I for the most part do not have a lot to say about the music that has influenced me - I find music to often be beyond words; its emotional effects too abstract to articulate, but I tried for the sake of this assignment, and I got some enjoyment out of it! It felt most natural to me to focus on albums I first heard in my formative years, from age 9 to 13, that have nevertheless stuck with me as important and valuable albums, influential on my development as an artist and person.

Swollen Members – Monsters in the Closet (2002)

The first album I picked out for myself at the age of 9; a sort of odds and ends collection that I recall was described in its liner notes as being Swollen Member’s “2.5th” album. Swollen Members were a Vancouver-based group that represented in early 2000s Canada a particular unusual merging of underground and mainstream rap sensibilities that would be utterly foreign to most Americans; a merging made distinctly amenable by Canadian Content requirements and MuchMusic VideoFACT grants. I recall sitting in the bathtub the evening after buying it, while my mom listened and wrote out a guide for me of which parts of the songs I should avoid due to swearing, which I dutifully followed for a time. I associate the album strongly with visiting my great grandmother at the nursing home in which she stayed two years later, the music fitting perfectly with the care centre’s sterile and mysterious atmosphere, at a time when I very often self-absorbedly had my headphones on in many after school social situations – not due to a lack of interest in others, but owing to the level of fixation music imbued in me at the time. I found it a very easy album to get lost in, in the particular way that only really occurred when I was a child; I especially loved the blurry, muddled atmosphere of “Northern Lights”, for which the liner notes proudly noted rapper Prevail kicks three distinct styles on with each respective verse. I long for the days where every single detail of a song would seem extremely important and worthy of rumination – the emotional associations conjured by the lyric’s mentions of Denver Airport terminations, “heavy bags of garbage floating in the tarpit” and “Neural Bombing Agency” watchtowers evoke for me an enchanting magical realist industrial landscape that inspires and interests me to this day. Despite the groups strong connections with California, I find Swollen Members’ sound to be one of the few examples I’ve heard of a distinctly northwestern, BC-centric take on hip-hop; evoking often the particular mystery, danger, and beauty of the evergreen fields, lakes and rivers that make up much of this province.

OutKast – Aquemini (1998)

Listening to “Da Art of Storytelling Pt. 2” during a storm on the outskirts of my town’s local college felt like one of the greatest moments of my life; me around the age of 10, getting to feel I was living out the song’s dramatic and romantic idea of apocalypse. Organized Noize and Outkast’s own production group Earthtone III introduced to hip-hop a live instrument-based sound that stressed an often somber and reflective gospel-influenced emotionality and melody over hip-hop’s more common focus on rhythm and texture, influencing immensely the development of my own melodic sense as a musician as well as echoing in particular rapper Andre 3000’s unique lyrical approach. I love that many of the respective verses on this album seem to exist in a vacuum, unrelated to the others both stylistically and in content; in “Y’all Scared”, the contrast between the mystery and obtuseness of Big Gipp’s verse, where I was mesmerized by the bizarre high-pitched yelping mixed underneath his slow, drawled vocals, followed by the total clarity and bitterness of Andre 3000’s verse regarding the crack epidemic and the increased gravity it gained in the public view as it spread gradually from primarily black and Hispanic communities to higher class white areas. The nature and structure of rap music is uniquely amenable to this asymmetrical, highly personal and diverse approach to expression within a single song, each verse potentially evoking the immediate yet idiosyncratic quality of a scrawled journal entry detailing the writer’s current mind state, fixation or concern. In a recent interview with Rick Rubin, Andre 3000 discussed his long-time struggles with anxiety and hypersensitivity – struggles which are very relatable to me, and I believe it is these qualities among others that make him such a valued rapper and lyricist, both to me and many others, for his thoughtful, insightful and probing lyrics; often delivered with a weary and resigned tone that reflects the mental exhaustion of living with an over-ruminative brain.

De La Soul – Buhloone Mindstate (1993)

De La Soul’s final album with Prince Paul shows an absolutely refined and sophisticated approach to sample-based rap music, released in the last days before large shifts in the compositional make up of rap music were to occur – changes that stressed heavy chopping and manipulation of samples, often resulting in a stilted and laboured sound, over the previously more common layered, loop-based production methodology that this album excels in. I remember finding a website on my old, slow computer for which the sound card was broken, containing the music video for the album highlight “Breakadawn”, the resolution low enough to play without buffering, syncing the video with the song on my CD player, excited to get to see and experience it. The video recalled for me my time walking among the rocks at Gyro Park with my mom in Trail, BC, age 12, with my headphones on listening to music. At this time, I felt De La Soul were people I could look up to and relate to on various levels as a rap fan increasingly aware of my outsider status as a bullied child at school. I admired their intelligence, cleverness, incisiveness; seemingly confidently and naturally out of step with what was then rap’s status quo, a status quo with which they would gradually feel motivated to conform following this album, much to my disappointment. “I Am I Be”, the incredibly beautiful piano-based backing track for which is poignantly foreshadowed earlier in the album, is absolutely one of my favourite songs of all time; the lyrics, written by rapper Posdnuos, express a poignant and singular mix of resignation, disillusionment, bitterness, empathy, and inner strength and morality despite the limitations of one’s upbringing and social situation. The song has a rare quality of someone in a very emotional and fragile place, letting out all of their current varied feelings, albeit still containing to some extent the group’s then-typical level of lyrical obfuscation. The album – short compared to the groups previous two albums – has an intriguing unevenness to it that I believe adds to my love of it, and seems further indicative of the group’s maturity; newly confident in their ability to whittle their expression down to what they found most important.

Buck 65 – Language Arts (1996)

Following a number of releases that felt distinctly behind the times, this album - Richard Terfry’s first under the Buck 65 alias - represents the coalescence of an absolutely bizarre, personal, and idiosyncratic take on rap music, a strange mutation of the particular ethics of 80s and early 90s hip-hop that Buck 65 at this point still felt deeply in thrall to, adulterated by his then more recent interests in experimental music, film and art – seeming to me an absolutely logical further step from hip-hop’s own very experimental, often dissonant aesthetics, and mirroring my own developing engrossments beyond rap music that started to bud around the same time I first heard this. I remember distinctly being 12 and starting to get into this music; listening to a CD I had burned at a friend’s house containing songs by Buck 65 and various other artists and feeling both fascinated yet unnerved by an eerie and sinister quality I perceived in the music - wondering to myself what I was getting myself into by listening to it, looking online at the strange gasmask-themed album covers for Buck 65’s early albums painted by Nick Reka – a moment stamped in time of the early heightened moments of engagement with art one can have before ones’ perceptions of said art become normalized by familiarity and knowledge of its greater context. The lyrics are consistently interesting and varied; verses sometimes ending sooner than expected with a peculiar line or couplet, and I’ve always loved how at the end of some songs one gets to hear an extended version of a previously looped and cropped sample, finally playing itself out fully before the next segment or song begins. The albums structure, fashioned after the nonstop spaceless barrage of DJ mixtapes, is like little else I have ever heard, creating a beautiful, mysterious, and otherworldly quality through the varied samples taken from different obscure sources, often jazz and musique concrete records; it’s a sound and atmosphere that I am greatly inspired by. I can remember burning this album to CD and having a lot of fun home alone, freestyling and running around to the instrumental “Diesel Treatment” that ends the cassette version of this album, lost in the possibilities of music that I was newly able to express, having just gotten a new computer on which I could use audio-editing equipment to produce beats, delving into anything I could about Buck 65 – though it can become harder to recognize when something has become so fundamentally and mundanely a part of you, this album’s influence on me has been absolutely immense.

Fog – Ether Teeth (2003)

An extremely pivotal album in opening my eyes up to the greater world of music beyond hip-hop at the age of 13, accessible to me due to Andrew Broder’s history as a turntablist and his association with the experimental rap collective anticon. This album singlehandedly showed me the value of learning and becoming proficient at an instrument at a time where I mostly felt in adherence to a reactionary anti-musicianship point of view due to bitterness over the lack of respect many had for rap music. His compositional sense resonated with me very strongly, recalling for me the hypersentimental and bittersweet melodic sense of late 90s country radio that I grew up hearing in my early childhood, and I gradually came to learn to play many of the songs on this album. To me, the emotional complexity of his chord changes are of a piece with his particular fractured sense of arrangements - a unified aesthetic - and the lyrics articulate a particular sense of humour often based in obsessive ruminations on the mundane and banal; an interest in amusing content-free blather he would gradually refine over his career.

Hothouse Flowers – Songs From The Rain (1993)

There is a photograph of me as a baby, about two years after this album's release, with me on the floor beside this album’s jewel case – despite this, I do not recall hearing it until perhaps about age 10 when my mom rediscovered it, and I associate it strongly with evenings at our apartment, the album playing on a stereo in our kitchen, perhaps lit only atmospherically by a candle or two on the table. Though my personal interest in music at the time was limited to rap and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, I was struck immediately by two songs on this album; the haunting lap steel-led “An Emotional Time” and the saxophone and bass-propelled “Isn’t it Amazing” – these two songs in particular are incredibly special and evocative to me of that time, the emotional character of the two respective songs articulating a particular melancholy and intensity that I have always loved in music. As the years have gone by I have come to appreciate greatly the entire album and its ebullient vibrancy and positivity, which for me echoes the feelings I had reading Herman Hesse’s short story collection Strange News From Another Star as a child, spellbound by the fantastical stories within, summoning for me images of spirited festivals in town squares. My love of this album for me represents partly my maturation as a person; no longer as bogged down in negativity and unhappiness as when I was younger, and therefore no longer desiring the reflection of such emotions and feelings in music; rather, increasingly I want to live my life in reflection of the strength and resiliency I hear in this album.