Do you know what day it is today? Yes, it's Thursday, but it's also my brother Jesse's birthday! Since he's the one that got me into music, I thought it'd be fitting to dedicate today's post to him and the music he's shown me. Get excited, this post is full of classics!
Some of the earliest tracks my brother showed me were rock music! That's right, I wasn't always an electronic music database. I'm talking Guns N' Roses and Red Hot Chili Peppers! Classics. The most significant stuff came a little later on, when I was introduced to 5 of my all-time favourite albums. They are: Hello Nasty by the Beastie Boys, Vegas by The Crystal Method, Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers, Homework by Daft Punk, and You've Come A Long Way, Baby by Fatboy Slim. These are legendary releases. The first was my introduction to hip-hop, the second and third to big-beat, and the fourth to house. Vegas may be The Crystal Method's only good album, but it's damn good. Dig Your Own Hole is one of the most important albums of the big-beat era. If you've never heard Praise You then you didn't have a childhood. What better intro to house music than the most influential house album of all time?
So that was my childhood. The last of those albums came out in 1998, so I'm still pretty young at this point. I jammed on those and subsequent releases by those artists for a few years, but the most significant introduction was when I was 15.
Have you heard of Underworld? They were pretty huge in the 90s, the highlight (in my eyes) of their career taking place in 1999 with their live album Everything, Everything. This is literally my all-time favourite album, and has been for 4 years. Jesse played the live DVD for me back then, and I didn't know what to make of it. It's pretty tough to listen to Moaner without having heard trance before (real trance, not that Tiesto shite)! When I heard the album a few months later, however, it was like an epiphany. We picked up the CD, and I was hooked.
Other sweet introductions have been to (in no particular order) Snoop Dogg, Sublime, Phish, Weezer, The Pharcyde, Q-Tip, Kanye West, Bran Van 3000, Girl Talk, Aphex Twin, Rage Against The Machine, and many, many more.
I hope one day I'll show him as much music as he's shown me. These introductions have been the biggest influence on my musical tastes, and music would not be such a huge part of my life without him. I'm truly grateful for that. Happy birthday, Jesse!
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