I have never loved a piece of music more...

I have never loved a piece of music more than I loved "U Can't Touch This" at age 10.

I made like five tape-edit "remixes" of it that I would play in succession on a multicolored Maxell. I went to record a version at a make-your-own video place and was sorely disappointed when they didn't have it. When I got my first computer, the first thing I did was type out the lyrics.

Your turn.

Tie between Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars) and The Queen Is Dead.

but when?

This is more about pinpointing an exact moment in your life.

oh, god. age . . . 18, i think.

It was like the music was floating in from some other planet, after a steady diet of mainstream pop radio and classic rock.

The first time I ever heard Górecki's "Symphony No. 3: I. Lento - Sostenuto Tranquillo Ma Cantabile" w/ Dawn Upshaw on vox, I teared up when it got to the crescendo. The most stunning piece of music I've ever heard.

Brahms Requiem, spring 1996, age 23. I had graduated from college the year before and our final mass concert was very disappointing for the chorus (Williams' "Five Mystical Songs", aka "wtf, did you just hate the seniors this year????" and this was after doing Beethoven 9 and "Carmina Burana" the years prior) and, when the following year's concert was announced, every alum who stayed in the area came back to sing in it, one because the piece itself is unbelievably bad-ass, but two because we were going to take it to New York and perform it at Alice Tully Hall. I've sung in some amazing spaces and I've sung some amazing pieces of music but that was the one that really all locked together for me; it's one of my most-treasured musical experiences.

I can't say it's the best performance in my life because since then I've been lucky enough to do some amazing things as a choral singer (singing with the BSO at Royal Albert Hall, singing with Dave Brubeck at the Newport Jazz Festival, performing in a production of "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" with Joyce Castle, singing Britten's "War Requiem" with the BSO from memory at Carnegie Hall with Thomas Quasthoff, Ian Bostridge and Christine Goerke) but that concert remains special. Not only did we sound great, but at the time I thought it was going to be the last concert of my life. I was still transitioning out of being a student and into being a working adult and I thought I was going to have to shelve my not-so-secret performance aspirations in order to focus on my software career. In fact, after that concert, I didn't sing regularly in a group for two years.

So, it's pretty precious to me as a final hurrah that turned out not to be so final, after all.

at least 2 possible categories

- music as context
- music as content

I did pretty much the same thing as whiney but it was with "The bartman"

lol whiney did you have hammer pants?

i was 10 or 11 and led zeppelin IV was the most amazing thing i had ever heard come out of my SORNY WALKMAN

when I was 11 I was jamming this ;_;
http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/g/green-jelly/album-cereal-killer-soundtrack.jpg

The Pet Shop Boys song "It's A Sin" - I became obsessed with it, and recorded the song repeatedly off the radio (mono radio cassette made by Bush) onto a C60 tape that was pretty much "It's A Sin", plus little two second bits of "La Isla Bonita" and Bruno Brookes (Radio 1 LOL80's DJ) saying "-oys!" or "At number f-". Pretty sure that the blank tape came free with a box of teabags. Or possibly a couple of gallons of petrol. Then I'd listen to this tape on my cheap-as-fuck Alba personal stereo (who designs a personal stereo so that it uses three AA batteries? not two or four, but three) with the foam covered headphones that were as loud to anyone nearby as the person actually wearing them. ZERO!!!

This is an awesome, beautiful thread idea.

I have never loved a piece of music as much as the end of I Am The Resurrection by The Stone Roses, when I was 15.

16!

lol whiney did you have hammer pants?

― sir ilx-a-lot (cutty), Tuesday, February 2, 2010 3:03 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm not gonna lie. Yes. I wore them when I won the 5th grade spelling bee.

Pet Shop Boys, "Rent", aged 13. It was the first pop song that properly obsessed me. I transcribed the lyrics, worked out how to play it on a Casio keyboard, played it several times a day, the works. For a time it was like it was the only song in the world. Thing is, I must already have heard West End Girls, Suburbia, It's a Sin and indeed tons of other songs that I now love passionately, but it's like my mind wasn't ready to obsess yet. Rent was the tipping point at which pop moved from being something fun to tape off the radio to something all-consuming.

that is maybe the single greatest thing you have ever posted, Whiney

dude i won my 5th grade spelling bee!

This is good.

I really, really want to say either "Fame" by Irene Cara, "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc. or "Private Eyes" by Hall and Oates if we're talking age 10, all strictly via radio overexposure (in the best possible way). I don't remember anything specific about that beyond simply loving those three among a slew of others.

i lost my 5th grade spelling bee. the word was obediently

i think i've gotta say "debaser" by the pixes when i was 14 or so. it was like a crack through which i could see a whole other impossibly cool and interesting world.

I wore them when I won the 5th grade spelling bee.

Ring the bell, school's in, suckers! still yr catchphrase til this day iirc

I have never loved a piece of music as much as "Yoda" by Weird Al, when I was 10. It was about Star Wars which I loved, but the music gave me chills. I didn't know the original yet. But listening to it, it was clear this was a deep song, even though the lyrics were about never ever ever being a Jedi before and so on.

dude i won my 5th grade spelling bee!

― sir ilx-a-lot (cutty), Tuesday, February 2, 2010 12:18 PM (5 minutes ago)

also 1st grade and 3rd grade

i tied a bunch in high school

also this is a great thread idea, i will have to think about it

for me...my parent's copies of "chronicle" by CCR and "hot rocks" by the stones...they had both on double vinyl and i used to listen to them all the time on their old stereo...i remember looking at the pictures and not understanding, esp the back of hot rocks where the stones are posing in front of some roman aquaduct looking thing...

i thought charlie watts was native american

CCR's "heard it through the grapevine" and "get off of my cloud" by the stone were my favorites

Rent was the tipping point

For me the tipping point was another PSB tune, "West End Girls".

"Funkytown" by Lipps Inc.

Funny how this song keeps popping up. A UK band called Pseudo Echo released a cover version in 1987, and a local radio DJ played the original, whether intentionally or by accident I don't know. But it blew my mind, as it sounded as though it were from the past (those Motown girl group vocals, the disco strings) and the future (that bass line) simultaneously.

whiney do you know chuck d repped like hell for u can't touch this?

i tied a bunch in high school

You had spelling bees in high school??

yah

Oh jeez, probably "Semi-Charmed Life" at 10 or "Jane Says" around 12-14

Rachels -- Esperanza

possibly 'web in front' by the archers of loaf in 1993. it was pretty much in my head for about two years.

I think for me it was a whole album - the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime. I kept that cassette in my Walkman for pretty much my entire junior year of high school. I listened to it so much that now, I can pretty much hear the first thirty seconds or so (the first car and the beginning bassline and "Serious as a heart attack/Makes me feel this way...") and not even have to listen to the rest because the whole double album will just play in my head. I remember how it was sort of broken up (the acoustic instrumental "Cohesion" then a few more "regular" Minutemen songs, then the live version of "Don't Look Now"); I remember how after all those minute-plus songs the three(!) minutes of "The Glory of Man" was like some kind of Yes prog epic or something...man, I listened to that record so fucking much that it was like physically shocking to listen to the CD and know exactly which song was coming next except it didn't come because five tracks were shaved off. (I have the whole thing in my iPod, of course, because someone uploaded the vinyl.)

Intro to this thing, music:
1984- Van Halen. First piece of music that was *mine*; bought with my own funds, played on my own tape deck: Panama, Hot For Teacher, and Jump...

Otherwise - probably Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert - when you hear the piano pedals and Keith grunting... first time I 'saw' music.

oh, and I was 9 re: VH

"Creep" by TLC was everything I looked for in music at age 8, and since it wasn't a very complicated "everything" it was kind of the purest.

god i love web in front so much

probably the album - Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex - introduced to me by my best friend Mike when I was 20. It was one of his favorites, and it became one of mine. I resented the fact that I hadn't heard this when I was in highschool, because it would have made those awful years make a lot more sense and be more tolerable, much in the same way that when you meet someone you love, you wish they had been a part of your life sooner. All the songs were about things I had thought about, and Poly Styrene was not conventionally attractive, even by 70s art-punk standards, and she had a dress with pictures of breakfast food on it. Mike would later become my boyfriend, then my ex-boyfriend, and I would make my own dress with pictures of breakfast food and cooking implements, and bring it with me when I drove 2000 miles to visit him in Indiana in the hopes that we'd get back together after we had broken up. It eventually took on a bittersweet quality - my love for that album. It would also serve as a gateway to No Wave and noise via James Chance & the Contortions.

You know, actually, "Creep" is still everything I look for in music.

I totally forgot about that song! CrazySexyCool was my first CD. I was probably 7 and "Creep" was my fucking jam. Also, "You Learn" by Alanis which I still genuinely like.

I couldn't knock it down to just one song, but I still remember that radio in 1979 (I was eleven...apparently a magical time for music) seemed to be always playing songs from either Bad Girls or Live At Budokan and it seemed impossible that anything could be better...

"All You Need is Love" from Yellow Submarine and John Williams Star Wars theme both made me the cornball I am today.

whiney do you know chuck d repped like hell for u can't touch this?

― men lie, women lie, hips don't (zvookster), Tuesday, February 2, 2010 3:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that doesn't surprise me. most people repped for hammer when he came out, it was only when he started getting overexposed that the backlash really happened. its total revisionist history how every accuses him of being this hated pop icon that came from nowhere to ruin rap

no that's pre-u can't you're describing, post there were big gatekeeping debates in the source etc. so it actually meant something

"turn this mutha out" and "pump it up" had basically made him a pretty big level hip hop star way before "u can't touch this"

those were mtv raps staples

most people repped for hammer when he came out

fans or critics? i don't recall many critics overly-impressed with hammer songs.

someone has swapped out hi dere's fav band for a diss.

not sure how that's less narcissistic tbh

oh its not a diss, take a deep breath

(tbh i was just hoping for a post where dan would say "HOLY SHIT I LOVE THE SOUND OF BABIES CRYING", but this will do fine)

This, when I was 6 or 7: the theme of an EXTREMELY popular Italian tv series called Sandokan, music by the De Angelis brothers aka Oliver Onions.
My mother bought me the 45, that I played like 7 billion times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBHBiVHleEw&feature=related

i didn't need a deep breath, i was loling? the post was like in two parts.

*kanye shrug*

sometimes I need a deep breath after lolling

Stereolab's Dots and Loops, when I was 18. I really felt like everything I had listened to before then was just leading up to that album, like I had finally found the one piece of music that hit all of my particular musical pleasure spots.

(xp) marco, that song is utterly fantastic! that might well have been mine too if i had grown up in italy and knew of its existence.

i wasn't loling that much

"(xp) marco, that song is utterly fantastic! that might well have been mine too if i had grown up in italy and knew of its existence"

I still have goose bumps when I listen to it - actually, every Italian kid in 1977 wanted to be Sandokan and sang this song. That show was truly epic.

One by Metallica, aged 14.

Or maybe the whole of The Downward Spiral, aged 16-17.

Probably Big Country's "Wonderland", age 16 or 17. That chirpy, looping guitar bit right before the verse starts was pretty much the sonic encapsulation of yearning hope, for me, for years afterwards. Maybe still now.

The song that keeps coming to mind is "Mystery Dance" from My Aim is True. I was 17 when that album came out in the US, and I think it was the first LP I bought for myself. I saw Elvis' big-glasses look as a Buddy Holly reference, and that connected the mysterious punk/New Wave sounds then impinging on my awareness to my interest in early rock 'n' roll and my need for a nerdy style icon. I loved the whole album and played it for months, but "Mystery Dance" with its terse retro guitar solo was a special favorite.

either

a) as a teenager going through the usual teenage things playing tori amos every day and ~identifying~
b) dancing to vitalic on my first e

I remember thinking when I was about 15 that Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party was the Platonic ideal of a music album.

In 1991/92 I started getting into music quite a lot making tapes of songs recorded from the radio, mainly from the top 40 countdowns. They featured a pretty big mix, Madness, The Smiths, erasure, The Doors, U2, Right Said Fred, Shakespeare's Sister, erm Undercover. It was the following year when I heard Ordinary World by Duran Duran that music really took a hold in me. It was the first song that really made me love music more than anything. I've never really looked back since then.

can't single out a specific song but i played nothing but the pixies' 'surfer rosa' for a solid month when i first started HS. i genuinely just didn't want to listen to anything else except this funny, weird, fascinating album that sounded like absolutely nothing else i knew at the time. and i guess my 'hammer pants moment' is for the 9th grade class elections i crossed out the names of the candidates and wrote in the pixies' names instead. (it's not even my favorite album by them these days and i don't remember the last time i actually listened to it.)

This thread inspired me to walk around, today, imagining that I was 16 again and my current favorite song ("Bricks & Mortar" by Editors) had the power to color everything I experience. It worked incredibly well, and improved my day and mood dramatically! Nice, Chris.

Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain is the only album i've ever listened to on repeat literally from the minute i woke up until the minute i went to bed, so that (13)
or possibly "Apollo Kids" the first time i took shrooms (19)

1996. There was this pop song called 'La calle de las sirenas' by Kabah that was a big hit in Latinamerica, sounded all over the place. 1,200,000 album copies sold or so.
I was 13 or 14 at the time, first time I fell in love. It was uncorresponded love but I didn't care. Noone cares the first time, do they? That's what makes it special. There's no fear. I remember we listened to that song all summer nonstop and it felt like it was the only song in the world I ever needed to hear. I think that's the one. A shame it's such a corny song with some of the most horrid and generic production I've heard in my life... I wish I had a reason other than nostalgia to listen to it nowadays.

The video is almost as cringe-inducing as the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCSHiHj8mTc

Fleetwood Mac, "That's All For Everyone," spring and summer of 1980. Junior year of high school and the summer before I was a senior. Sometimes I'd play that song over and over (but not "Over and Over," lol), sometimes I'd kind of tease myself with anticipation and make myself play the whole album (a double!) through to get to the payoff, but the payoff was always that song -- the laugh in the background at 0:58, the marimba, the primitiveness in the drum and maraca parts, but mainly the two "oooooohhhh"s starting at 1:41. Totally put chills down my back every time I heard them. Those shifting sung chords made me realize that there was an aspect of music (harmony) that would always be a mystery to me.

I was 13 or 14 at the time, first time I fell in love. It was uncorresponded love but I didn't care. Noone cares the first time, do they? That's what makes it special.

I think the music I listened to at that point in my life was The sound of babies crying.

lol

I was just discussing these kinds of vivid music memories the other day...

I was riding in my friend Mitch's car, his mom was driving, we were in 9th grade probably. Suddenly on the radio I heard the single version of "Radio Free Europe", it was like the skies opened and this beacon of sound came shining out.

Also remember, the year before, sitting totally transfixed by the radio as I was hearing "Another Brick In The Wall Part 2", I had never heard a song with such strange sound effects before and it just blew me away.

But for total unwavering obsession I gotta go with Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising, which I listened to every day for months in the fall of 1985.

Metallica, "One," years 14-18.

My brother and I were the first to get picked up on our bus route to high school and the last to get dropped off. We had to wait outside, often in cold Western Massachusetts winters, at 7:00 in the morning. The ride usually lasted about 20-30 minutes, long enough for us each to listen to the side of a casette on our walkmen. We used each other's tapes and traded, but our faves were usually grunge or classic thrash stuff. Metallica was the best, especially the Big 3 albums. You could listen through the whole side, perceive the riff progressions building into entire songs building into an entire mini-suite, trying not to headbang too noticeably, but able to tune out the outside world before your day began at school. The second side on Justice for All is diffuse, but the four long songs on Side 1 were perfect, cresting with those big, swelling guitars into the solo into the machine-gun riff and then over. I used to time it out with each stop of the bus. It made me ready for homeroom and high school.

One by Metallica, aged 14.

― BTW, I'm frightfully middle-class (chap), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 5:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Didn't see this!

bad moon rising is the best sonic youth!

i also love pet shop boys 'rent' and distinctly remember hearing it in college & thinking wow this is a fantastic song. i had been a fan of 'west end girls' / 'it's a sin' / 'opportunities' and a couple others when i was a kid, because they were on the dance music countdown, but at that time in college i was listening to like touch & go records stuff and old industrial, so.. that was different.

A less narcissistic answer involves the mixtape I made at age 16 that was 90 minutes of The sound of babies crying's "The Same Deep Water As You", which I used to spend hours listening to. Depression and obsession inspire you do odd things sometimes but I still love that song to death.

I had the same obsession over the Cure and that particular song/album for a few "difficult" teenage months. I can see why it lends itself really well to that sort of obsessive listening...

Moka, ¿dónde te criaste?

when i was in high school my stepfather was teaching a course on american popular music at a local college, and at one point he printed out the lyrics to "u cant touch this" for all of his students. he ended up printing way too many, and so in order not to waste hundreds of sheets of paper we just turned them over and used the other side, so every essay and book report i handed in that year had the lyrics to "u can't touch this" on the backside of each page.

- Mexico.

:P

I was probably 19 or 20 and drunk on some cheap red wine when I was playing "Black Celebration" and decided that "But Not Tonight" was the most amazingly beautiful song I'd ever heard. I must have played it nearly 20 times that one night. It's not my favorite song by any means but listening to it that evening might have been the most in love I've ever been with a song.

there are too many possible ways for me to answer this to narrow it down accurately or honestly but for sheer ecstasy-of-the-moment, moe tucker about 10 years ago closing out her show with a 10-plus-minute jam of "bo diddley" was one of the greatest things i've ever seen or heard or felt. she was playing guitar the same way she plays drums, just clawing out that rhythm like an act of faith and revelation, and it was just one of those please-don't-let-this-end moments. i mean, transcendent. it was a little club and people were just jumping through the ceiling.

the one that keeps coming back to mind is listening to 'smells like teen spirit' (which had just come out) on the day i got my year 12 results. it was probably the most alive i'd felt up to that point and the music just added to that feeling..

Oh, and for a present analogue, I had a moment like this with the whole of Miles' '70s fusion catalog approximately one week ago.

I was in the middle of Get up with it and something inhabited me and I knew it was funky and possessed long teeth.

Why the :P face?

Latin American as well, lived in Mexico for a few years, is all.

It has to be when I was 21 and became completely obsessed with the Cardigans' "Carnival." I overheard it at a record store and flipped. I didn't know that much about twee-pop at that point; I was actually going through a really heavy James Brown/electric-Miles phase at the time (1996; I'd found vinyl copies of Big Fun and Get Up with It and Live Evil before the CD reissues the following year), and this was like its opposite. It hit me like a brick; I bought the CD and played nothing but that song for two days straight. I don't think I've listened to it in 13 years. I'm embarrassed by hard I fell for it, to be honest. But yeah, I did.

*by HOW hard

Oh who am I kidding, it was Moby's "Bring Back My Happiness" in 1995, which I would blast like a maniac and scream along with while riding over park bridges at 5 in the morning on my bike. I had a LOT of energy back then.

Heavenly Pop Hit by the Chills at I guess 10 or so. Millions of things since. Latest; Early Winter By Gwen! Stefani!

"Carnival"'s from Life, right? It doesn't seem so from the nature of the question, but I really dug and in all likelihood would still dig that record.

Eiffel 65 - "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" when I was in 6th grade

Carnival is still an amazing song heard it on a bar a couple of weeks ago and was impressed at how good it still sounds.
I also remember loving it back then, I think I was 15. I had a mixtape with Carnival, It's Oh So Quiet by Bjork, A girl like you by Edwyn Collins, Gangstas Paradise by Coolio, Alright by Supergrass, Say What You Want by Texas and Country House by Blur amongst others I'm too embarrased to admit. I remember listening to the mixtape for 10 hours straight on a trip to the north. Kids nowadays have it so much easier.

so when i went through a totally shitty breakup about 3 years ago, i listened to mclusky "she will only bring you happiness" about a billion times (ok srsly, as a i recall, about 100 times in a 3 week period) and it was a no joke healing process. i will love that song until i die.

also as bonus, current gf was a just a friend at the time, and joined into the maudlin rocking out. WIN WIN!