was an investment. This was pre–Columbia House for me, which meant that I had to be really careful when purchasing an entire album, because it’s not like I was going to get a bunch of new ones anytime soon if it sucked. So I had to be sure it was worth it. I went to Rose Records (there’s a futon store there now, RIP) with my mom and got Surprise and knew that I was going to be listening to it for weeks, which I dutifully did. “Makin’ Happy” is a fucking jam, which I probably only discovered because every time she caught me in front of the TV, my mom was like, “I know you’re not watching a SHOW after you begged me for that TAPE!” and chased me out of the living room and into the warm embrace of my busted Aiwa boombox, but that’s fine.
“Ecstasy,” PJ Harvey
Rid of Me changed something in me. Yes, I tend toward the hyperbolic, but Polly Jean thrashing on her guitar while caterwauling about sex in this super-raw way seriously cracked something open inside my most shame-filled places. There was a time when the most glamorous thing to my tiny brain was the prospect of having someone worthy of the title “lover,” someone sweaty and elusive who would make me feel things that warranted a song being written in their honor, and PJ is mostly to blame for that. I listened to a lot of the Beatles’ later work and other shit that made me feel like I wanted to be on drugs, but PJ and Tori made me long for someone to put their tongue in my mouth while I had many very deep thoughts about it. Imagine being that stupid. Remind me to tell you about the time I thought I was going to be a spoken-word poet and at my first open mic said “rim shot” without realizing that it could be interpreted as referring to butt stuff. The entire audience laughed hysterically at my Feelings Poem. It dawned on me too late why it was funny, and then, because I am a humorless toddler, I stopped reciting the poem and tried to explain to the crowd that I meant it in the music way, and then they started snapping to get me to leave the stage, but I didn’t know that was a thing, so I talked for four more excruciating minutes until I died.
“On the Bound,” Fiona Apple
Umm, Fiona has exactly zero bad songs. I could totally make a case for just strapping you down and forcing you to listen to Tidal over and over until you’re inconsolable, but as much as I love that album, When the Pawn…is the one that, for me, has the most necessary and heartbreaking shit on it. I do not knock on Fiona’s door when I’m trying to have an upbeat good time; I am coming to her with the shattered pieces of my heart in my hands, setting the pointy shards at her feet, and lying very still until she stomps on them with her words. The urgency with which she growls “you’re all I need” is so visceral and great, and I have never spoken to anything that wasn’t shaped like a burrito with such fervor in my life.
“Brown Skin Lady,” Black Star
When I first started listening to rap music, I was deeply invested in West Coast rappers, mostly because the music was so aggressive that it made me feel tough by association, and also because I looked like a young Ice Cube. He, DJ Quik, and Too $hort (“What’s my favorite word? Bitch!”) provided the bulk of the soundtrack to my aggro tweens. I used to walk around rapping “I hope you know I’d rather be dope than use it” to myself, but what do those words mean to an eleven-year-old girl in the rough part of the suburbs? No one had offered me dope. And I myself was most certainly not the other kind of dope. I always felt like a voyeur listening to NWA, or anything else that referenced crack cocaine and guns, but then De La Soul came along, and I was like, “Ooh! Okay! They’re rapping about roller skates!” I wore hemp necklaces and a velvet choker almost every single day: backpack hip-hop was made for me, especially because that peace-and-love shit really resonated and, deep down, I was terrified of doing