Music I’m Supposed to be Ashamed Of

100: What cassette did you wear out from use? #LifeWideLearning16 @MrChase

— Ben Wilkoff (@bhwilkoff) April 10, 2016

I understand that the question is about cassettes. Where that specific medium is concerned, I didn’t wear any out other than in recording and re-recording improvised “radio shows” I’d make as a kid. Instead, listed below are those albums I listened to more than I should have, but just as much as I needed.

I was never good at understanding what was cool. Some of that probably stems from growing up in a family ripe with musicians of all ilks. Add to that experiences like my grandmother never telling 10-year-old me that my peers likely weren’t singing along with Neil Diamond cassettes in their family cars, and you’ve got a perfect storm of eclectic, peer-chided musical tastes. Enter, Matchbox Twenty’s Mad Season. Released in 2000 when I was “going through some things,” Mad Season was both the album I needed and the album I deserved. Each song could be counted on to hit some emotional cord my mid-adolescent self needed to experience through music. I listened to “Bed of Lies” as though it might have led to full-time employment. The whole album was my jam. This is why, after a year, I needed to buy another copy of the CD. As it turns out, you can listen to a CD too much. Mine was scratched and tired. Still, I’ll hit up Mad Season every once in a while to remember who I was and what I was feeling at the turn of the century.

I’ve never really known what I should and shouldn’t like. When it came to hanging out at my grandparents, I was always keen to flip through their record collection. It was where I learned about Mel Tormé, brass bands, and Peter and the Commissar. If you’ve heard, “Hello, Muddah”, then you know the wordplay joy of this album capturing a live performance of Allan Sherman, Arthur Fiedler, and the Boston Pops Orchestra. I’m sure I didn’t get the political overtones of Sherman’s text, but the music and intelligence of the words shown through to my little-kid self. Anyone interested in understanding my sense of humor should probably listen to this album (both sides) to get a handle on what you’re in for.

I’ve owned two copies of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell CD. The first was never opened or listened to. While not triggering Tipper Gore’s parental advisory standards, this album was reported to my mother by work colleagues as containing swearing. She decided it hadn’t been the appropriate inclusion in my Easter basket. A similar decision would be reached the next year for Green Day’s Dookie. As a result, she asked for it back. I obliged. As soon as I was old enough to drive to the mall and had the money, I bought Meatloaf’s second opus. To this day, I love every song on that album. If you need me to, I will come and sing them to you.

Last week was a big week for my childhood. Netflix began streaming all 99 Animaniacs episodes. For almost the entirety of the show’s run on afternoon TV, my friend Travis and would call each other and conduct a telephone version of what today would likely be an award-winning post mortem podcast. When the first and second cassettes of Animaniacs songs hit shelves, I was there. I was there and I was singing along. To this day, my aunt and uncle remember (differently) my insistence on listening to one of the tapes when I went to visit them in Nashville.

In few places in my life am I cliché. In one recording, I fully embrace that cliché, Barbra Streisand’s The Broadway Album. It was my mom’s vinyl copy that I first “borrowed” into my record collection when I was 7. With the door to my bedroom closed, I would pump up the volume on my suitcase record player and belt out these Broadway classics without any sense of irony. When I bought the album on CD (around the same time I was making up for the Meatloaf mishap) I still had no appreciation for the irony. It wasn’t until college when I downloaded the digital version of the album that I recognized the stereotype I was furthering. At that point, it didn’t matter. The record had been in my life more than 11 years, and all I knew was that listening to it allowed me to tap in to something I hadn’t had words for the first time I heard it.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.