As a writing exercise, I've chosen the ten books, albums, movies, and games that were most important in defining me as a person, and challenged myself to explain why.
Some of these set my artistic tone or left huge imprints on my personality, others changed the course of my life or career. With each item I can say, "if not for this, I would be someone else right now." But why? It's a surprisingly hard question to answer. A strong feeling would compel me to put something on the list, and then I'd realize I had no clue how to unpack that feeling.
When I was twelve or so, I visited my cousin in Berkeley. He was a sophisticated 16-year-old, with skills I could only grasp at - like sarcasm - and a collection of weird t-shirts, and real opinions about music. I had a few blank cassette tapes, which I was using to record puerile skits and fart noises with my friends, and my cousin had a CD collection. So after breakfast one day I spent a few hours tinkering with his Mom's stereo and managed to dub a couple of his CDs onto tapes before I had to go home.
This was a big thing for me. I idolized my cousin and if he liked something then I must like it too. In retrospect I might say that it was fortunate he actually did have good taste, but that would be based on my own opinions as an adult, which were evolved from his, so how much is that statement really worth? But perhaps you can judge for yourself: The first thing I dubbed from him was Pink Floyd's epic prog-rock album The Wall.
I understood almost nothing in the lyrics. I was too young to handle metaphors, and the drug and sex references sailed right over my head. But the music was astounding. David Gilmour made guitar solos you could follow like a train of thought, and Roger Waters sang with a kind of all-out intensity while still being musical, like a person right on the edge of exploding but still under control. I could really relate to that. Puberty, yo.
I rounded out my Floyd collection slowly, since I was spending most of my money on candy and software. I listened to Dark Side Of The Moon while walking home, A Nice Pair while doing homework, and Atom Heart Mother before bed. I listened to Animals and The Final Cut while hanging out with friends, and we would occasionally discuss the lyrics.
Except for some stuff in their early years, Pink Floyd is not what I'd call "light". It's not dance party music. When Roger Waters is in artistic control, the music is a psychodrama - obsessed with confronting tragedy and working through it. When David Gilmour has artistic control, the music is psychedelic and strange - all about transformation, inside and out. The creative tension between these two made music that was always challenging, in sound and words. I came to expect this from music in general. What was the point of lyrics if they didn't say anything?
Much later in high school this became a touchstone for my friends, and we would relentlessly mock popular music for its apparent lack of substance. During one lunch break we recorded a skit where a "top 40" radio DJ introduced a song called "Oh Baby I Want To Suck All The Love Out Of You". The song itself was just a repeating keyboard riff while one of us screamed the title over and over, until the DJ cut it off.
Just about everyone is a little asshole in high school. I was definitely more of an asshole than average, mentally placing myself outside what I thought was a happy collective of cool conformist kids, then resenting that collective for not including me. As an adult I can see how obvious it was that I'd constructed my own little narrative to give my social awkwardness and difficult feelings some kind of positive spin, perhaps the way previous generations of awkward kids found an identity reading superhero comics. (As I write this in 2015 I find it hilarious that popular culture has turned superheroes with tragic pasts into its own billion-dollar entertainment industry. We're now an entire nation of underdog outcasts! How does that work?) But at the time, it was the most serious thing in my life. Pop culture was mindless consumption, elevating "having a good time" over everything else, and to my friends and I it was an Orwellian propaganda war against our complicated and angry feelings, against our desire to focus on what was wrong instead of what was right, which apparently had no place in adult society.
It bears repeating: We were teenagers. Being a teenager is an ugly business. I'm not trying to credit my cousin or Pink Floyd for my attitudes as a teenager, but I will credit them for providing a soundtrack that helped me connect with my friends, and with myself, and continues to connect me with adults and an entire genre of rock music.
My Berkeley cousin came to visit us for a while during the summer, and he brought a collection of mixtapes with him. It was my solemn duty to assimilate everything he thought was cool, but I only had a few blank tapes of my own, so I asked him which ones were the best. He handed me one with no labels on it, and said, "This is industrial music. It's what they listen to in the factories in Germany."
Cool! My cousin was awesome; he knew everything!
The music was really bizarre to my young ears. Highly electronic and beat-driven, atonal and mysterious; a landscape of metallic percussion and chopped-up orchestral music scattered with out-of-context voice samples. Repetitive to the point of being hypnotic, but unreal enough to hold my attention. This was my first connection to music that seemed to enhance my ability to concentrate. It located the place in my brain that was constantly interrupting me and neutralized it -- like, I would still feel the distraction start to happen, but I would run straight into the music and ricochet back the way I came, into whatever I was already paying attention to, without losing my place. If this is what people listened to in factories, I could understand why. It lived up to the idea of "industrial", since it helped me to be industrious.
My cousin never told me what band or bands were on the mixtape, and he didn't visit very often so I was always too distracted by his presence to remember to ask. I played the tape for my friends, and none of them could identify it. Eventually I brought it to a record store in Santa Cruz and played it for the staff. They didn't have a clue. No one did. It remained a mystery for eleven years, and not for lack of trying. Every time I went shopping for music I bought anything in the "alternative" or "industrial" section whose tracklist seemed to reflect what I heard on the tape, hoping to get lucky and stumble across it. I never did, but I found a lot of other interesting music by accident that way.
The second song on the tape was Dance Of The Cowards. I memorized every word of the monologue long ago, and when I was in middle school I believed it was about how narrow-minded people get obsessed with conformity out of cowardice, and are abusive towards anyone truly different, but eventually the different people rise above them socially, rise above their abuse, and leave them behind. I interpreted it in my own context as a weird and lonely kid, just like I did with Pink Floyd. 25 years later this song still stands as one of the strangest compositions I've heard - and I've heard a lot of weird music, for sure. It has no drums, no stringed instruments, no brass instruments. The repeating motif is not on any musical scale but it does have structure, and it's clearly made from snippets of a voice but it never forms any words. Then there's that bizarre monologue. Cold, dehumanizing, and threatening. If I were a parent hearing my kid listen to this, I would probably get a bit worried... Until I remembered that I listened to the same stuff at the same age and - ahem - "turned out fine".
Eventually one of my friends encountered the source album when he got a radio show in Davis and spent many hours rummaging through the station's library. It was the band "Greater Than One", and they were from England - not Germany - and their music had nothing to do with making factory workers productive. My cousin had just been bullshitting me, of course. Not that it mattered - it was the sound that I liked, not the origin story - and by the time the mystery was solved my musical tastes had been developing for a decade and were firmly in place.
I had no idea who Placido Domingo was. I didn't even know he was an opera singer. What mattered was that whenever my Dad took us on a drive any longer than 15 minutes, chances were pretty good that he would play this cassette in the car stereo, and he would sing along half-seriously to most of the lyrics as we went.
To my thirteen-year-old self, my Dad was a gigantic, generally quiet man with a very dry sense of humor. He would occasionally act like a goofball with his kids, but only when he was absolutely sure no one else was looking. Driving down the road with us in the confined environment of the car, he would alternately croon and bellow his way through each song in the mode of this legendary Spanish opera singer, and his enthusiasm was so infectious that we would sometimes join in for the chorus, even if we couldn't quite make out what Placido Domingo was saying in his heavy Spanish accent. We would just sing some garbled up approximation instead.
It takes some practice to understand what opera singers are saying when they get loud, since so much of their enunciation is dropped in favor of volume. Add a foreign accent on top, and us kids didn't stand a chance. Placido would explode with "Is there an explanation, to ease my sorrow?" and I would participate with "Is Aaron echination, poofeezy arrow?" It didn't seem to matter!
Dad would also listen to an Elvis cassette over and over, and I consistently mistook the line "ever since the world began" with "Elvis is a waffle maker", and I imagined Elvis gyrating around a kitchen wearing a chef's hat - and then burning his fingers on the waffle iron, prompting his followup "ahuhuh!" Dad also got a Huey Lewis And The News tape from somewhere, and Huey at least could make himself understood, but my Dad never sang along to that.
Yep, it was the Placido Domingo that really brought out his performative side, and in turn, inspired my own enthusiasm for vocal performance - mostly singing by myself as I drove my own car, for year upon year as a teenager, until I worked up the guts to first join the choir class, and later, perform in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It didn't hurt that he also encouraged me to join choir by saying, "when I was a kid, the football coach actually ordered the whole team to join choir, all at once. He said it was mandatory." I liked that.
Meeting my Dad in any other context, it's very hard to imagine him flapping his elbows at the wheel of the car and singing, especially to a song like "Perhaps Love." (And especially to "Perhaps Love" as a duet by Placido Domingo and John Denver!) In fact, it's hard to imagine that song even exists. But if this six-foot-two, serious-looking middle-aged dude with a beard and gorilla hands could cut loose from his life-long John Wayne impersonation and showcase his inner opera diva, then it was totally okay for me to do the same.
And that was very important.
This was one of the albums I bought in the record store when I was looking for the source of the "industrial" music my cousin gave me. The cover art looked vaguely eastern-european, like a stone monument to some austere political regime, and the track names sort of matched what I heard on the tape - if you really squint, maybe. I brought it home and dropped it eagerly into the CD player...
WHAAM... WAhoom, WAAhoom, WAhoom, ...
I can still remember seeing the level meters on the stereo slam all the way to the right with every beat when I played this track for the first time. This was exactly what I anticipated from a category called "industrial", and I liked it. In fact, I thought I was hearing a template for the whole genre, and that there were many other albums like this one waiting to be explored ... but that wasn't true. Even the rest of Ministry's own discography doesn't sound like this, as though they tried it one time and then said, "ugh, forget it, we need to drop these synthesizers and add in some guitars."
"Twitch" is a well engineered album, with a cleanness to it that I hadn't encountered before. Take the track "The Angel" for example. Skip halfway into the song, so it's really going. Notice how distinct every instrument is, how the snare drum in the beat has an airy quality to it that seems to rise up through everything else. To a kid whose ears were accustomed to the hiss of cassette tapes, this was a revelation. It started the beginning of my obsession with purely digital sounds, leading into groups like Moby, Biosphere, Kraftwerk, et cetera. (Now for extra credit, notice how everything swaps from left to right on the soundstage and back again, every four beats. That's got to be Adrian Sherwood working his sequencer magic.)
This CD was only the second or third piece of music I'd purchased using my own money. (I think the first CD I ever purchased was "Radio KAOS" by Roger Waters, which didn't have much of an impact.) Everything earlier had been from the family collection, or dubbed from my cousin or friends. I brought this home seeking industrial music, and hadn't been disappointed, but when I moved on to purchase some of Ministry's other albums, I found something much more aggressive and distorted, and my musical tastes expanded into that, too.
Ministry's "Twitch" had a purity to the sound. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" had interstitial quiet moments, where the listener could relax, or just hang out for a while between two thoughts. My small music collection was hinting at a much larger territory, called "ambient music". Meditative, unhurried, without even lyrics. Then one day - doing my usual thing of hunting for albums that might be the elusive "industrial music" my cousin gave me - I dropped right into the middle of this new terrain.
I don't think I'll ever know why the band is called "In The Nursery". Something to do with gardens? Something about childhood? It hardly matters. What their music is, in a word, is ethereal. It's what you would expect to hear in a cathedral - quietly in the background, or loud in your ears when a sunbeam pierces you through a stained glass window - but the closest you'll ever get instead is an ordinary church organ or choir. Well, maybe a live performance in some world-famous location would have the same effect. But only maybe.
The alternately rapturous, then tragic, compositions on "An Ambush of Ghosts", mixed in with short pieces of tense dialogue from a film that - even after 20 years - I still haven't bothered to see (how could it live up to this music?) connected together with half a dozen things I was obsessed with at the time. Meditation, choral music, victorian architecture, stone monuments and ruins, ghosts and demons... I sometimes wonder if, had I been raised in a religious household, some other set of concepts would already be rooted in my mind as a 16-year-old to tie all these things together a different way, rendering the music mundane, or even annoying. I'll never know.
What I do know, is that after this album, I had a voracious appetite for "ambient music", and the more albums I bought - by Robert Rich, Brian Eno, Biosphere, Harold Budd - the more I appreciated the sound of In The Nursery, and of this album in particular. One day, as a 17-year-old, I got an extra-long speaker wire and dragged my stereo speakers into the bathroom and took a bath with one lit candle and this music playing. Very "goth", as my generation might say. Over twenty years later, about half the music I have is "ambient", and my 100 most-played songs are almost exclusively "ambient".
Some people crave this stuff, some people are annoyed by it, and some people are totally unmoved. I like to think that this means there are at least three kinds of inner universe, and we each live our lives immersed in one of the three, and only occasionally visit the others. So a state of mind we only occasionally visit - one we find strange and exotic - is what some other person might be comfortably resting in, all the time, every day. It's amazing society works at all, eh?
In a funny twist, the movie that I never bothered to seek out and watch, was actually never released! Even if I wanted to see it, there's no way.
Every six months or so my friends and I would make a road-trip from Santa Cruz to Berkeley, and spend hours in the music stores on Telegraph avenue. I don't know if there is an equivalent to this for high-school kids now - the pilgrimage to find media - since all media is downloadable. I'm too out of touch to know. But as a teenager, I relished a trip to the music store the same way I relished a trip to the toy store when I was six.
There was no internet to research music, and very little time to spend at a listening station where you could demo an album before buying it, so I usually bought things based on what section they were in, the cover art, the track list, and good old hearsay. For example, "Friendly Fa$cism" went into my shopping basket because I'd read somewhere that Jack Dangers engineered the album, and I really liked his work in Meat Beat Manifesto. When I queued it up back home I thought the music sounded great, but what really surprised me were the lyrics.
As a seventeen-year-old I didn't have a category in my mind that encapsulated their politics, but in retrospect I think the category would be "leftist". In fact, to say that Consolidated leaned left would be like saying that Paris is a little bit French. The track "The Sexual Politics Of Meat" was a funky beat with a spoken-word essay laid over it, excerpted from a book of the same name, and it was all about how the exploitation of "female reproductive organs" in the meat and dairy industry was interconnected with a patriarchal society that exploits the reproductive capacity of women. I was too young to sensibly interpret or critique the essay, but I knew I was hearing a point of view that was important because it contrasted with a lot of things I knew from popular culture that I wasn't all that comfortable with. Assumptions about food, assumptions about gender roles, assumptions about family structure, et cetera. At the very least, no one in authority around me seemed to believe there was even a debate worth having. This was just the way we did things; if you wanted justification you were obviously a troublemaker.
It's hard to be fair with perceptions like that, though. I was a teenager; what did I know about my community? Wasn't I just carrying around a bunch of impressions from television and films? Well, yes and no. I was living in an ostensibly liberal area, and I certainly had liberal parents, but it seemed like there was strong disagreement just a few degrees of separation away, in any direction. I had next-door-neighbors who were obsessive about religion and believed in strict gender roles. I had parents of friends who would say terrible things about homosexuals. I knew just one person who was part of a vegetarian household, and the standard response everywhere else to "I don't eat meat" was "what the hell is wrong with you?" There was a lot of separation enforced out of paranoia.
I credit Consolidated with reassuring me that there was an entire movement out there whose purpose was to identify and trash that paranoia. As the world becomes more interconnected, we have two experiences over and over again: We either feel validated and content when we discover that our belief was the majority opinion all along, or we feel persecuted and upset when we discover that our belief was an outlier, and bound for extermination unless we fight for it. Either way, interconnectedness is not the enemy. If your beliefs can't stand up to it, they need to evolve.
Consolidated's lyrics also served as a primer for a hundred different political discussions I would later have online and in college. Would things have been different if I'd purchased some turgid "christian rock" album instead? I don't know. I was already headed to the "left," and it's hard to compare a push from behind with a push from the front. I might have just put my head down and charged harder in the same direction.
I was a very stubborn kid, most of the time!
This album got a whole lot of press in its time, as part of a ridiculous culture war over a category of music called "alternative music".
I bought it because I'd already bought "Broken" and "Fixed" by the same artist and thought they were excellent. "Broken" in particular was a perfect encapsulation of the teenage angst I was feeling, but "The Downward Spiral" was more diverse, more innovative, and had a sound that grabbed me and sent roots into my imagination. The musical terrain it staked out was further explored by four or five long remix albums (counted differently depending on how you categorize the UK and Japan releases), all of which I bought and adored.
I thought some of the lyrics were a little trite, so I constructed mix tapes that cut them out, and listened to those over and over while shelving books at the Scotts Valley public library for a meager student income. At Cabrillo College I took an autobiography course, and when we were asked to discuss our favorite music, I mentioned this album, and said "it sounds like electric shocks with copper wires, and huge metal pipes colliding in a factory, and blocks of sandstone grinding together in a desert somewhere, with dried blood on everything." I storyboarded music videos for a few of my favorite songs in a sketchbook. When I started dating in college I made out with several girlfriends to the Coil remix of "Closer".
(That sounds a bit cheesy - like, I had a standard collection of "moves" I would put on my college dates and that song was among them. But the Coil remix of "Closer" is creepy and atmospheric. I really liked it, but I had no confidence that my date would like it unless they showed some interest in the same kind of music first. If they did, I would get all excited and geek out about different songs and sounds, and that might lead to this song later in the evening. If that's a "move", then I guess I'm guilty as charged...)
All that is evidence of strong influence, but the way this album really changed me was by forcing me to choose a side in a culture war.
As a teenager, I thought the music was cathartic, even therapeutic. It was one of many "alternative music" albums that located and illuminated an empty space that popular culture was obsessed with avoiding. Mass-market appeal meant that you didn't use impolite language, or talk about suicide or isolation or pain, and you disguised all your lust behind relatively benign romance, because you might upset some consumer's happy mood and get dropped from a radio station or a CD rack or dropped from a tour. Take the modern phenomenon of being "offended on the internet" as a form of entertainment, and crank it up even higher, then add a scoop of puritanical religiosity on top - this stuff is offensive to God! - and you have an idea of what this music was trying to displace. Nowadays it seems almost pathetic when a media conglomerate caves in to the wishes of a religious group. A quarter-century ago it was business as usual, built in from the ground up.
So I found myself thoroughly on the side of the counterculture. That put me among children of the "baby boomer" generation, vastly outnumbered by their parents and surrounded by a media that didn't represent them or cater to them. From our perspective, culture was measured against parental approval, and our parents didn't approve of heavy metal or gothic rock (both imported from the UK in the 80's), rap, techno, or anything else that sounded a bit weird or contained confrontational lyrics. This was the era of the "Parental Advisory" sticker, which was intended to warn kids away from "damaging" content, but was widely interpreted by kids to mean, "your parents feel threatened by this music, and if they're not the intended audience then perhaps you should be."
On the other hand, "The Downward Spiral" album was hated by plenty of young people in the music scene too, because its popularity brought with it a lot of unwelcome attention. People who felt they had a personal relationship with the music were dismayed to find it getting radio play (in censored form) on stations that mixed it indiscriminately with contemporary "top-40" stuff. My friends and I bitterly acknowledged that people we didn't like and couldn't relate to seemed to be playing "our" music because it was suddenly fashionable to do so - and because it pissed off their parents. Yes - teenager logic often runs in reverse. You identify someone you dislike, and work backward from there to establish why. (Then you're compelled to defend your position, which is where a whole lot of stupid comes from.)
When I was 18, I went to a house party with a random group of kids from my high school, and I was totally flummoxed when somebody cued up "Closer" (from this album) and everybody started dancing. To me, it was a song about the nasty emotional issues that young men develop around sex in a culture that tries to suppress it. Definitely not a party anthem. I never expected to see a group of drunk and stoned acquaintances in a trashed living room shouting "whooo!" and "I love this song!" while they gyrated around with big grins on their faces. Was this "my" music, or was it "theirs"? It was impossible for me to reconcile.
I bonded with friends - and chose my music "scene" - based on bands like Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, and Einstürzende Neubauten, but it was always with the understanding that my friends and scene would be forever hidden within a larger culture that didn't welcome it. "The Downward Spiral" was simultaneously welcome, and unwelcome, in both arenas. It was simultaneously vilified by the mainstream, and regarded as "too mainstream" by people in my own music scene. At the same time, it had obviously gained mainstream popularity, and was treasured by part of the counterculture as well. (It wasn't the only album that was treated this way, but it was definitely the biggest example.)
That phenomenon led me to realize something about music itself: It was absolutely acceptable to play music that sounded angry and weird, and sing about despair and sadness, because it formed an open channel for confronting these things in everyday life. This sound needed a permanent place in mainstream culture, not just a little alcove in a dusty corner where people in "the scene" could appreciate it "properly", whatever that meant. Popular culture was broken, and would remain so until this element was built back in.
(As an aside, I think it did get built back in, slowly over the last couple of decades. Then it jumped the shark with the latest round of Batman remakes, which were way too obsessed with darkness and grit for its own sake. GOTHAM GETS THE HERO IT NEEDS! Pffft.)
I'd like to draw your attention to something called the normal distribution function. The best way to demonstrate its power is with a device, called the Galton Board. In the linked video, notice how all the beads start in the same place, and then, by making a simple binary choice - left or right - over and over again, they fall into a spectrum, and almost all the beads end up close to the middle, while the edges taper off.
That's how culture works too. Every day, people make small choices among the things they are already trained to notice. Then, day after day, choice after choice, they drift out across the normal distribution. A person can be "a little bit" of something each day (sexist, reclusive, generous, politically active, etc) and then be "a whole lot" of something in a few years, without ever deciding to, or even realizing it's happened.
With that in mind, let me tell you about this. One day I was driving home from a camping trip with friends, and my friend Kathleen put a Tori Amos tape in the stereo. "Let's see how you like this," she said. "Okay," I said.
It was the song "Crucify". I instantly thought: "Where has this music been all my life?"
I immediately liked Tori for her voice. She sang like Roger Waters sang: Swollen with emotion, but also fiercely controlled. That approach extended into her compositions as well. I could relate to her songs about wrestling with inner demons, trying to find and keep a sense of self, and being constricted by gender roles that seemed designed to stamp out everything interesting and weird. I also enjoyed how abstract her lyrics could be - for example, speaking to God as if he were a selfish ex-boyfriend who was now exploiting some other woman. ("Will you even tell her, if you decide to make the sky fall?")
As I explored the rest of the album that contained "Crucify", the song "Silent All These Years" hit me hard as well. To me, it's a song about feeling deeply discontent with the way romantic relationships work, but being shut down repeatedly or rejected in the attempt to express it, and wondering if the chance to express it will never actually come -- and that perhaps the only course is to remain discontent until the desire for romance itself fades away with age. A plaintive and bitter song. Singing it over the years in my 20's, it could sometimes drive me to tears. In my 30's it was less affecting but still powerful, and I performed it once at karaoke, under interesting circumstances.
Kathleen saw how I took to Tori Amos and decided I would like Alanis Morissette as well, but that didn't stick. In fact I immediately disliked Alanis Morissette, and it took me a long time to articulate why. Eventually I realized it was because she was externalized. Her songs were full of complaints and accusations directed at other people, fetishizing her own lack of agency as though it were a proud character trait. Even her ostensible love song, "Head Over Feet", runs: "Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are - I couldn't help it - It's all your fault." Is that meant to be ironic? She sings it as though blaming someone else is a celebration.
Anyway, I'm not really interested in crapping on Alanis' early work, just in pointing out the contrast, and why it mattered to me. (I wasn't the only fan to feel this way. Tori and Alanis went on tour together, mostly in big arenas, and the crowds didn't mix well.)
I devoured every album Tori Amos released, including all the singles. I made my own mix tapes, threading in ambient music to give myself emotional room to recover after singing along with her in the car. From vocal performance with Placido Domingo, to the expressive grief of Roger Waters, to the kaleidoscopic Tori Amos, I was moving away from the normal distribution, and I liked the broader point of view that came with it. A few more pegs down on the board, and I was dressed in drag singing brassy showtunes about sexual freedom in The Rocky Horror Picture show, with my parents in the audience. At the time I never even stopped to consider, "How did I become an outlier?" I had only ever been making small choices.
The mix tapes turned out to be very popular with some of the women I dated too, and some of my favorite memories in my 20's and 30's are from driving along, singing alongside someone, sharing our connection to the music. (Again - if that's a "move", then I don't care.) By that point I was way off to the side of the Galton Board, and it was validating to find people in a similar place.
It's interesting to me that my ability to connect with Tori's work drops away sharply, just after "From The Choirgirl Hotel". After that she must have evolved as a person in some different direction that I could no longer relate to.
I came relatively late to the They Might Be Giants party. Their albums floated around in my friend group for years, then I finally paid attention when I went to UCSC and kept finding myself in small groups of people who happily sang all the lyrics together - some with harmony - while I was stuck sitting quietly and looking confused. So I borrowed a few CDs, then bought a few more, then I got obsessed... You know the story.
So why does this album belong on this list? The attitude. Flansburgh and Linnell's albums are like catchy musical puzzles, full of scientific facts and geeky historical references, absurd situations and metaphors, puns, riddles, and playful instrumentation. They express something in music that I wanted to express generally. At UCSC, that combination of playfulness and curiosity was something that I deliberately decided to hold onto as I continued the journey into adulthood. "I need to keep part of myself here," I thought. "Sure I'm serious and depressed at times, but I also need to stay familiar with this place - at the intersection of science and jokes."
That attitude has been a huge asset over the years. When we hit a difficult problem at work, I always look for two things - a solution, and some joke to crack about the situation to lighten the mood (though never at anyone's expense). In a way it's a survival tactic. Work would be a lot less interesting if there weren't any jokes, and if it wasn't interesting, I would get bored and suck at it.
I can't credit They Might Be Giants exclusively for this of course, but they did give me a solid push in this direction, and every time I sing along with them in the car it's like another supplemental push.
One day a couple of my friends and I got together and decided to go on a road trip, to visit another dear friend of ours who was living way out in Lee Vining. We all had musical inclinations, and it occurred to us on the second or third day that we had enough hardware sitting around in his garage to actually produce an album. To be clear: We had the hardware. That's not saying we had the talent.
So we coordinated ourselves enough to create three rough covers of video game songs - about seven minutes of music - and spent the rest of the time screaming, beating on things, cracking jokes, and playing random samples to make each other laugh. When it was all done I went home and slurped up all the "interesting sounding" parts and beat on them until I had 74 minutes of stuff. Then we burned and hand-assembled about a dozen CDs, in cases with cover art, and passed them out to friends. "Look guys, we made an album! Ha haa!"
I'd like to say we were a smash hit and embarked on a world tour. But the only thing we really had going for us was our sense of humor, and a large collection of very weird samples. We might have found a cult following if we'd been around a quarter-century earlier, but only if we took distribution and exposure a lot more seriously. One of us did work at a college radio station and passed our albums around, and they actually got some respectable airplay, but that was as far as things went. Oh yeah ... And four of our fans made "music videos", for Banana And Router, !unusual, Weenie Roast, and Monkey Seed.
And, getting together to "produce" a new album was an absolute blast, every time. I have never laughed so hard, and so often, in my adult life, as I have when four of my oldest friends got together in one place and cut loose with the noise. And that comes through on the recordings. For a while our tradition was to buy a drum kit off Craigslist just before the meetup, and make sure to destroy it before the end. One of our (very few) fans emailed us once to say, "You guys sound like your live shows would be off the hook!"
The "roster", so to speak, moved around a little over the years. One member left basically because he was "too good" a musician, and felt that his efforts were being wasted. Which they were; no doubt about that. I joked with him a while ago, "when you left, you probably took about 90 percent of the talent with you." Nevertheless we roped in two more friends and kept going, for a few more albums.
After 2008 the logistics of getting everyone together got a lot more difficult. Six of us did gather for a session in Oakland that lasted a few days, and we mined that for samples and put together a handful of rough tracks, but the enthusiasm has stayed low. I think the Braindead Monkeys are having a kind of existential crisis, about the very idea of a studio-rat musical "group". Who even owns CDs any more? Why make songs as a collection, if the idea of an "album" itself is stale? Why make new music? It's isolated from visual art, interactive art, and other more modern and more interesting mediums.
15 years later we occasionally get emails from people who've blundered across the website. Every now and then someone floats the idea of getting together to make more tracks, but then we immediately start talking about what else we could - or should - be doing instead.