Alright, I’ll stop exposing the side of me that’s a heinous, judgmental beast for a while (she only comes out on special occasions these days anyway) and get back to completing this Music Meme from Monday.

The Final Three

Nirvana - Unplugged in New York

Yes, it’s become apparent that an unnatural amount of my musical influences come from the Grunge era. I know this. I’ve accepted this.

That aside, because of the ever-present censorship of my mother, I wasn’t exposed to any of the Seattle/Sub Pop/flannel-clad sounds of the Grunge movement until a few years after Cobain and Hoon were both dead. I know, it’s really inauthentic to claim to have “been around” for an important musical movement but not have actually been involved. It’s like faking nostalgia or something. However, I wasn’t too late to catch the tail-end of this cultural movement (I mean, My So-Called Life hadn’t even aired yet at this point) and, in the summer before my 6th grade year, my paths crossed with a few musical mentors who pushed me into the deep end of everything I’d missed and I was hooked.

This particular album represents the first sounds I heard and the first times I started breaking away from authoritative conditions to let myself enjoy the music that I felt passionate about. For example, when I purchased Nirvana: Unplugged, my mother was appalled and immediately confiscated the CD. (This, by the way happened many many times over the next few years until I got to high school and she realized there was no use.) The boy that I was chronically in love with through the majority of jr. high made me a tape of the album (and Metallica’s black album, now that I think about it) and I listened to it until the tape’s wheels began to squeak as they rotated.

I still have that tape. I still hear the squeaks. I still feel a familiar, youthful passion during every song, if only from reminiscence.

Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill

This one’s funny because it has two levels for me. (Also, it’s another that my mother promptly confiscated) When it first came out I just loved the sounds and, while I knew she was revolutionary for saying things that “ladies shouldn’t” and being gutsy enough to get really really pissed off and emotionally vulnerable as a woman, I didn’t actually understand what she was pissed about. (Again, I was only in 6th grade when this came out.) I mean, I got that a guy she loved had treated her like shit. Okay, I could relate to that because all the guys I knew treated me like shit. (Ah, middle school in suburbia.) And that hurt and made me angry, so I kind of just channeled all that early teenage angst into my repeated listening of the album. And I learned every single word on the whole thing, whether I understood what “going down” on someone meant at the time. (Um, I didn’t.)

But then [as I've mentioned a bazillion times] in high school I got into a relationship where I was actually singled out and hurt on a personal level. And that’s when I toootally got it. Finally. Suddenly I could relate to Alanis being livid at “how quickly I was replaced”. I was pissed because he, too “took me for a joke, took me for a child”, he’d never “heard a damned word I’d said” and I was “frustrated by [his] apathy” too! And as the relationship dragged on and on, I came to understand it even further. He DID say he’d “love me until [he] died” and hey! incidentally, he, too, was “still alive”. And yeah, after all of it, “All I really” DID “want was deliverance/ A way to calm the angry voice.” I understood every single lyric and there was Alanis, paving the way, giving me permission to embrace my emotions and feel really really angry for a change instead of trying to bottle it up and pretend like it never happened for the sake of appearing “ladylike”. (That’s how sociopathic serial killers are created, you know.)

Suddenly, it was like this whole entire album was written specifically for and about me. This resulted in many many screaming, angry, post-breakup evenings of wailing along with Alanis as an inexpensive form of therapy.

And you know what? Between her, Fiona Apple, Holly McNarland and No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom”, I totally got it all out of my system.

Queen - The Greatest Hits I, II, and III

Of all the albums I’ve listed, this one is the most like a patchwork quilt of memories from a multitude of my life’s avenues. The obvious first example is “Bohemian Rhapsody” and its direct reference to Wayne’s World and how I do love that movie almost as much as I love the people I associate with it and the memories I have of those people in relation to the movie and the song. (posephus, obviously you’re included here. Just.. you know.. in case you were wondering.)

And then “Under Pressure” reminds me so much of my sister and how, while listening to it one day a few years ago, she realized, while wailing along with “Why can’t we give looooove that second chance?/ Why can’t we give love just one more chance?”, that she really did want me in her life and really was willing to forgive me for being such a shitty shitty person to her for so many years (not entirely due to drinking, which is even more shameful to me) and she called me and we made amends from a falling out that had seemed scarily permanent. It was a huge turning point and affirmation that working toward recovery was making me slowly more accessible and lovable to those around me.

Um, “Fat Bottom Girls” used to be a bit of a theme song for me and I even started a tiny clothing/accessories collection with that as the basis. But then one extremely intoxicated night the song became the theme for me making a massive ass [heh. get it?] of myself in a very very public setting and the memory of that has kept me away from the song for the last 4 years.

“Don’t Stop Me Now” is such an amazing song about hope in general, but I sort of adopted it as a theme when I finally committed to sobriety.

Honestly, I could list a reason I love every single song on the three-CD compilation but suffice to say that it and the band in general hold a lot of sentimental value for me.

The most important factor of these being that they’ve always been my husband’s favorite band and “You’re My Best Friend” has kind of always been our song. And that’s really good enough for me.