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Purchase log, 2022-05-10

[Utada Hikaru - ULTRA BLUE]

I catalog my music purchases on Collectorz and Discogs, but they don’t give me a sense of change over time. So I’m noting them here weekly as well.

Catalog

CD
  • Aaron Jay Kernis, Second Symphony / Musica Celestis / Invisible Mosaic III
  • Cibo Matto, Viva! La Woman
  • Elliott Carter, Night Fantasies / Piano Sonata (Charles Rosen)
  • Julian Lloyd Webber: Saint-Saens: Cello Concerto / Honegger: Cello Concerto (Yan Pascal Tortelier, English Chamber Orchestra)
  • Leif Segerstam, Symphonies Nos. 9 and 12 / Monumental Thoughts (Staatsphilharmonie Rhineland-Pfalz)
  • Melanie C, Northern Star
  • Michael Jackson, Dangerous
  • Samuel Barber, Capricorn Concerto / A Hand of Bridge / Intermezzo from Vanessa (Marin Alsop, Royal Scottish National Orchestra)

Reissues

Vinyl
  • Utada Hikaru, First Love
  • Utada Hikaru, Distance
  • Utada Hikaru, DEEP RIVER
  • Utada Hikaru, ULTRA BLUE
  • Utada Hikaru, HEART STATION
  • Utada Hikaru, Fantôme
  • Utada Hikaru, BAD Mode

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Purchase log, 2020-01-28

[Change - The Glow of Love]

I catalog my music purchases on Collectorz and Discogs, but they don’t give me a sense of change over time. So I’m noting them here weekly as well.

Catalog

CD
  • Andrew Lloyd Webber, Song and Dance: The Songs (Original Broadway Cast)
  • Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago
  • Cee-Lo Green, Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections
  • Michael Jackson, Bad (Special Edition)
  • Musical Youth, Anthology
  • Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time (Tashi)
  • Philip Glass, North Star
  • Rage Against the Machine, Renegades
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff, Preludes (Complete) (Alexis Weissenberg)
  • The Flaming Lips, Fight Test
  • World Saxophone Quartet, Dances and Ballads
  • Soundtrack, Friday Night Lights
  • Soundtrack, Kill Bill, Vol. 1
  • Soundtrack, Strictly Ballroom
Vinyl
  • Change, The Glow of Love
  • Lounge Lizards, No Pain for Cakes
  • William Orbit, Strange Cargo

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Purchase log, 2019-06-11

[Amanda Shires - To the Sunset]

I catalog my music purchases on Collectorz and Discogs, but they don’t give me a sense of change over time. So I’m noting them here weekly as well.

New releases

Vinyl
  • Eluvium, Pianoworks

Catalog

CD
  • Amanda Shires, To the Sunset
  • Charles Ives, Symphony No. 4 / The Unanswered Question / Central Park After Dark / Symphony No. 3 (Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot)
  • Colin McPhee, Symphony No. 2 / Concerto for Piano with Wind Octet / Nocture / Balinese Ceremonial Music (Brooklyn Philharmonic, Dennis Russell Davies)
  • Cypress Hill, III (Temple of Boom)
  • Florence + the Machine, Lungs
  • Franz Schubert, The Last Four String Quartets (Quartet Italiano)
  • Franz Schubert, Winterreisse (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau)
  • Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove
  • Kansas, The Best of Kansas
  • Ladytron, 604
  • Ladytron, Witching Hour
  • Living Colour, Collideoscope
  • Living Colour, Stain
  • Michael Jackson, Bad
  • Re-Flex, The Politics of Dancing
  • The Temptations, The Ultimate Collection
  • The The, Infected
  • Soundtrack, Battlestar Galactica: Season 4

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Favorite Edition Rewind: 1979

[The Manhattan Transfer - Extensions]

A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries ranking my favorite albums from 1985 to 2004. My collection has expanded greatly since then, particularly in the last five years. So I wanted to see what has changed in 10 years.

1979 is officially the year I started collecting music. And it’s all because of a post-disco hit about the Twilight Zone theme song. This list, though, couldn’t have been compiled till 2006.

  1. Gang of Four, Entertainment!
  2. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita
  3. Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd
  4. Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach
  5. Midnight Oil, Head Injuries
  6. Talking Heads, Fear of Music
  7. The Clash, London Calling
  8. Michael Jackson, Off the Wall
  9. The Police, Reggatta de Blanc
  10. Emmylou Harris, Blue Kentucky Girl

Other favorites from the year:

  • The Manhattan Transfer, Extensions
  • The B-52’s, The B-52’s

The hit in question is “Twilight Tone” by the Manhattan Transfer.

Though more renowned as a jazz vocal quartet, the group wouldn’t get on my radar till “Twilight Tone” invaded the airwaves. Search YouTube for a performance of the song on a variety show — it’s amazing what people will endure for art. Or gimmickry.

My parents relented and bought the Extensions album for me. Of course, I played “Twilight Tone” to death, but I also dug the other songs on the album. Unlike “Twilight Tone”, they ranged from doo-wop to a capella. One song was a bizarre novelty with the singers voices rendered at chipmunk speed. You could say this was Manhattan Transfer’s disco album.

I’ve included it in the extended list. As fond as I am of the album, I have a better sense of what 1979 really offered as a year in music.

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Q: Why have I disliked Michael Jackson for so long? A: Internalized homophobia

[Michael Jackson - Off The Wall]

I remember the moment my ambivalence toward Michael Jackson turned into downright hatred.

My family had the television tuned into the 26th Grammy Awards in 1984, the year Thriller won eight trophies. That meant Jackson went up to the stage over and over again, and as the evening wore on, the fey voice, the extravagant get-up, the single glove — they all annoyed me.

“He’s a sissy,” I concluded. I was already being taught where nerds fell in the junior high social order, and sissies (fags, faggots) were many rungs lower.

Jackson’s big win made him a target for sensationalism, and the press turned every quirk of Jackson into Exhibit A for what a damn freak he was. My impressionable 12-year-old mind conflated those reports with my own vague understanding of … let’s call it “gender identity”, and I didn’t like it.

It would be years before Jackson’s eccentricities would be revealed to be sinister, but I still feared the idea of having anything in common with him. I didn’t know what to make about being gay — I didn’t even have a word for it yet — but I understood the prevailing mood of the nation at the end of the 20th century.

Gay. Pedophile. Criminal. Hell-bound. The public at large would make no distinction between a platinum-selling pop artist or a pre-teen Asian-American Catholic school kid.

By 1995, I would eventually discover that no, I wasn’t a freak. I wasn’t entirely accepted, but I wasn’t a freak. Jackson had gone off the rails, and he gave everyone fuel enough to dislike him. So I continued to scoff at his music, even though I was never going to be his target audience.

When Jackson died in 2009, I had a morbid thought — could I start to appreciate him? Let’s face it, so long as he lived, the press was going to magnify even the smallest of infractions, and that kind of baggage makes it impossible to separate the man from the art.

So difficult, in fact, it’s taken seven years for me to cross a threshold — adding Michael Jackson to my music collection.

Vinyl collecting made me rethink albums I brushed off for overexposure at the time — Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Peter Gabriel’s So, Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain. Entering my 40s has mellowed me out to the point where I find my youthful indignation pretty ridiculous.

I’ve already embraced ABBA. Why not Michael Jackson?

I would flip through the stacks at record stores and pass copies of Thriller or Off the Wall and feel the urge to buy them. It caught me off guard. I would have barely considered such a thing in 2009. What’s happened in that time?

I remembered that Grammy broadcast, remembered the vague realization it communicated. Do I still have that fear? No, it’s been nearly 20 years since I started to identify myself as gay. The national mood is vastly different as well, where disparaging gay citizens is a political liability and a social offense.

The course of Jackson’s life after those eight trophies ran a sad and bizarre course that, frankly, had nothing to do with me. We had nothing in common, and Jackson wouldn’t be the last celebrity chewed up by the pop music machinery.

At a Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale in May 2015, it finally happened. I found a copy of Off the Wall on CD selling for $1. Why not?

My oldest sister bought the singles from Off the Wall, but she didn’t make the leap to getting the full album. While I got sick of the Thriller singles, the same hadn’t happen with the hits from Off the Wall. “Rock With You”, “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” — there was enough disco in them to be timely but far more ahead of its time to sound, well, timeless.

Like AC/DC’s Back in BlackOff the Wall may well be the only album by Michael Jackson that I own. I’m still not the target audience for Jackson’s music, but an imagined fear shouldn’t prevent me from liking something he did.

 

 

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