Last year, I wrote about my hobby of archiving musical memories for each year of my life, from childhood to the present day.
I call these mixes my “phono albums:” the musical equivalent of a photo album.
Now I’d like to share some Phono Album entries with you, at least the ones that seem worth sharing.
This first entry is more to set the scene than anything. It’s one of the earliest years for which I could make a full 80 minute playlist.
This was the school year of Fall 1990 to Spring 1991, when I was nine years old, going on ten.
I was in the third grade of elementary school, and I happened to have two teachers for this grade. One would teach in the morning; the other in the afternoon. I had a crush on my morning teacher. I felt so cool when I saw her at the James Ward concert I attended with my parents that year.
If that didn’t impress her, hopefully my drawings did. For instance, the one I did of Abraham Lincoln for my history report.
Ahem.
Anyway, my main sources of music at this time consisted of:
- My parents, who played old 60s pop, Country Western, and CCM
- My teenage sisters, who listened to rap, heavy metal, and radio pop
- Various film or TV show soundtracks, and…
- Whatever kid’s tunes caught my ear.
Quite a strange mix!
As a playlist in its own right…it’s admittedly not the smoothest listen. But as a snapshot of a blue collar family at the dawn of the 90s, it’s perfect.
And it’s a lot more digestible than the second grade one:
So that’s why I started with this one:
- “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone” — Presbyterian Hymn
- “Partyman” — Prince
- “The Butterfly Song” — Kids Praise
- “Mr. Lee” —The Bobbettes
- “Straight Up” —Paul Abdul
- “Holy Books” —James Ward
- “Monday, Monday” —The Mamas and the Papas
- “Hens & Cocks” —Camille Saint-Saens
- “Iesha” — Another Bad Creation
- “Rubber Ball” —Bobby Vee
- “Girls” —The Beastie Boys
- “Threshing Floor” —Steve Camp
- “Lookin Out My Back Door” — Creedence Clearwater Revival
- “Blame It On the Rain” — Milli Vanilli
- “Shut De Do” — Acapella
- “Friends in Low Places” — Garth Brooks
- “He’s So Fine” — The Chiffons
- “Pray” — MC Hammer
- “El-Shaddai” — Amy Grant
- “Kiss the Girl” — Alan Menken and Howard Ashman
- “Beetlejuice Main Title” — Danny Elfman
- “She Drives Me Crazy” — Fine Young Cannibals
- “Will Ye Go, Lassie Go?” — The Clancy Brothers
- “One” —Metallica (I watched the VHS version of the video over and over again…)
Some important seeds were planted here…
Tune in to find out what emerged as a result!
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Abraham Lincoln once said:
“YouTube makes it hard to put children’s songs into playlists, but for the subsequent entries I actually have playlists to share for your listening convenience.
And also…Vive le resistance against YouTube ad block detection.”
Sic Semper Youtybrannis.
That list is really all over the map, as it should be. Will be interesting to see how some of that shakes out as you age. I recognized some names and tracks that only tend to come up with people who were deeply embedded in CCM as I was in the late 80s/early 90s.
Shut De Do is a song I haven’t heard in years, though I am more familiar with the Randy Stonehill version.
The ultra-purist and self-appointed CCM gatekeeper Steve Camp is a name one will rarely hear outside the Christian ghetto. I love that he is adjacent to the Beastie Boys on the list. It just feels right in a twisted way.
I seem to recall that I had that Kids Praise cassette and taught kids to sing “If I Were a Butterfly” in music class in a Catholic school. I certainly remembered who Psalty was.
Anyhoo, looking forward to seeing more.
We loved those Psalty records. We also had Candle’s Agapeland albums, like The Music Machine and Bullfrogs and Butterflies. But the music didn’t really fulfill the promise of those album covers.
I never knew that Steve Camp was the KRS-One of CCM, I just thought of him as a cool rock guy (and now markedly less so, but still catchy and nostalgic).
He wrote a whole manifesto calling out artists like Sixpence None the Richer for crossing over into the mainstream and saying that people had lost sight of the call. It was pretty extreme and judgmental.
Just a question on #5- I’m intrigued by Paul Abdul. Is he Paula’s wacky brother that did a forgotten cover album?
Ha, or maybe a young Pauly before he became Styreen…
I so want him to be a thing. I’m already envisioning a backstory.
A new category is born:
tnocs Fanfic’
Terrifying. If I go down that rabbit hole, I’m not likely coming back.
Actually, wasn’t there a commenter who wrote fictitious interactions between the subject matters of Tom’s columns that took place in an alternate universe? They were really great.
I’m sure I’m misspelling this but wasn’t it mcwadg?
Yes, I believe it was dwmacg. Did he eventually publish those into a book? I seem to recall he did.
I was thinking this should become the next series on TNOCS – someone go back and copy various series that ran under the commenting section.
I was looking for an entry I wrote about Front 242’s “Headhunter”, but it is impossible to find using any searches (click on a member, and you can only find scattered comments by them up to 2 years ago…or maybe a specific number).
As I went thru a few articles’ comments, I came across dwmacg’s series, and I wondered if it could be copied here.
Probably not without his permission, but I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him.
Agreed, especially since I think he has them published as a book. Sometimes if you respond to an old comment on Stereogum, the person gets an email. That’s happened with me a few times, but only with older comments.
He did. I bought it from Amazon. I assume that it is still available.
It is called Dispatches from the Musical Multiverse by David MacGregor.
Ah, I do remember that now! Thanks, ltc!
Happy to help!
Yes, it’s still for sale on Amazon.
🤐 I’ll never tell… 😉
Reminds me of Cheers. Cliff, the mailman, is trying to make a joke with Paul, one of the regulars.
Cliff: Hey, Paul.
Paul: Hey, what?
Paul probably gets the joke. He just hates Cliff.
This list is as scatterbrained as one of mine. With all the genres I’ve been covering, the algorithm can’t make heads or tails of me.
Great topic, I’m looking forward to how this series progresses.
It progresses toward a better balance between eclecticism and sensible flow, at the very least.
Dude, that mixtape is amazingly eclectic, kudos to 10 YO Phylum for being so open minded in appreciating all music. 😃
Of course, now I totally want to see the track listing for 2nd Grade Phylum…..
It’s not all that different in terms of music sources and genres, but it’s just a much stiffer listen.
And there are more “cheat” picks, i.e., songs that I definitely was listening to at the time, but probably also well before. For instance, the soundtracks for Disney’s Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. The fact that I got to 80 minutes even with those loopholes felt like an accomplishment.
Like everyone else, I admire the eclectic nature.
Plenty that is a mystery to me. Until last week Camille Saint-Saens would have been one of them but my daughter came home with Music homework to listen to Fossils and describe what she was hearing. That was once we got past the confusion that she thought the teacher said that it was a band called The Fossils. Of which there are quite a few – it did seem unlikely that she was being asked to report back on a New Zealand garage rock band.
Looks like Abraham Lincoln has been brawling if his black eye is anything to go by. Politics was rough back then.
Random fact: Japanese people call the prominent brow/eye socket depth of white people “shoyu.”
Random fiction: The prominence on Honest Abe’s face was the original Lincoln Tunnel.
I just looked it up. “Shoyu” is a bona fide Japanese word. I thought it was oceanic slang. I thought the Japanese called it soyu.
“Show you what?”
A misunderstanding between a Buena Vista Hotel waitress and me about my condiment request. It was a JPO trip. In the twentieth century, they actually allowed 5th and 6th graders to control traffic without any adult supervision.
I could have sworn that I had made a similar shoyu joke with you when discussing musubi.
This comes as a shoku to me.
偉大な頭脳と学識ある頭脳は同じように考えます。
This made me wonder how a Japanese person might actually choose to translate “great minds think alike,” because it strikes me as a decidedly un-Japanese to state that one has a great mind, especially when the intent is merely to highlight a shared train of thought.
I found one website explaining the fixed expression to beginning learners of English, and they translated it as 考えることが似てるね, or “our thoughts match, eh?”
Fun minutiae!
I still do this to this day…
https://tnocs.com/my-autobiographical-mixtapes/
However, I am just coming up on my 6th consecutive year. I wish I had phono albums from my younger years — that would be a trip to look back on!
Great series, looking forward to how it (and your musical taste) evolves.
Your Abraham Lincoln has a hint of Kafka to his aspect…
Clearly intentional. I was trying to foreshadow Part 12 of my “Dude Where’s My Van?” series. I was an ambitious kid.
I can not stand CCM (sorry). When I was a kid, I used to attend the Methodist Youth Convention Labor Day weekend in Ocean City, NJ.
On the first night (Friday), we’d meet in the Convention Center, and there would always be some type of CCM band to perform after we’d discussed the schedule of events for the weekend. My junior year, the band felt the “spirit of the Lord” and wound up playing over a three-hour set. I can’t sit through a Springsteen set, let alone a band I’d never heard of.
What was amazing is how deaf the band was to the audience – here were over a thousand high school kids, waiting to get out of there and go socialize, and the band kept playing…and playing…and playing. By their third hour of playing, there wasn’t a soul cheering or clapping.
The following summer, I was kicked out of my youth group and was not allowed to attend the Convention (which, except for the Opening Night Debacle, was one of the great events of the year). I was undeterred – I told my parents I was going, and drove down with a buddy of mine where we got our own hotel room ($9/night). When I arrived, I called my dad, and he told me he’d stopped over at the church to give me something and they told him I wasn’t invited, so I NEEDED TO GET MY ASS HOME THAT INSTANT.
I threw my friend under the bus. “Dad, Scott’s drove us down, and he said he’s not leaving.”
We had a great time that weekend, ESPECIALLY when the CCM band did their set, then went they came back for the encore, Scott and I stood up triumphantly and walked out of the convention center.
Scott was never invited to our house again.
I bet that band got paid to prevent some teen pregnancies…