What artists/writers/performers
grasped you at a young age
and carried you on towards
becoming the person
you are now?
One of the benefits of growing up in Canada in the 80s/90s was that we had a music video channel that–for the brief window when it was relevant to me–went out of its way to expose its audience to something beyond the regular top 40. This was how I heard Lou Reed for the first time in a non-animated context. It was 1989, I was 13 and the video they played was the first single from “New York”–which was considered something of an artistic comeback for him at the time. Here’s a live version of that song from that same year:
That next day I bicycled over to the nearest public library and found the album in their new release bin. I took it home and listened to it non-stop. I could tell that I was listening to something that was very adult and serious, but also funny in ways I didn’t entirely understand. Bullied and alienated from the rest of my peers, I was very angry and it was this righteous indignation that I latched onto–especially in “Dirty Blvd” which to me was about how unfair life was and how most of the people fighting for something better probably woudn’t find it.
After that I took out every album of his the library had. My uncle bought me the “Between Thought & Expression” CD boxed set for Christmas a few years later and I listened to it non-stop. I hadn’t yet moved on to his earlier work with the Velvet Underground so for the first few times I listened to that set’s 12:20 version of “Heroin” I was convinced it was about a terrible woman named Rowanne–“Heeeeeeeey, Rowanne–be the death of me, it’s my wife and it’s my life.”
Looking back, he clearly belongs on the list of creative people whose works caught my attention at a young age and helped to form the building blocks of who I became. Also on that list I would add George Carlin, Woody Allen, Tori Amos, Johnette Napolitano, Kurt Vonnegut, Gordon Korman, Stephen King, David Cronenberg, Bob Fosse, Roger Cormen, Danny Peary and many more.
Who are the people on your list? The ones who helped shaped you and whose presence you will dearly miss once they are gone?
I was in the record store one day (ha, remember that) and randomly picked up a tape (ha, remember those) of Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix. I distinctly remember hitting ply in my bedroom and thinking “holy shit, what is this madness?” Over the next few years I bought everything from Hendrix I could get my hands on…probably ended up with 30-40 bootlegs, along with his few studio albums. The other band which made me feel adult in a different way and a little bit later was Radiohead’s Ok, Computer…especially Karma Police. On the literary side I can say with… Read more »
Owen Meany is the only book I stopped reading because it affected me too much. I had fallen so in love with the narrator’s mother that by the time what he told us in the beginning came true and she was killed, I couldn’t read any more. That said, I read The World According to Garp in grade 9 and it really amazed me.
Bob Marley, Public Enemy, Janis Joplin, U2, KRS-One to name a few.
KRS-ONE is a great one. For a white kid growing up in suburbia, Boogie Down Productions was very eye opening.
Oh, anything by Salinger, Cather in the Rye was good but so was Raise High The Roof beams Carpenter, and Franny and Zooey
Also, Dance on my Grave by Aiden Chambers is just the best bit of coming out, coming of age, teenage gay fiction ever. Romance, sex, death, sailing – who could ask for more?
And while David Essex’s Rock On maybe a cheesy bit of pop it had some cool going for it too and in his youth Mr Essex was a cheeky chappy with more than a bit of sex appeal.
And just in case no one else says it: Smashing Pumpkins.
Some of the performers who shaped my life were on kids’ shows: Mr. Rogers, Emilio Delgado and Sonia Manzano from “Sesame Street,” Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno on “The Electric Company.”
Some were musicians: the Grateful Dead, the Stones, The Doors, The Cure, Nirvana, Green Day.
Most were authors: Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Donald Sobol, T. Ernesto Bethancourt, Kurt Vonnegut, Harry Harrison, Alan Dean Foster, James Herriot, Ray Bradbury, Vladimir Nabokov, etc. etc.
They’ll never know how much they meant to me, but I am grateful to them all the same.
“HEEEEY YOU GUUUUUUUUYSSSSS!”
Loved “Electric Company” (and “The Magic Garden” when I was little)…and okay….I could not tear myself away from “Zoom” and “The Brady Bunch” either…(I’ll stop there, but I could go on about favorite TV shows)… Back to cool bands: Cheap Trick, Styx, Pat Benatar, Blondie, and, yes, KISS!! Loved Chryssie Hyde of The Pretenders and The Stray Cats….there is nothing like seeing my favorite bands live!!! I owe a huge debt to punk and The Clash and The Waitresses and Wendy O. of The Plasmatics (she loved to blow up cars onstage!!)….loved their attitude …they were sooo badass and way… Read more »
Agreed with Joanna that Tori Amos hit me like a lightning bolt with Crucify. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me album and 4-track demos also had the same effect. On the guy side, Nine Inch Nails, Kurt Cobain and The Cure changed me forever, as did artists like De La Soul. So many in the late 80s and early 90s reshaped my world.
I didn’t discover De La Soul until my 20s, but Rid Of Me was a major album in my collection. I used to have an amazing poster of PJ Harvey amongst my collection. It was right beside the one I had of Kate Bush in her “Babushka” costume.
Awesome ;D
Hip Hop and Rap from the 80s and 90s. In that era rap was about using music to tell talk about the circumstances you were living. The obstacles that I was staring down the barrel of as a teenager were more in common with what Public Enemy and Tupac than the likes of other genres of music at the time. I remember for a long time the scariest thing I worried about was a stat that said between the ages of 18 and 25, a black man was more likely to be in jail than college. I don’t know how… Read more »
Can you imagine another art from in the last 30 years that told people’s stories that nobody else was telling in the mainstream more than hip hop and rap?
I mean, what an enormously important movement, if you think about it.
The story of young black men? No there is no other (despite its flaws). But at the same time when you look at the state of today’s rap and hip hop its pretty clear that the stories of young black men is profitable.
In the past it was, “This is the only life I had so I made the best of it for better or worse.” These days its “Moneymoneymoneycarscarscarswomenwomenwomenfamefamefame!!!”
There were the bands that took me through the pre and teenage years: First boy bands like Nsync, but I also liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Wallflowers, Nirvana. And then I became really interested in goth/rock with bands like Lacuna Coil and Evanescence. I’ve really listened to music from all genres except country (because I grew up listening to country and as near as I can tell the songs haven’t changed yet). I dislike AC/DC and Kiss because it reminds me of when my parents would get high and blast the music until my ears felt like they… Read more »
I find myself more attracted to the Kiss albums of the 70s, but for many of the same reasons I can’t stop listening to Donna Summer–there’s a nostalgic dreaminess there I find appealing. That said, I’ve never liked AC/DC.
I think I would probably be ok with them if they weren’t linked to other things in my mind.
Musically I was heavily influenced by the rock gods of the time: Cobain, Reznor, Grohl, Maynard.
But I’m not sure they helped move me into adulthood. Definitely helped me through adolescence though I didn’t consider myself grown up until my tastes evolved beyond being restricted to peer acceptability. Once I got there, it was Miles and Mingus, Django, Grappelli, Bird and Dizzy and Cannonball.
Musically, it was Public Enemy for me. Looks to be an odd choice, considering I’m white and from rural farmland PA, but their music opened my eyes to the unrest and unjust outside of my little sphere of existence and forced me to think bigger. Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher gave me Fight Club, which even though I was already an “adult”, made me see that I was living a life dictated by others, and not MY life. And I have George Carlin to thank for seeing the humor and sheer ridiculousness of our country’s exceptionalism and it’s leadership.
Not odd at all! After I read this article today, I was rooting through a drawer and found an old PE shirt. “It Takes A Nation of Millions,” man…I was in college living alone in an urban setting for the first time. I feel like I understood the temperature of the streets because of their music.
hilariously, I am also from white rural farmland PA
This is embarrassing in its triteness but to be totally frank, I can’t see how I would be anywhere without Tori Amos. Coming from a small town where there was nothing but the churchy “good girl” or the vilified slut, to have a woman who was outspoken, unafraid, fierce, talented, loud, not a “good girl”, talking openly about lust and desire – not to mention her rape – was mind-blowing. She was beautiful but terrifyingly powerful and not always happy. I think a lot of women my age probably feel the same way, and probably a lot of men as… Read more »
Not just women, since she made my list too! The first time I saw “Crucify” it literally made me sit straight up and say “What is this?” aloud to myself. And when I got the album and heard “Me and a Gun” it shook me like nothing else I’ve ever heard or ever will.
I almost vomited when I first heard “Me and a Gun” but it mattered SO MUCH to so many people. Before that, rape was this distant thing – something that could happen to a bad girl, something sexualized in movies, something that people talked about as if the survivor wasn’t real.
It was the first time I’d really seen a rape story told by the survivor. It changed everything for so many people.
I wrote my college admissions essay about Cronenberg, my filmic hero. We might be the same dang person, Mott.
Together we’re almost the perfect person.
To stay on the topic of Lou, the first record of his I heard was “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” (natch), on a diner table-top juke box with my family. My step-dad pronounced him “jive,” but the song confused and excited me. The first one I owned, a few years later, was The Velvet Underground and Nico. This was not a kid’s record. It was the antithesis of the West Coast counter-culture rock that permeated classic rock radio. It was dark, weird, beautiful, and scary. I think that record helped me to understand that it was ok to… Read more »
There were so many, but the ones whose deaths hit me hard when I was a teenager were Isaac Asimov, Jim Henson, and Douglas Adams. They were representatives of other kinds of masculinity and adulthood, reminders that the universe is vast.