For music lovers, there is usually a single album that comes to mind when thinking about childhood. For many, those albums from our pasts can be embarrassing, cringe, worthy of secret-keeping — think the “Hamilton” soundtrack, middle school emo or the music your dad made you listen to. Regardless of whether you are proud of your musical past (the tastes of childhood are usually unfettered and uninformed), these albums can be full of memories, beginnings, endings and self-discovery — all equally a stitch in the fabric of you. Today, the Music writers explore their past, one album at a time.
— Claire Sudol, Music Beat Editor
Silent Shout — The Knife
It’s pretty easy to see why I’ve gravitated toward Silent Shout over the years. It was middle school, an uncomfortable time for me (and for most others), and I discovered this album after becoming a massive Björk fan. Silent Shout, though it may derive some of its sounds from the Icelandic songstress, goes in an entirely different direction. Unlike Bjork’s themes of naturalistic splendor, Silent Shout is anxious and rigid, built out of tales interwoven with Swedish folklore that depict a ghost in a machine unveiling the harshness of its reality. In middle school, however, I never cared to unravel the politics of this album, though I found solace in the icy, brittle grooves scattered throughout, reflecting the uncomfortable changes middle school brought along.
Underneath the springy and perky electronics on “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” is the story of being trapped within the never-ending cycle of capitalistic greed, all the more accentuated by the repetition towards the end of the song during which lead singer Karin Dreijer layers more and more vocal motifs on top of each other until the track becomes a rambunctious cacophony. Beneath the demonic, pitch-shifted vocal effects and slippery synthesizers on the title track, Dreijer sings from a place of pure unease. She describes dreams in which all her teeth fall out, being trapped in a permanent mute state where she is unable to scream, singing “I caught a glimpse now it haunts me.” The track “Like a Pen,” my personal favorite on the album, is a cutting, four-to-the-floor dance tune about Dreijer’s contemptuous view of her own body, in which Dreijer gives an impassioned, guttural vocal performance likening herself to a vampire, as if pleading the listener to help her morph out her monstrous form: “And when the light finds my eye / I’ll be fleeting like a scent.” A revolutionary statement in modern dance music that still holds up to this day, the cold and tortured Silent Shout will always have a place in my heart.
Daily Arts Writer Zachary Taglia can be reached at ztaglia@umich.edu.
Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness — The Smashing Pumpkins
I do not often go back to Mellon Collie. Thus, the memory is still pure, rich underneath like an unturned stone: It was Halloween that day and I was shit out of parties to go to. That night, I wandered the city alone, parting schools of fifth-graders with little brown bags, past the swerves and stumbles of college-age drunks. On a bench in Hell’s Kitchen, I wrote, and the infinite sadness was my soundtrack.
It’s complained that Smashing Pumpkins, or rather, frontman Billy Corgan and his fed-up tagalongs are self-serious to a fault. This isn’t unfounded: He once called Mellon Collie his The Dark Side Of The Moon. Though his grandiose comparisons, his abrasive studio conduct and his extended cat-related feud with “globalist shill” Anderson Cooper have attracted ire and incredulity, they indicate a well of self-belief. Corgan’s work is nothing if not absolutely sincere.
Mellon Collie reflects on youth with a mercurial temperament; as someone living through that youth, I embraced the angle. The album’s a sonic wunderkind, where sunny pop-rock, arid ballads and starry-eyed symphonies come to mingle. Taken together, the mundanities of teenagehood become so big, so unnameable.
Expect to grow out of Mellon Collie. Some lyrics read juvenile; some songs run long. Even so, I look at it like I look at my poetry from that night, and smile.
Daily Arts Writer Amina Cattaui can be reached at aminacat@umich.edu.
ARTPOP — Lady Gaga
The process of listening to music is both a sensory experience and one of embodiment. While I’m not one to shy away from mellow, minimal tunes, I’ve always been drawn to larger, almost overwhelmingly grandiose music, where the sounds whirl inside my headphones to the point of dizziness, engulfing me in a pool of giddiness and euphoria. But my favorite songs also allow me to identify with them, whether they’re lyrically relatable or elevate my current self.
Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP elevates both of these experiences for me. Described by Gaga as putting “art culture into pop music,” reactions to the album were polarized upon its release in 2013, due to its bordering-on-pretentious conceptualization, ambitiousness and somewhat quirky songs. But as a soon-to-graduate high school senior listening to it in late 2019, ARTPOP was an almost spiritual experience, a liberating force from the quotidian nature of Midwestern public school life. Bizarre, extravagant and utterly mesmerizing, ARTPOP is pop music at its greatest. “Jewels N’ Drugs” had me hooked, as my brain tried to make sense of every outlandish musical element in its four-minute runtime. “G.U.Y.,” with Gaga’s loud, powerful vocals over bursts of kaleidoscopic synths, transported me into unimaginable dimensions, to the point where I felt like I had the cymbal-banging monkey inside my head. ARTPOP is glitz and glamor exemplified, with images of bedazzling sequin outfits and ornate gold chandeliers foregrounding every song. In “Donatella,” Gaga famously stated: “I’m blonde, I’m skinny, I’m rich / And I’m a little bit of a bitch.” I’m no Gaga (or am I?), but ARTPOP made me feel more fabulous than I am. At the end of the day, isn’t that what music is all about?
Daily Arts Writer Thejas Varma can be reached at thejasv@umich.edu.
Born in the U.S.A. — Bruce Springsteen
Born in the U.S.A. is not so much an album from my past as it is one from my mother’s — one of those records I keep taking out of her give-away pile even though it skips horribly on “Bobby Jean.” Though she claims to be a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, my mother’s policy was to let us play our music rather than subject us to hers, so I didn’t come face-to-face with Born in the U.S.A. until I sought it out for myself.
Born in the U.S.A. is an album of hits, so made for the stage that I can almost hear it echoing around a packed arena, even when it’s playing from my slightly waterlogged laptop speakers. Released in 1984, the album is a complete 180 from the sparse and somber Nebraska that preceded it by only two years. On Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen maintained his talent for vivid and clever storytelling, but this time paired with that passionate, moving quality that turns hits into anthems. It’s no wonder that this is the album that gave us some of his greatest classics like “I’m on Fire” and “Dancing in the Dark.”
But though there’s a grandness to Born in the U.S.A., there’s a closeness to it too. As I listen to my sister and my mom sing along to “I’m Goin’ Down” while cooking dinner, I know that Born in the U.S.A. belongs in our kitchen just as much as it does in any arena.
Daily Arts Writer Nina Smith can be reached at ninsmith@umich.edu.
Camp — Childish Gambino
To be clear, this album sucks. It’s Childish Gambino’s first project and pales in comparison both thematically and artistically to his critically acclaimed subsequent projects. Every time I listen to this album, I feel like Gambino develops an interesting idea, and starts to hit on key concepts pertaining to his meteoric rise to young superstardom only for it to be ruined by an extremely corny, immature punchline (I’m looking at you, “Bonfire”) or absolutely visceral beats that I end up wanting to skip every time.
Despite this album being admittedly terrible, there is a certain charm to it for so many, including myself. Personally, I stumbled onto this album in high school, the perfect age for this immaturity to play well in my juvenile ears. I fell in love with it, and sophomore year, it became one of my most-played albums of that year. Looking back on it from a mature viewpoint, I now know why. This album is far from perfect sonically — it’s raw, a project with decent depth in topics, but no direction. It taps into themes of the competition of being “cool” yet individualistic; it talks on adolescent crushes and love, and all the needless embarrassment that comes with teen romance. In just a mere 50 minutes, it creates a high school summer to a tee, and that’s exactly what sophomore me and many others needed to hear. The album is immature and uncut, with no clear direction. But that’s exactly how high school was for many, including myself, which is exactly what makes this album perfect.
Daily Arts Writer Nickolas Holcomb can be reached at nickholc@umich.edu.