew that plenty of the bands I loved when I was 13 simply wouldn't wouldn't appeal to me in adulthood.
Daydream Nation was very different. The maturity of the music was palpable. I was responding to the music and the aura and the hue of the sound; I wasn't just relating to some angsty lyric about divorce or the status quo. I was appreciating art on my own, in my own way, independent of the influence of friends, siblings, MTV, radio or any other warped and market driven notion of what was or should be "cool". There was something really pure about it, and I loved the idea that I was having an authentic reaction to something, and it had nothing to do with marketing, or trends, or high school, or what anyone else thought I "should" be doing.

In this way, I associate SY and Daydream Nation in particular, with a key phase in the development of my identity and my path to independent self discovery.

Yes, that was from my memoirs, Severian's S'Very Awesome Rise & S'verely Shitty Subsequent Slip into S'nility

^ that started as a response to Mortte's comment about having heard a great deal of "epoch making" music before getting into SY. Basically, same here. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Ramones, Nirvana, MBV... I just feel there's a distinction between the music I was surrounded by for various reasons and the music I made the explicit choice to surround myself with later.

To me SY came first and after that Nirvana. I heard GOO first time about half year it´s release. But reason why I like it so much is that it reminds me many of the sixties stuff I loved. So the reason I started to love it wasn´t any "this is music I´ve never heard before" it´s more like "really great some today´s band have made an album that is so much the music I love".

But I also really remember when I heard "Smells like teen Spirit" first time. It had pure energy that I hadn´t heard a long time. My brother bought Nevermind and I brought it to some our school´s party. Of course the most of the people didn´t understand it at all, but there were maybe three guys who went absolutely grazy about it and asked me what´s this, it´s really great! Even that song has become some kind of Stairway to Heaven of grunge, I still remember that my first feeling always when I hear it. Later of course I met guys, who had been Nirvana-fans already in Bleach-time (you know there are always guys who heard great bands from their first demos, Metallica was playing in a very small Place in Finland after they had made Kill Em All, there were guys watching it, but not me).

I think those were great times, I think grunge was the last true youth movement. Year after hearing Smells like teen spirit like many other fans in Finland I went to see Nirvana in a Ruisrock-festival. It was a little bit disappointment to me, but I think I will remember it rest of my life.

Anyway Nirvana become a band almost everybody of my friends listened, SY was never as popular here. But even I liked Nirvana then and has liked it also later, it never became as important to me as SY.

About Nirvana & the Beatles, I have always thought Nevermind is kind of Beatles-album made in the nineties way.

I'm not sure how much any record has really changed my life. Some bands have increased my appreciation for music, or changed my listening and music purchasing habits. But pinning those changes to one record is kind of unrealistic to me. More than one record it sort of a giant mess of this song or that song, particular live experiences, and various things I've read.

Certain friendships I have have used a shared love of music as a springboard to something greater, but again I couldn't highlight one record that was pivotal in this.

Public Enemy probably made me aware of more important real world issues that I didn't know about but that is thanks to their general message as a band, rather than one record or another, (I was 10 or 11 when I first heard them and I can't remember which album I heard first anyway).

Nirvana was a big deal for me and made me stop listening to everything else when I got into Nevermind. And then 36 Chambers got me back in to hiphop a few years later.

Pertinent to Sonic Youth, they have probably had a greater affect on broadening my tastes and also resulted in a few friendship that have spilled out from this message board and into real life, and even lead to trips to Greece and Montenegro. I guess the SY release that set me on the road to being a life long fan is The Year Punk Broke, which is VHS tape and not a record. So maybe there's your answer.

1991 punk broke was my better introduction to SY.. i had dirty and washing machine but THAT video was epic..

Its nice to see how much we all have in common

I even debated putting 1991 punk broke as my most influential record until i realized that Ras Michael indoctrinated me, recruited me to work with him, and became my personal friend and mentor

I would go for TYPB if videos were allowed. The only film I've watched more than that was Up In Smoke! (both heavily influenced me :D)

If I had to pick a record I'd probably say Nevermind...

Everyone just stop stealing my memories! Nevermind? Electric ladyland? 1991 punk broke??m up in smoke????

Great post, i love a European perspective on nevermind

About music and coping mechanisms, I believe music is a coping mechanism in those who love music passionately. I can be of course wrong. I mean there are persons to whom this world is too much, kind of sensitive guys, who needs some art to survive. I spent some times alone when I was quite small and I think music become to me replacement of human relations in those situations. No-one of course did put me into room with a music, I think i just was interested about music myself. And because my parents had to be in the work (my mother was only few hours a day) and I enjoyed to be myself with the music, there were those moments. One of my longest friend from childhood has told me, that she asked me to go out but I had said "No, I just want to listen rock". I don´t remember it myself.

Anyway as music therapy view of this, I believe music can also prevent some people to face his problems. I mean music can be so big defense to person who has been in it most of his life.

But also, I think my life would have been really much worse without music! I think I have coped with really hard times with the help of great people & music.

Hex Enduction Hour

Honestly...I would have to say Kill Yr Idols/Confusion is next. It's the 2nd album by SY I listened to. That CD totally changed the way I viewed music. I didn't know such sounds were possible with your standard rock outfit. ANyways...SY as a whole changed my whole view on life period....especially after reading Goodbye 20th Century. I mean...I guess SY came into my life at the right time. I listened to them at the start of high school and that time is a very influential period...we're all beginning to find ourselves....and SY really just told me, 'fuck it'.

I heard Goo first time also in the first grade of high school. It was quite messy period in my life, so it was really great soundtrack of it!

SONIC YOUTH - EBOLA

These have been really important to me also, kind of milestone albums. Black Sabbath vol.4 is the first album I remember to listen, from cassette (before my brother bought vinyl player, we had cassette player). Of course didn´t really understand it that time, but I still remember the feelings it woke in me. Then there was period I thought Sabbath was boring. Then one of my friends recommend me Paranoid-album and so Sabbath became back to me and I still love those 6 first albums.

Nico-album & White light become important to me same time as Joy Division-albums. Really great music to the adolescent who just a little before has found punk.

Stooges came to me little bit late. I had heard Raw Power, but really didn´t first understand why people thought it was a great album. I think the sounds were the main reason (now I really love those sounds). I heard three cover-versions from the first Stooges album (Not Right, No Fun & Ann) and because I really liked them, I wanted to hear the originals. Then I finally heard first Stooges in one of my friend, he put it me into cassette and I become a big Stooges-fan!

Vol 4 is a Sabbath masterpiece

Snowblind is fucking awesome. The song itself is so great that even that godawful System of a Down couldn't ruin it. Even their version had some of the haunting energy of the original.

I'm not a "Sabbath Guy" in any way, and I can get by with well put together playlists and "best of" collections for the most part, but Vol. 4 is an album I can't go without. It's their best as far as I'm concerned.

Dudes, will you all just get out of my head and stop stealing my ideas and tastes in music! This has become my favorite thread

Do yall like Sabotage? Its truly my fav Sabbath album

I think I like all those six first as much. Sabotage is also really great! Symptom of the Universe, Megalomania, Supertzar, Am I going Insane, really great classic Sabbath tunes! Hole in the sky has of course great riff, but I think in that song band started to go to the little bit boring direction. Of course there are some not so great songs also in the earlier albums.

But if I have to say my favourite of those I think it´s also Vol.4. Maybe just because it was my first Sabbath and also my first rock album I remember to listen.

About my parents, they introduced me only this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE5SrkzxYdY

About System of down, never really understand why people think it´s a great band. It´s not bad band, but I think Nomeansno & Minutemen have done same thing a lot better.

Just listened their Snowblind-version, I think it`s horrible.

The first record Self Titled is brilliant, original, and fierce. I love that record.. all the other shit is just that, shite.

System of a Down is garbage, like any of those bands. Seriously. Why are we even talking about them here?

Anyhowz. I don't like the percussive hippy folk bit in Supernaut, it detracts from the riff-majestry. And FWIW Sepultura did a much better incorporation of that kind of stuff on Roots.

piece for jetsun dolma

I like percussions in both. Sepultura`s version of the Symptom is also really great! Like the acoustic end of it!

Terre Thaemlitz - Couture Cosmetique

totally blew me away when I heard it for the first time. It's actually the record that encouraged me to make music, and more specifically, that kind of music that I do.