I'm transferring this over from Facebook, which is much harder to search than Blogger, in an effort to keep longer, more personal essays like this in circulation.
Day the first: I was nominated by a lifelong friend, Matthew Wilhite, to identify ten albums that had a real impact on me. Sure, I'll post the cover, but each of these albums reaches back into the past and provides interesting insights into how I became...me.
If you're not into long posts--or you care more about my affinity to firearms than my taste in music--please move along.
My eldest son, Owen, has spent the past three years building his knowledge of rock music and assembling a huge collection of CDs and vinyls. Being the methodical person he is, he began with the Beatles and has slowly worked his way into the 70s with Led Zeppelin and Simon & Garfunkel. As I write this, he is poised on the edge of the 80s, listening to Queen and early U2.
When I realized where his systematic study of rock history was leading last year, I told him, "Just let me know when you get to Wang Chung."
Did it make sense to him? Of course it didn't. I'm his dad. I was doing him a favor. God forbid I would have recommended Bruce Springsteen and ruined the E Street Band for him forever!
Why Wang Chung then? Well, it's true that I really liked them. I owned the Mosaic (1986) cassette, and I had the extended dance version of "Let's Go" on vinyl. It was cheap, synth-driven pop, perfect for the late-80s, with a clean sound. Sure, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" was the instant hit from the album, but "Let's Go" was my go-to song, a four-minute burst of Saturday night excitement that (in my mind) wasn't equaled until the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" more than 20 years later.
The teenaged poet in me loved the first ballad on the album, "Hypnotize." It chorused the starry-eyed view I had of girlfriends at the time, and the way it rhymed 'hypnotize' and 'mesmerize' just seemed cool at the time (sure seems cheesy). The other ballad, "Eyes of the Girl" also captures my teenybopper passions (I was 15 in 1986).
But beyond the songs, Wang Chung opened up a channel of rebellion for me, a fascination with BritPop that I shared with friends like Kristy Jones Clay and Lisa Matthews. There were so many other foreign bands that fascinated me, the way Wang Chung did: INXS, Simple Minds, Tears for Fears, A-Ha, and Roxette, to name a few.
In this way pop opened my eyes to a world far beyond Tennessee, a "World in Which We Live" (Mosaic's closing song) united by shared human values and a desire to seek social change.
Four years after the release of Wang Chung's Mosaic, I traveled to the UK for my sophomore year of college. While there I saw A-Ha in concert (I had already seen INXS in Nashville in 1988 with Lisa). I made friends from all over Europe and Africa, friends who are precious to me to this very day, along with ideas they introduced me to.
I eventually gained the global mindset that I had only glimpsed in my living room sessions with Wang Chung on the stereo, even if I outgrew the puppy love that amplified those songs in my 15-year-old mind.
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