{"id":8958,"date":"2020-05-19T20:36:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-20T01:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/?p=8958"},"modified":"2025-02-08T20:58:01","modified_gmt":"2025-02-09T02:58:01","slug":"six-albums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/2020\/05\/19\/six-albums\/","title":{"rendered":"six albums"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Facebook people were doing a thing where they posted 10 albums over the course of 10 days. I got up to six. Backdate reposting for posterity…<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

10 albums. 10 days. They might not be consecutive days but will be revealed in chronological order of my life, not album release. \u201cPosting without explanation\u201d is disingenuous crap. I\u2019m not nominating anyone. Let\u2019s do this. (Blame Mark.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014 \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Day 1. Bad Religion, Against the Grain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Sixth grade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had the coolest big brothers in the world, and this is what they listened to. It rubbed off hard. I learned big words and I used them. \u201cThe swath endogenous of ourselves will be our quandary,\u201d yeah.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Day 2. Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Eighth grade, I think? which was closer to contemporaneous with The Downward Spiral<\/em>, but let\u2019s be honest here, I had a head like a hole. I had a heart like a hole, and a hole like a hole, and if I had a soul, well\u2026 you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I avoided the trap of idolizing my idols. Maybe I was too shy, even in my daydreams. In the cafeteria a friend detailed her destiny to someday be with Trent Reznor, as in, BEEEEEE with him. And it made me feel bad, embarrassed and sad, that he couldn\u2019t just be her fantasy big brother, like he was to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Times seen live:<\/strong> 3<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Day 3. Tool, \u00c6nima.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Where to start. Well see that\u2019s the thing. Where do any of their albums end and I begin sounds overblown, but how else can I put it? the way their music folds time, an instant wormhole, an aural ouroborus. It\u2019s not a place I always want to go. It demands your full attention. But when I\u2019m there I never want to leave. Not till I\u2019ve worked through everything. And if you’re wondering WTF are you talking about, Meg, you clearly don\u2019t listen to Tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Times seen live: 4.<\/strong> Most memorable was in St. Paul in the early aughts. I\u2019d just gotten my wisdom teeth out and thrash dance drank torrents of my own blood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Day 4. Underworld, Second Toughest in the Infants.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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There was no YouTube or Napster, and the radio didn\u2019t play what I wanted to hear. I bought Second Toughest based on a one-line description in a Wax Trax promo because that\u2019s what you did, you paid $17 sound unseen and so many times it was total crap. Did I really like KMFDM? Meat Beats Me Manifesto!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Underworld, yeah, that sounds promising \u2014 I coughed up my minimum wage earned from washing dishes at the fanciest restaurant in the Fargo mall. The rest = history, a decade of raver pants and 16 minute songs on repeat for days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Times seen live:<\/strong> 1 glorious time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Day 5: AFI, Black Sails in the Sunset. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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I have the remarkable OG status as a North Dakota kid to have seen AFI in a basement in 1996, which would have been Very Proud of Ya<\/em> era. The less remarkable fact is I had no idea who they were and didn’t care. I went to the show to see my crush, who I never spoke to once, then or ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three years later AFI popped into my head at Media Play, and I saw Black Sails. Song titles like “Porphyria,” “Exsanguination” and “Malleus Maleficarum” were all dog whistles to Dark Meg. What I found were fast, melodic, shouty songs about being a weirdo, but not alone in being in a weirdo, in fact, there was a whole tribe of weirdos who couldn\u2019t wait to see how fierce I could dance and how hard I could punch. My voice joined the chorus for years, in a delicate balance of tongue in cheek and deadly deathly seriousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Times seen live: <\/strong>I don\u2019t remember. 8 maybe?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Day 6: Modest Mouse, The Moon and Antarctica.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While this album is probably my favorite \/ makes me cry the most, if this exercise were about songs instead, this would be “Dramamine” from This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About<\/em>, a song that destroys me in the first 8 seconds, blasting me back to my brothers\u2019 cars cruising around town holding my breath against the stink of their cigarettes. Modest Mouse was one of the rare bands that all three of us shared \u2014 not just enjoyed but felt deeply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The summer before my senior year they moved to Seattle to see what would happen, leaving me to fend for my teenage soul alone. I missed them so fucking bad. By that time they\u2019d already long been living with my dad, but this distance couldn\u2019t be breached by an afternoon at the Frisky Goat or Village Inn or plain driving around, which we did, a lot, because it was Fargo and the 90s. They moved back in a matter of months. The wound mended fast as my own life was picking up, preparing to leave home because now I knew it was possible to have this kind of pain and still do these things anyway, all the stretching growing healing, having a life worth living, leaving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So much of the music I love ties me to myself. Modest Mouse binds me to my brothers. \"\u2764\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Times seen live:<\/strong> 2<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The music that once upon defined me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-8958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-narratives","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8958"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8971,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958\/revisions\/8971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/megasimon.com\/d6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}