[vox] Vox Hunt: Life-Changing Albums

"Audio: Show us five CDs or albums that changed your life. "

Ok, here we go.


Metallica - Master of Puppets

It seems like a strange choice, but this was the album that started me on the road to where I am today. Ever see "SLC Punk" ? There's a flashback scene at the end where the main characters are teenagers, playing D&D in the basement. That's pretty much where I was. I had an unnatural fondness for pen and paper roll playing games, and boy did I look like it. I got pretty into "Call of Cthulhu", and one of my fellow unlayable nerds let me know that there was a song called "The Thing That Should Not Be" on Metallica's Master of Puppets. Arguably, being a metalhead is a sideways social move from being an RPG nerd, but at least it got me out to shows and causing trouble instead of rolling up characters in my room.


Bad Religion - Suffer

After a few years of metal, I got kind of sick of the cartoonishness of the lyrics, and the wankery of the guitar players. Don't get me wrong, I'll still pop a Slayer disk in now and again, but I needed something that spoke a little more directly to me. Enter punk rock. Suffer still has the distinction of being the only punk album that has ever made me reach for a dictionary.


The Specials

So I had a prety good thing going on with the punk and all. One night, I was hanging out with an extremely knowlegable cool girl (that I coincidentally had a huge crush on). I thought I knew what was up. She asked me if I wanted to hear "what skinheads listen to". Personally, I was expecting some handcore Oi! or something. Instead I got the dulcet tones of Rico Rodriguez's Trombone on "A Message to You Rudy". I was owned, and to this day, I still listen to more ska than anything else.


Jane's Addiction XXX

I don't remeber who first turned me on to Jane's Addiction. Things from that period are a little...fuzzy. Whoever it was set the soundtrack for my life for the next few years though. I still listen to (XXX? Live at the Roxy? Jane's Addiction?) a few times a year. It's just so wonderfully raw and organic. Even though Navarro is kind of a sellout whore these days, he had more influence on my guitar playing than pretty much anyone else.



The Smiths

Ah the Smiths. I do know who is responsible for this one, but I don't blame them. This was "my band" for the last year of high school, as well as my first couple of years of college. Actually, I had a mix tape with the Jane's Addiciton XXX album on one side, and Rank on the other. I don't think it left my car's casset player for a full year. Morrissey's voice provided the soundtrack for many nights of pretentious conversation, independent film viewing missions, thai food, and more coffee and cigarettes than anyone should probably consume in a lifetime.