Jump to content

5 albums that changed the way you hear music, 5 books that changed the way you read


Recommended Posts

  • 1 month later...
  • Replies 119
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Albums

Velvet Underground - White Light White Heat

Mogwai - Young Team

A Tribe Called Quest - Low End Theory

John Coltrane - Giant Steps

The Stooges - Funhouse

Books

Anthony Burgess- A Clockwork Orange

William Burroughs - Junky

Albert Camus - The Outsider

and I would second On the Road and Pattern Recognition

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Music

1. Liars - Drum's Not Dead

2. Fugazi - Red Medicine

3. The Blood Brothers - Crimes

4. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven

5. These New Puritans - Now Pluvial

Books

1. Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

2. William Burroughs - Naked Lunch

3. Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird

4. Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

5. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Music

1. Converge Petitioning the Empty Sky (first leap out of mainstream bullshit)

2. Poison the Well Opposite of December

3. Sleep Sleep's Holy Mountain

4. Neurosis Through Silver in Blood

5. Wolf Eyes Burned Mind (the most recent leap into another musical world)

Now I listen to such a vast amount of different styles of music, it's crrrrrazy.

There's only one book that has really effected the way/what I read, and that book is a little contemporary piece called America Psycho.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

books

yu hua - to live

lu xun - diary of a madman and other short stories

dai sijie - balzac and the little chinese seamstress

haruki murakami - norwegian wood

haruki murakami - hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world

albums:

faye wong - life

david tao - black tangerine

amei chang - sisters

stefanie sun - kite

cheer chen - fabulous adventure

cui jian - rock in the road

Link to comment
Share on other sites

all in no particular order b/c its to hard to pin down:

music:

digable planets- reachin.......

flock of seagulls-self titled

slug-sad clown bad dub II

operation ivy-energy

typical cats-self titled

books:

american psycho

fear and loathing in las vegas

hells angels

informers

fear and loathing in america

Link to comment
Share on other sites

not in any certain order:

albums:

steve reich- music for 18 musicians

keith jarrett- the koln concert

ilkae- stained glass pinata

psychic paramount- gamelan into the mink supernatural

flaherty corsano duo- the beloved music

books:

leo tolstoy- family happiness

gabriel garcia marquez- 100 years of solitude

leo tolstoy- anna karenina

haruki murakami- norwegian wood

philip gourevitch- we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Words on paper

1.Enders Game - Orson Scott Card (made me like Political Sci-Fi)

2.The True Game - Sherry S Tepper (made me realize we are all pieces of a chess game)

3.The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (made me want to go to Mars and get murdered)

4.Every prose book I've ever read (because you'll find a gem or a few in every one

5.Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back - Shel Silverstien (Influenced me more than any book I've ever read)

Words to music and music without words

1.Bitches Brew - Miles Davis (If you've never started listening to this then realized by the end of it that you've unknowingly written your literature paper, then you wouldn't understand).

2.Tormato - Yes (Don't Kill the Whale)

3.Stop Making Sense - The Talking Heads (Listened to this atleast once --start to finish, sometimes skipping Genius of Love-- every day for a year)

4.My Life and the Bush Of Ghosts - Brian Eno and David Byrne

5.Vitalogy - Pearl Jam (First album I ever listened to start to finish, got me onto music(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1. death cab for cutie - you can play these songs with chords... and not their new stuff either. im talking about shit that ben played in the VU at lunchtime.

2. brand new - your favourite weapon...yes very scene, but very, very different.

3. srv - greatest hits. you've never heard blues before you've heard this album.

4. radiohead - kid a. no explanation needed.

5. pink floyd - dsotm. realized what this type of music (and pretty much any other type as well) was written for.

BOOKS

1. the river why

2. tao te ching

good talk.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Meh. A shameful, glossy, populist list that was angry, raw, Clever, deep and expansive when I first discovered it.

1) Metallica - ... And justice for all

2) Nirvana - nevermind

3) Pavement - crooked rain crooked rain

4) Tortoise - Millions now living will never die

5) Boards of Canada - Music has the right to children

1) Douglas coupland - Generation X

2) Charles Bukowski - Women

3) Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn

4) George Orwell - 1984

5) Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums/Satori in Paris

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1. low - the curtain hits the cast

2. red house painters - demo

3. kraftwerk - 1/2

4. velvet underground & nico.

5. husker du - zen arcade

1. 120 days of sodom, marquies de sades.

2. aesthetic theory, adorno.

3. i-d mag

4. -

5. -

i love lists!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Albums

Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground ---This requires no explanation, the VU is incredible. I was never floored by music before this.

The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers ---To be perfectly honest, I'm not that cool. When I was in highschool I listened to whiny punk and emo and alt-rock, I may dress in tight pants and rock out hard, and like the right music and be with cute girls, but ultimately, I will only be like this in my youth, I don't have timeless cool. Jonathan Richman is also extremely uncool, he wasn't Lou Reed, and the Moderrn Lovers weren't the VU, that's the only real difference in their music. At the time they were doing the same thing the VU was, but who they were made it come out differently, that really resonated with me.

Buddy Holly - The Buddy Holly Story --- This album makes me want to grab my best girl and my letterman jacket. I'm a great escapist at heart, I love the ideal past, I love the era this music came out of, and I love how fresh the sound was at that time. I love how I can hear where modern rock comes from when I listen to Buddy.

Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot --- This could be the greatest album made so far in the new century. I've never heard any album work so cohesively, nothing Radiohead has done, Pink Floyyd, all the great concept albums don't have the unity of vision that this shambling wreck of lilting melodies and background chatter has.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over the Sea --- Music shouldn't always be this naked and honest, but sometimes it is required.

Books

Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian --- This book was hard to read. It's as dense as Pynchon and possesses a savagery and brutality that surpasses any modern horror writer. I've never been terrified of a character in a novel before meeting Judge Holden. This book has no redeeming characters, not the kid, not Holden, not the whole gang, not America. Books very rarely persuade me of anything, but this book shaped the way I viewed manifest destiny and the birth of a nation.

JD Salinger - Nine Stories ---The world can be a very simple place, and also a very very sad place. No-one really frames that as well a Salinger.

The Wanderer - Knut Hamsun ---I didn't really understand the birth of the modern prose style until I read Hamsun, this is one of the first great modern novels. Sparse and detached, it still tells a wonderful story.

The Idiot - Dostoyevsky ---Taught me that an extremely obvious device, and a simple but clever conceit can, in the right hands, be used to great effect.

The Englishman's Boy - Guy Vanderheaghe ---Changed the way I looked at language. Very few writers possess the command that Vanderheaghe has, the story itself is decent but the style is absolutely gorgeous. Set a bar for language so high that I can't help but be aware of it in all other writers now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

books

roald dahl - the witches/mervyn peake - titus groan (hey, i was a kid...:rolleyes:)

steinbeck - east of eden...first looooongassbook i zipped thru in a few days.

hunter s. thompson...his journalism and fear & loathing in las vegas

irvine welsh - trainspotting...a fun read, had to read it aloud at first to understand.

charlotte perkins gilman-the yellow wallpaper (gothic feminist short story)

albums

elliott smith - either/or (songs that are helpin' me learn guitar)

stereolab - transient random-noise bursts with announcements

the specials - self-titled

young marble giants - colossal youth

ludy van's piano concerto no. 5 (emperor)

...not if it were songs the list would be completely different. :]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Albums:

Big Black - Atomizer

Beat Happening - Beat Happening

Parliament - Mothership Connection

Sun City Girls - Torch of the Mystics

Whitehouse - Dedicated to Peter Kürten, Sadist and Mass Slayer

Books:

Foucault

Hegel (made me hate reading)

A People's History of the United States

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Richard Rorty

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In no particular order

Music

1. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

2. Eric Clapton - Unplugged

3. U2 - Achtung Baby

4. Dave Matthews Band - Crash

5. Radiohead - OK Computer

Books (hopefully this can include graphic novels...)

1. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

2. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

3. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

4. Watchmen - Alan Moore

5. Sandman series - Neil Gaiman

Link to comment
Share on other sites

five albums/eps:

1. a tribe called quest, midnight marauders

2. the miles davis quintet, 'round about midnight

3. the libertines, up the bracket

4. the softies ep

5. stereolab, dots & loops/broadcast, the noise made by people

five books:

1. honore de balzac, pere goriot

2. f. scott fitzgerald, the great gatsby

3. richard wright, black boy

4. tom wolfe, the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby

5. don delillo, white noise

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...