Ten albums I admit I bought ...

... and my rational attempts to explain why!!

Many times, I have reached into the barrell that is rock'n'roll, and pulled out a royal turd. These are ten of the most turdish.
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10. Let's Get It Started - MC Hammer

Everybody bought Hammer Don't Hurt 'em: the summer of 1990, you couldn't go ten minutes worth out hearing "U Can't Touch This.".

It took a true dork to go searching for Hammer's back catalog. Yes, this is MC Hammer's debut album, purchased mid-stream in my rap phase that began with the Beastise Boys Paul's Boutique album and ended some time after finally wearing out House of Pain's "Jump Around".

I remember nothing about Let's Get It Started - only that I sold it to a used record shop in 1993.

I'm not sure how it lasted 3 years.

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9. Gonna Make You Sweat - C & C Music Factory

I signed up for the Columbia Tape & Record club in 1991. Admid Bat out of Hell and No More Tears, I ordered this dance floor favorite, purchased so that I could match Jason Baker move for move on "Things that Make You Go Hmmm ..."

Yes, I rap danced. (Basically the "Running Man".) For those who went to Watts On Main in Moose Jaw in 1991, I could be seen on the dance floor with Baker and Toby Torkelson (his real name) competitively "danicng". (Along with whatever girl I could desperately enough convience to witness said debacle.)

I think this is why I didn't date much for two years.

In order to keep up on my "moves", I practised while working weekends at the YWCA. Hiding down in the basement, underneath the swimming pool, I developed my foot work to C.C. Peniston's "Finally".

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8. Don't Be Cruel - Bobby Brown

This was no accident. Grade 11, I purchased this tape a second time weeks after breaking the first one in my questionable ghettoblaster.

Ironically, the first tape lasted about as long the girlfriend it was bought to impress.

After Dana Roney broke up with me, I got drunk for the first time. (Two hours later, I got sick from being drunk for the first time.)

Bobby Brown's ranting rap during the title track somewhat encapsulated my female frustrations: Hey yo' Kimmy - what's up with this attitude? I thought I was bein' real good to you. I treat you sweet, take you out at night- but you never say thanks girl, that ain't right! I bought you diamonds, even gave you pearls. I took you for a cruise all around the world. I treat you high post, but you play me close. If I want to drink up, you won't even toast!!

I guess I wanted to drink up ... and Dana Roney wouldn't even toast! (After "drinking up", "cleaning up" the reminents of the microwave pizza I had eaten was a whole 'nother story.)

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7. The Dune Soundtrack - Toto

Sometimes ... you're still a kid. This was one of my first tapes, bought around the time I had Girls With Guns by Tommy Shaw and the full Duran Duran discography.

I thought Dune would be the next Star Wars. I remember acting out the Sting/Kyle MacLachlan knife-fight scene in my bedroom. "I will bend like a reed in the wind.".

Looking back now, I'm shocked at just frickin' creepy the movie was.

Particularily the fat, gay, boil-ridden Baron Harkonnen. The soundtrack's only highlight included the Baron's freaky dialogue: "The Duke ... will die before these eyes. And they'll know ... they'll know ..that it is I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who encompasses his doom! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!".

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6. *Music for the People - Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch

"Vibrations good like Sunkist ... made wanna know who done this?!"

Nuff said.

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5. Ceral Killer - Green Jelly

I had no excuse. I was an adult.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNYi6W3v0io

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4. Pickin' on Nashville - The Kentucky Headhunters

Country? I have no bloody clue why I chose this particular album. The forsenic musicologist in me theorizes I must have thought they sounded like .38 Special. Or maybe it had something to do with a purchase at the time of the Allman Brothers greatest hits.

Oh yeah, and because I had recently bought my own pair of cowboy boots! I think a picked a pair that made me look like a hooker.

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3. Anti-Christ Superstar - Marilyn Mason

"The Beautiful People" was catchy. Not catchy in a "Jessie's Girl" kind of way. More like a heavy metal Gary Glitter playing with the Vienna Boys Choir at the Nuremberg Rally. (Gary Glitter, the phrase "playing with", and the Vienna Boys Choir all together in one sentence?)

Over ten years later, I swear I hear the melody of George Thoroghgood's "One Burboun, One Scotch and One Beer" buried somewhere in the mix!

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2. No More Games (The Remix Album) - New Kids on the Block

There's a phrase - I don't think it's biblical - that basically says Be careful of laying down with swine, because you don't know you'll pick up.

Not that I'm suggesting that she was pig-like in any way, but when I methaphorically (not sexually) laid down with Robin Kirkness, my Grade 12 & post-high school girlfriend - I picked up something far nastier than anything you could imagine: I started to tolerate the New Kids on the Block.

Secretly, I purchased the controversial No More Games after watching a concert film Robyn had. I kept it hidden in my tape collection like it was a stack of expesnive and shameful German pornography.

The remix versions of their hits added something I've never heard before, and their step-by-step program to love and courtship was particularily inspiring.
Step one: We can have lots of fun.
Step two: There so much we can do.
Step three: It's just you and me
Step four: I can give you more.
Step five: Don't you know the time has arrived.

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1. C.M.B - Color Me Badd

"All 4 Love" was gay but catchy. "I Wanna Sex You Up" was just plain gay. So how was I got dead with this tape? Was I gay*?

(*Asterisk alert - my defintion of the word "gay" has nothing to do with sexual orientation. "Gay" to be means "lame". If you are homosexual, I will refer to you as a homosexual. However, if you are lame - you are gay!)

No, I bought this "gay" music to fit in with the guys. Not that they were homosexual guys. At least, I don't think they were homosexual. Not that I would have cared.

These guys were in my Business Admin classes. Jockular guys who considered music like Color Me Badd as "chick-getting-music". Kevin Calladine, Jason Watson, Jason Schiedner and a fellow who I can only know remember as "Goots" - were my friends for the first year and a half of business adminstration classes at SIAST Palliser campus in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

"Chick-getting" music was important - you went to the bars and you tried to get the girls to dance with you on the fast songs .

My skinny ass failed miserably.

I remember reaching my limit about the time that Nirvana started to hit its' peak. The rest of the guys thought Nirvana was "gay": literally homosexual music made by homosexual men made for other homsexual men. They wondered how you could get chicks with all that howling and ugly guitars. You couldn't dance to this, could you? That's what music was for!

I took a look at the cassettes on Kevin's wall - filled with artists like Dino, Expose, Alanis (three years before Jagged Little Pill), Snap, Paula Abdul and Technotronic - and decided we had different opnions on the sexual orientation of our music collections.

It was then that I decided I was only going to be happy if I was myself. No more rap dancing. No more Color Me Badd or Mr. Lee's "Get Busy". No more trying to be the failed ladies man that I was. Back came the Cheap Trick and the Kiss and the Alice Cooper and the comedy.

And soon enough, no more business administration.

I always look back on this time period as my mid-life mid-life crisis. The music I chose was just like the fifty year old man getting a hair piece and a fancy sports car. I was no dancer and certainly no stud.

I laugh when I hear these songs again. (I love YouTube!) They remind me of me back then - plastic, fake, and ridiculous - and funny as hell!