10 Albums That Will Save A Teenage Loser's Life

If anyone ever asked me to talk about my top 5 favorites albums, this one would be there. It’s hard not to fall for Bowie when you become a teenager. It seems that – among teenage outcasts – there are many kinds of outcasts, but they ultimately fall under one of two schools of thought: the metal kids and the pop kids. Bowie always straddled both. In the case of Ziggy… all the right stuff is there: angst, alienation, confusion. But there’s also an all-embracing theatricality – and love – for the freaks in Bowie’s music that a guy like Marilyn Manson never really got, I think. Sure, anybody can make a record for an angry teenager, but all of it tends to one long, screaming complaint. In Ziggy Stardust, there’s coping, acceptance, and love – because, who wants to be bitter at 17?

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only person in New York under 30 who still listens to The Replacements. Is that cruel to say? No, because The Replacements never wanted to be U2 or Madonna. Therefore, they have a cred and a following that is only amongst those that go searching for them. I bought Let It Be not knowing what to expect and I fell in love on first listen. The ‘Mats are one of those bands all the critics talk about being great, but the general populous tends to ignore. There are many reasons I like them, but I think Paul Westerberg’s lyrics is the main one: raw Midwestern honesty about getting dumped, being twentysomething, and making music. They lack the gloss and pretension MTV has since put on pop-punk, and always dedicated themselves to making music that was fun only for them. It shows on this record. 

I remember being handed this album by a friend and being told “Listen to this. I think you’ll like it.” On first listen, I thought Small Change was the greatest, weirdest music I had ever heard. As I found out from my Rolling Stone subscription, apparently all the indie rock boys consider discovering Small Change a rite of passage. The album was Waits’ last one that he produced for Asylum Records and it’s also the last one he made as “heart on his sleeve” piano player before he got more eclectic and started playing a radiator with skeleton bones. Anyway, this is a very ballad-heavy album and it’s very baroque, and brooding, and I loved it. Once again: more stuff about girls and loneliness side-by-side with jazzy spoken word tracks about drunken pianos.

Everybody talks about how London Calling was utterly profound. I am making no argument against cold hard fact. But – at the same time – everybody also talks about how Sandinista! is its equal, and possibly better. I am partial to that camp. Discovering The Clash in college was monumental, alongside The Ramones. Yet again, another case of an angry young man with an outlet to channel his frustration towards a stagnant government, a self-seriousness I thought all college students were supposed to have, and a crappy sex life. Anyway, as I dove deeper into The Clash’s catalogue, it was only a matter of time before I ran across Sandinista! The album finds The Clash at a major turning point, as they venture further away from straight-up punk and indulge in hip-hop, pub rock, and reggae. It’s a very New York album. I started listening to it heavily right after college, when I was still walking around with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I wanted to be a carefree 19 year old kid forever, but I was inside a 23 year old’s body who faced with his first year of adult responsibilities. It was my first real identity crisis, and I think Sandinista! spoke very strongly to me in that respect.

I bought this album to impress a girl. I own up to that. Of course, timing is everything in life and maybe my introduction to Sonic Youth was supposed to happen that way. The first time I listened to Daydream Nation, I didn’t know what to think. It was completely different from anything else I’d heard. The only other alternative band I liked back then was Jane’s Addiction (try to understand the irony, in 1997, of telling people you “liked” Jane’s Addiction when you were fifteen and living in the New Jersey suburbs; completely unaware of Perry Farrell’s once debauched lifestyle). Anyway, I didn’t get Sonic Youth when I first heard them, but the more I listened, the more they grew on me. I would like to say they were always one of my favorites, but I really haven’t come to appreciate them until this year. What I did know back then was that they were from New York, and they were cool. This immediately meant to me, at seventeen in 2000, that cool people and cool things had to be happening in New York City. The rest is history.

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Kid A is a remarkable album to me. Not so much because of the music, but because of the timing of its release – September 2000, two months before the presidential election where everybody lost faith in the system. It was the first Radiohead album I ever owned, which is weird, because I loved OK Computer though I never felt an inclination to buy it in 1998. Rather, I chose to let my ear bleed to it on the listening stations at HMV. Anyway, I loved Kid A despite not having a single clue what it was about. It’s one of those albums where you don’t need an explanation, you just listen to it and you know that it’s brilliant. A few months later into 2001, I remember reading an interview with Thom Yorke where he discussed the album’s themes of cloning, reckless government, a dystopian future. As I said – considering the context of its release – I’ve always found Kid A ironic and timely at once.

“Wolf Like Me” blew me away when I first heard it. Mostly because, though I like TV On The Radio’s music, I thought their last album was very moody and a bit hit-or-miss. With they released Cookie Mountain’s first single though, I was ecstatic. I felt like they’d really hit the nail on the head. The whole album was a step forward for them and it was one of the first c.d.s I bought after I had graduated college and moved to New York. Another one – like Kid A – that I didn’t scrutinize, because I just thought the music was great and it made me want to dance.

I realize that citing a “greatest hits” collection on a favorites list is a cop-out. But, consider that we’re talking about The Cure, a band always better known for its individual tracks than whole albums (save for Pornography). I first started listening to The Cure when I was 15, goth-y, and depressed that girls wouldn’t look at me. At that age, you get very angry and being needy seems like quite a bit of fun. This record obviously presented a weird enigma, because it contains all of The Cure’s later (and more upbeat) hits like “Friday I’m In Love”, “Just Like Heaven”, “Close To Me (Remix)”, and my personal favorite “Strange Attraction”. I’ve always liked pop more than anything else, and I always loved listening to music about girls ignoring guys like me. Not only was it a ray of hope, but it showed me that at least you can still have fun while pining for the head cheerleader.

The Get Up Kids will always be one of my favorite bands, even though my emo days are very far behind me at this point. Not unlike The Replacements, there’s a corn-fed sincerity about them (they were from Kansas, after all) that makes it very hard to group them alongside bands like Dashboard Confessional and – to a lesser extent – Fall Out Boy. They never asked to be part of the emo movement. They just liked writing songs about girls and they happened to fall in with a subculture obsessed with the same idea. It then makes sense that after Something… was released, they began to experiment with their sound. They never found the same chemistry on later albums as they did early on, but you can’t fault them for trying something new. This album was not only a security blanket through-out most of high school, but it’s easy to go back to for it’s very straight-forward pop sound. I had this on c.d. and tape for my car at one point.

“Two turntables and a microphone.” I remember watching Beck on Saturday Night Live play a shortened version of “Where It’s At” and being completely mesmerized. I must have been fourteen or fifteen, at the time. Odelay had been out for a while by the time I came across it: I bought it second-hand for $5 off one of the skate rats at my middle school. He tossed in a sampler from some indie SoCal label, but that ended up stolen from me by a girl who I would’ve let steal anything from me back then. Maybe that was fate’s way of stepping in and saving me from being distracted. Odelay was a fun album. It was one of those albums I would brag about owning, because I thought it won me cred points. I loved listening to it. “High 5” is still a favorite track of mine.