[Reclaimed Timber Music Subseries 011]

Can we Talk? – Tevin Campbell, 1993

…

It is an odd coincidence that three decades in a row with years ending in “3” have supplied me with life-altering musical releases. 1993, 2003, and 2013.

That isn’t to say that many, many other amazing albums haven’t come out in many other years. (Note 1983 and 2023, the other two decades ending in “3” that I’ve been alive in, but too young, and probably too old). ⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾

This writing isn’t about “good” album release years. It’s about pivots in my ether and atmosphere as music takes hold of my dynamic direction – somehow on a ten-year hinterland, three decades in a row. Record releases in consortium and various genres that shaped a path of discovery fit for Chester Copperpot.

The sheer amount of music that has hooked me in, in these three stated years alone has not only been noticeable, but I feel it’s noteworthy.

Pivot 1993: Radio Jams, Gangsta Rap, Contemporary Christian Monoculture, and Zany Spoofs.

Without a doubt, 1993 was the first year I really got interested in music. This would span ages twelve and thirteen, at some point between seeing The Sandlot in the theatre and graduating eighth grade.

I was a late bloomer – and certainly things were on my radar at ages ten or eleven. But honestly before that, I just wasn’t exposed to much other than my father’s car radio in the background in passing, set to Dick Beyonde’s Oldies 104.3, or the lite rock station. Maybe kids bringing their boomboxes, Vanilla Ice and Kriss Kross cassette tapes on to the school bus. Songs have stuck with me from that era, but nothing jolted me.

But I remember lying in my bed every single night in ‘93 listening to Adam Curry’s Top 30 Hit List on my yellow plastic transistor radio. The inner galaxy and the cosmos of sounds transmitted via analogue radio waves through the 1/16^th-inch input into my cheap headphones. No one told me about the show. It just found me. Years before the internet would come dialing up from a telephone jack in the wall.

Meatloaf “I’d do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”, Enigma “Return to Innocence” (which I had to Google just now because all I knew was it had Native Americans chanting in it).

Cheryl Crow “All I Wanna Do”, Lisa Loeb “Stay”, and Salt n Peppa “What a Man”, were all in Adam Curry’s Hit List queue over and over for months and months before slowly being replaced and dropping off the charts one by one.

The videos on MTV and VH1 that year would have been from Aerosmith Get a Grip. Namely “Crazy” and “Cryin’”. Those, “Gin & Juice”, “Mr. Jones”, and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” – and one can’t forget, “The Sign” by Ace of Base. The television played them ad nauseum on repeat all day those afternoons I’d stay home from school, sick.

Engraining me with a newfound sense of place, these songs and those nights in my headphones, and days home from school, and the memories attached swung me from the dim to the enlightened gateway ideas that might be out there. Memories of moving from Richton Park to Manteno and having to craft a full allotment of new friends. Finally, being able to relate to people on some sort of level of semblance out in the wild – not just in church or little league.

I bought the Aerosmith album, as well as these other 1993 CDs:

Counting Crows August and Everything After

Nirvana In Utero

Janet Jackson Janet

Mazzy Star So Tonight that I Might See

Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream

Ace of Base The Sign

Spice 1 187 He Wrote

Eazy E It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187’um Killa

2pac Strictly 4 My N****z

The Cranberries Everybody Else is Doing it, So Why Can’t We?

Mariah Carey Musicbox

Wu Tang Clan Enter the 36 Chambers

Salt n Peppa Very Necessary, and

Ice Cube Lethal Injection

At a Manteno Junior High eighth grade social, I worked up the courage to ask Mandy Howard to slow dance with me. She said yes. It would be my first ever slow dance. The dance was to “Anytime You Need a Friend”, by Mariah Carey. As I awkwardly swayed and sweated in my grey silk shirt, I nervously understood I’d hit some new level albeit really hoping it would be over soon. It was heart-beating excitement wrapped under a purple tie I borrowed from my grandfather.

I didn’t buy all those CDs that year, and some of them I wouldn’t actually purchase for another decade or so in some sort of fleeting nostalgic curiosity after seeing them at Salvation Army for 49 cents or whatever. My strange desire to see what all else was on the LPs as opposed to simply the radio hits.

This would be well after my self-inflicted stigma of shame would fade. The idea of the guilty pleasure has been more or less pretty foreign to me for a long time now. There are things that I won’t blast out the windows of my moving vehicle. It’s not because I’d worry about people knowing what I listen to, but mostly because I don’t want people to think that it’s all I listen to. I do have some semblance of dignity left.

Of course there was Snoop Doggy Dogg’s debut album, Doggystyle. This album might have singlehandedly set off a full array of character idiosyncrasies in me internally and externally. I mean it changed the way I dressed and taught me which cologne to buy. I’ve written about this album here. G Funk took hold, and the synth melodies from Dr. Dre’s Moog Voyager and gangbang street mentality became an iconoclastic outlook for a full few years of my white bread life.

At some point, years later Siamese Dream would affect me on yet another existential level. ⁽³⁾

The second leg of this initial journey – at the time, starts in 1993, when I was more or less forced to tune in to the CCM industry because of my church upbringing, so most of the CDs I actually bought in that specific year came from the Christian bookstore at the mall. They were more along the lines of:

Carman The Standard

DC Talk Free at Last, and

Newsboys Not Ashamed

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t way into these sugary sweet deathcult-pop records at the time. I didn’t have much aegis. There were other losers who were pressured to listen to this, but we never officially formed an alliance. There was a closeted dichotomy between these albums for me and records like Doggystyle. One classification I had to hide from my friends, the other I hid from my parents.

I actually bought DC Talk Free at Last and Nu Thang at the same time. The cashier innocently projecting, “wow you must be a big DC Talk fan!” secretly pissed me off even as a young thirteen-year-old. It’s like “Hey idiot. If I was a big fan already, clearly I’d own both of these by now. These are like all of their albums. You think I just buy the same CDs over and over again?!”

There were also numerous Christian rap CDs I got my hands on that year. Preachas Violent Playgrounds, and ETW Lets Stay Together. You know, the hits. The main one I was interested in was Dynamic Twins No Room 2 Breath. This was sort of a take on phony gangsta rap with mush-mouth vocals where you couldn’t really tell that they were Christian. I remember even showing this one to normal kids hoping it would pass. But mostly they were like, “Ummm… cool. So do you have any Warren G?”

Finally, as the third piece locks into place; I cannot forget the king of spoof himself: “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Alapaloosa came out in 1993, and I was first in line to pick it up at Camelot Music, just a thirty-foot jaunt from the mall Christian bookstore. It’s not his best songwriting (save for “Frank’s 2000-inch TV”) and it’s not his best batch of parody songs. But it set the tone for my future as a Weird Al fan. The Jurassic Park tropes, screaming the pop culture elements of the day, along with the red CD are a sense of throwback for me to the era of intrigue. The era in which I got to buy music of my own, wetting the appetite in terms of what else may be out there.

The special era in which I got to start collecting physical media. A trend I’ve never stopped.

Pivot 2003: The Big Three, The Ja Rule Beef, and Even More Zany Spoofs.

Between 1993 and 2003 I slowly morphed from pubescent teen to full grown man-child. I didn’t really drink or date or basically do anything other than play in bands, go to concerts and watch movies. I had a lot of time and budget allocated toward music purchases.

My favorite band, The Smashing Pumpkins had already broken up years prior, but Billy’s new band Zwan would have a monumental one-and-done album in 2003 – Mary Star of the Sea.  I saw Zwan play three times that year. Out of a sense of reverence for the Pumpkins whose arguable heyday was more or less over before I could reasonably afford concert tickets or even travel to the shows. I wasn’t going to miss any chance to see Billy and Jimmy play live if I had the option.

The artistic direction Billy would go in with the Zwan release set me on a high plane of expectation, although it would fizzle out and they’d break up after the one album.

The 1970 Pontiac Bonneville

In hip hop… well, look there wasn’t much in my lane that year. But two albums of note sucked me into a steady addiction of newer Dr Dre and Timbaland production. I was interested in Eminem stuff at the time, so I followed his proteges 50 Cent and Obie Trice with their 2003 albums Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Cheers, respectively.

50 Cent’s album was just a glittery dumpster fire. A fantastical train wreck of shiny, polished synthesized beats merging with grit and grime and gunshot samples and braggadocio with no borders.

If I can’t do it, homey, it can’t be done.

Obie Trice’s 2003 album has some remarkably flashy tracks. I will go on the record to state that Eminem’s best verse he’s ever recorded was on a track called “We All Die One Day”. Both this album as well as 50’s album entailed Nate Dogg hooks for weeks, man.

Both of these albums pushed the Ja Rule beef to extremes. I hated Ja Rule to no end, and I was there to absorb every aspect of that beef.

These two gangsta classics parlay me back to the time that same year when Dave drove me, Yardchicken and Tyweezy, in his baby blue drop top 1970 Pontiac Bonneville over to this one sucker’s house where said sucker lived with his mom and dad.

Dave and I went up to his door after parking the Bonneville half way in the guy’s front yard. With Yardchicken and Tyweezy mad dogging him from the convertible behind us, I confronted this full-grown man about him trying to get my teenaged sister drunk. I didn’t even care if his mom or dad answered the door. My assumption was he was attempting to take advantage of my sister. He nervously stumbled about, denying it with his white trash mustache. My inner 50 Cent and my spiritual calling from Obie Trice made that motherfucker my Ja Rule.

…

I bought both Death Cab for Cutie Transatlanticism, and Coheed and Cambria In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 on the very same day they were both released on October 7 at Threshold Records in Tinley Park. Both of those albums are perfect. The former would become one of my top tier DCFC releases to this day. At the time they were still relatively unknown, and I remember not understanding why they weren’t more popular. The latter would be a spark into my mild interest in prog stuff.

I have no idea what the Coheed & Cambria universe has morphed in to, and I’m sure I’d be getting hatemail from the Cobalt & Calcium masses if I had any sort of audience… but it starts at the story of two kids, Coheed & Cambria who were bitten by a venomous dragonfly. The venom was to spread into a zombie like psychosis and spread across the world, likely to wipe out humanity. The parents of Coheed & Cambria decided they needed to murder their kids with a sole intent to save the human race – but their kids are on the run. Or so it goes.

Threshold, a revered haunt, now shuddered, at one point in life was my most favorite record store on earth. Though it holds a tight grasp of nostalgia for me, this was before I’d discover Reckless Records on Broadway.

I once had a tradition of going to Virgin Megastore on Michigan Avenue every Christmas season and buying one Mark Kozelek album per year. In 2003 I purchased Sun Kil Moon Ghosts of the Great Highway. It was his first of many startlingly impressive records under the Sun Kil Moon moniker. It’s definitely the best album that he’s done.

The Big Three of 2003 in portion and measure:

Joy Electric The Tick Tock Treasury

There isn’t much else I can say about Joy Electric that I haven’t written here. The Tick Tock Treasury was the first proper Joy Electric album I bought in real time of its release, and it completely solidified an obsession with analogue synthesizers. I bought a Moog Prodigy in 2003, and I stayed up all night while I lived alone, learning its buttons and knobs of filters, envelopes, and timbre.

A pitch wheel to bend my heart toward wires and crafted synthesis.

Radiohead Hail to the Thief

Hail to the Thief was Thom Yorke’s endeavor back from the Avante Gard after Kid A and Amnesiac. The first blip of the album symbolizes his return to guitar-based music with the pop jolt and crackle of the cable to input jack of the amp.

Specifically, I remember falling in love with this entire album in transit on a daily basis between Kankakee and Rockford, Illinois in the summer of 2003. Long ass drives to nowhere, coming home to no one. There is still a heavy electronic influence in the album. It’s not as much a concept as Ok Computer. But what even is?

HTTT may not be Radiohead’s “best” album, but it’s definitely my favorite of theirs. I might add that Pablo Honey came out ten years prior in 1993, but it made absolutely no impression on me whatsoever. So much that Radiohead is in my top five favorite bands of all time – possibly even number one… yet I basically hate their first album enough to not even include it in the 1993 honorable mentions category list. Mostly I pretend Pablo Honey doesn’t even exist.

The Mars Volta Deloused in the Comatorium

I imagine Deloused is what battle sounds like. Effects pedals as allies in a war against the guitar, while fluid bass licks from Flea float through like hovering drone robots. I was a fan of At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command, but this record took Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala from the two-dollar-per-ticket post-hardcore shows I’d see at Courtyard Café in Urbana, to a massive jungle of soundscape bathed in crack smoke, and DMT. Created with melody amongst chaos, I couldn’t believe the sounds they came up with. A life changing album.

Deloused in the Comatorium is one-part insects performing brain surgery on you, and one part melody ear-worm pop balladry in Spanish guitar tone. If you listen to it panned all the way right, or all the way left, compared to stereo, it sounds like three different albums.

I saw them play at Riviera in 2003 when this record came out. I can’t forget the date because it was the very same night and at the very same time of the Steve Bartman affair: October 14^th.

I was at this concert seeing The Mars Volta, a band with a self-admitted $1000 per week heroin habit, screaming at the Riviera sound guys for botching the works. At the same time, my friend, the aforementioned Dave, watched the Cubs on television playing the Marlens at Wrigley a few neighborhoods away, during a playoff game.

Texting was not a thing of the era, but I remember Dave chirping me on my Nextel in real time during the fiasco where Bartman interfered with the foul ball. Calamity ensued causing the mental falter like a classic loveable loser domino effect, spinning the team into enough eventual losses leading them to elimination.

Other 2003 albums of note for me were:

Saves the Day In Reverie

Mew Frengers

Metric Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?

Alkaline Trio Good Mourning

Broken Social Scene You Forgot it in People

Stars Heart

Duvall Volume & Density

The Postal Service Give Up, and

Rainer Maria Long Knives Drawn

One Final ’03 Thing: Poker Chum Challenge.

In 2003 my rap group, PCC created our third album Kickin’ Rhymes & Cockin’ Nines. The project was a tribute via satire with regard to the gangsta rap I had grown up listening to in the 1990s. The concept was also combined with inspiration from the Michael Bolton character in the film “Office Space”, as well as “Weird Al” Yankovich. Weird Al’s standalone originals were often wrought with comedically extreme bouts of murder, rage, guns, and suicide.

Murder ballads and love tributes to firearms, all interwoven with my version of synthwave, i.e.; murdawave. Some of which was spun from my Moog Prodigy. You won’t find this on Youtube or Soundcloud, and thank god.

In fact, I only had one hundred CDs and the devil only knows where they’ve landed. I have one, single, solitary copy in my collection. ⁽⁴⁾

Pivot 2013: A New Beginning; or – Shoegaze, Dreampop, and Synthwave.          

Life took me on a roller coaster between ages twenty-three and thirty-three. As it does. Moving to Chicago. Two engagements, one marriage, one divorce. Going from homeownership to sleeping on a couch, two college degrees, and not knowing which way is up.

Albums like M83 Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (2010), Neon Indian Era Extraña (2010), Active Child You Are All I See (2011), Beach House Bloom (2012), Wild Nothing Nocturne (2012), Passion Pit Gossamer (2012), and the soundtrack for the movie Drive (2011), majorly laid the tracks for me.

But nothing hit the Cambrian Explosion like the year 2013.

Shoegaze-Dreampop-Synthwave became a personality trait for me that year. Melancholia drenched midtempo minor keys struck a chord in my being as I started a new life in my sad aging hipster divorcee studio apartment. It started with The Mary Onettes Hit the Waves, then Small Black Limits of Desire (though I could do without that album cover art), and then went to Kisses Kids in LA, and Wild Nothing’s Empty Estate (EP).

Washed Out Paracosm brought me from a post-chillwave being to a bass frequency epiphany point. Tropical vibes and nostalgic warmth on translucent purple vinyl that looks like candy. Lush reverb spinning me out toward… something in liminal space. I don’t even know. It’s the best record this guy has released, and I love everything this guy has released. 

Toro y Moi Anything in Return is Chaz’s most accessible record by far, but I have always been here for that. Four-on-the-floor dance-adjacent tracks with modular synth bass and metaphysical words from metaphysical worlds.

…

I did what would be my final rap album in 2013. I went under the name Ideologue. (Stylized with a period if you want to look on Soundcloud). Same as before I crafted all the music between Fruity Loops, and a synthesizer. It was produced on GarageBand and mastered by Quiethouse Recordings in Boston in exchange for a big box of beer and swag.

This was more or less a solo album although almost every song had featured cameos. Aaron Comprehend, EBT, Food Stamp, Sharkula, D Code, Uncle Joey, etc. I don’t really know what it was other than rolled up, indecipherable puns incorporating craft beer and coffee and regret. School debt, divorce, and lost friendships as well, I guess.

…

Chvrches The Bones of What You Believe came out later in 2013, as I was ramping up an involvement with a girl who was heavy into church. In fact, since I was as into her as she was into church, I made a commitment to attend with her at least twice a week. This is not including small group meetings and agreements to read and discuss Christian books.

It was at a Pentecostal church, no less. The very denomination I’ve likened to jail. A steel cage I had escaped from years prior. To say that I was head over heels is an understatement.

The idea of going all in for church was supposed to be offset by the benefit of the relationship itself, what with me coming out of a wreck of a past marriage, and she being my literal childhood crush from ages past. I had the background to somewhat blend in at the very least. This would be a few years before my church trauma would actually be realized.

I remember a part of the lyrical metaphors from Lauren Mayberry reaching out to me in warning. Between the synth pad textures and cutting, glimmering shiny production I felt a grit. It was my 2013 version of Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Shimmering sonicism, but a darkness prevailed.

“I’ll be a thorn in your side, until you die” – beckoned a cautionary tale of the lethal combination of me and chvrch back together as one. Perpetually. For the rest of my life. Because at age thirty-three I suppose… why date someone if you aren’t at least internally gauging a life together? And it’s true; I was spit out the bowels of the Conservative Christian framework in a mutually agreed destruction of the heart.

Anyway, other honorable musical mentions that were released in 2013:

Disclosure Settle

Ghostface Killah 12 Reasons to Die

Jimmy Eat World Damages

Atoms for Peace AMOK

Run the Jewels Volume 1

J Cole Born Sinner

Tegan & Sara Hearthrob

Empire of the Sun Ice on the Dune

Active Child Rapor EP

Mark Kozelek & Jimmy LaValle Perils from the Sea

Blue Sky Black Death Glaciers

Kanye West Yeezus

Citizen Youth

Iron & Wine Ghost on Ghost, and

Aaron Sprinkle Water & Guns

I own all of these on CD and also most of them on vinyl as well. This is middle age I suppose – re-buying everything I already own, on vinyl reissues. Twenty-year anniversary releases. Thirty-year anniversary releases. There are some albums on vinyl that I own multiple copies of. This is not normal.

Classixx Hanging Gardens

It’s difficult to surmise and summarize this year of 2013 in music for me. The album Hanging Gardens by the DJ ensemble Classixx might help. There is a track called “Borderline” which features Jesse Kivel (from Kisses). I haven’t played the song in a while (until writing this) but I used to play it on repeat. This sort of piece is fairly representative of who I was in this particular year.

Atmospheric synth pads, arpeggiated groove, electronic drums. Mystic vocals from the man himself.

If she would talk through the wall
Painful night call
Just hanging around
A real love won’t let you down

…

(1) 1983

Lionel Richie Can’t Slow Down

Madonna Madonna

New Order Power, Corruption, and Lies

Tears for Fears The Hurting

(2) 2023

M83 Fantasy

Wild Nothing Hold

Yatte & Duett The Minute

Beach House Become (EP)

(3) Siamese Dream, along with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would unquestionably change my life. I’d become a lifelong Smashing Pumpkins devotee, and an all-things Billy Corgan obsessive.

In 2003, during my stint of living alone in babyfaced man-child hermitage I made a bootleg Smashing Pumpkins CD. It had a front and back cover as well as a label on the CD-r.

Songs from the Lost Pumpkin Patch

I made money by making copies of this and hocking it on eBay. As long as I didn’t write that it was a bootleg in the listing, the auction didn’t get blocked. I figured that out quickly.

Some of these CDs went for upwards of $30 each. True fans already knew it had to be a bootleg since they’d automatically know it wasn’t a proper release. So, there was no way I’d feel guilty about this fact, and there were no complaints. At the time, not everyone had capacity or the technology to locate all of these songs and cobble them together on one album, especially with cool, stolen cover art. In all honesty I was providing a service to these fellow fans.

Every time I sold one, I’d go back to look at the list of eBay bidders who lost the auction and I’d message each of them individually. I’d let them know I had one more copy I could sell them if they wanted to send some cash over PayPal. Obviously at a rate just below the selling price. Then I’d start the listing process all over again the next moment I had.

(4) My band (not my rap group) opened for Legends of Rodeo in 2003 – a monumental thing in my life, even though I won’t quote the name of the band I was in. Not because we sucked. It was the opposite. We were really good. I played a Fender jazz bass. I just hate the guy who fronted the band, and I’ve vowed to never give him any credit on any level whatsoever. I don’t mention any of his bands, ever and I’ve long since broken all of his CDs.

The 2002 album from Legends of Rodeo, One Thousand Friday Nights was a major player in my ’03 alterations and formulation.