1 post tagged “life changing”

Audio: Show us five CDs or albums that changed your life. 
Submitted by redhotmomma.

The first time I listened to this album, I was amazed.  I rocked out for weeks straight, and i fell in love with a long-haired white boy with a hip hop swagger.

I was in elementary school when Off the Wall came out, but that didn't stop me from breaking needles on my mother's copy and dancing my ass off to ever song.  I played it over and over until I knew each lyric by heart, and then I played it so that my cousins and siblings knew it too.

My mother says she played this Marvin Gaye album constantly during the last two months of her pregnancy with me, and inexplicably, for as long as I can remember, I have been able to sing every single song on this album, in order, from a side to b.  It is also, by far, my favorite Marvin album.

I was working for the US Postal service when this album came out, and cds were a big deal to those of us that worked the overnight shift.  Music in our headphones kept us going.  I was the first in the group to purchase this cd, and it became my personal Lovesexy; I never skipped a track.  Even now when I listen to it, I listen from beginning to end, because this is one of those cds that makes you appreciate a band that actually plays their own music.

I was not quite 9.  My uncles, the twins Earl and Jerald, were not quite 21, and they were still sharing a bedroom in my grandmother's house.  One of my favorite hobbies was going in their bedroom when they were gone and playing their albums.  "Shake Your Pants" was my favorite cut, and for six minutes and twenty-one seconds at a time, I would transform their bedroom into my own private disco, dancing around in a pair of my aunt's heels, wearing one of my grandmother's wigs and imagining myself on Solid Gold with the audience cheering for me.  One afternoon, my uncle busted me in the mirror, singing "Why Have I Lost You" into a hairbrush, and that picture (which i shall now have to retrieve) is in a photo album at my grandmother's house -- a nine-year old me in an unfortunate pair of plaid pants, a superman (christopher reeve!) t-shirt, and what i can only imagine are the most hideous pair of buster brown's my mom could find, holding a bright pink goody hairbrush to my mouth and singing at my reflection in his mirror.  It was the beginning of my infatuation with having my picture taken.