Distant, Disengaged, and Detached Parents

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“You’re coddling the child!” Adrienne said. The child, in question, was her grandchild, so she has a vested interest in the manner in which we raise him. She was so angry though. We could see it in her face, the way her teeth set in a grimace, and the eyes that almost penetrated us. She was calling us out and basically warning us to change our ways before it’s too late.

Some parents who overdo it. We see it, and it sickens us in ways that mirror Adrienne’s, but why does it sicken Adrienne so much that she’s taken a confrontational stance when we tend to our child’s injuries after an accident? 

Were we overreacting, as she says? I don’t know. She seemed pretty convinced that we were, and when I disagreed with her, in the most polite and respectful way, she became visibly agitated. She took it personal. Her teeth gritted. We know when they’re not truly hurt. We know when they’re crying out for attention, and some of the times, their parents give them what they want. Some of the times, we give what we know to be unwarranted attention to them. Is that a bad thing? She acts as if it’s a violation of nature. There are other accidents. We know those too. Those that call for a special kind of TLC that only a mother can provide. She berated us on those occasions too. “It’s just not good for the kid,” she says. “He’ll never learn if you don’t teach him how to deal with it himself. You know what the kid’s doing, and yet, you still go so far overboard. You’re coddling the boy.”  

There are extremes in both situations. We know it’s vital for their growth that our child learns to be self-sufficient, and we employ tough love on a case-by-case basis, but how often are we supposed to reinforce these measures? We know we shouldn’t cater to his every need and whim and that it’s not healthy for the kid when we do, but it disgusted Adrienne so much when she witnessed us console him that she couldn’t hide it. Why does it sicken her so much, and why is it so important to her that we do nothing when our child gets hurt?   

Most childhood accidents are benign, but some of the times those relatively harmless incidents shock and scare kids. Proponents of tough love measures, such as Adrienne, don’t see that in the moment. Perhaps, the kids fear that they’re hurt more than they really are. They’re kids. They don’t know any better. She doesn’t see that either. She just sees a kid blubbering and a parent smothering. She thinks that if we employ tough love often he will learn what he doesn’t know any better. She thinks we need to let him cry it out of his system, and she suggests that we “Rub some dirt on it. It will better for him in the long run.” There are arguments to on both sides, but if we’re to follow her advice how far do we take it?

“My parents employed tough love when we were injured,” Adrienne says, “and look how we turned out. I just think most parents coddle kids too much in the modern era. No one sprinted to our rescue, when we were kids, and we turned out just fine, and so did our kids and their kids.”

Adrienne has far more experience in parenting than we do, so our natural inclination is to cede to her knowledge on this matter, but who is Adrienne? Who informed her ideas on parenting. She would be the first to admit that her parents didn’t know how to love. “They were dirt poor, and they probably had too many kids, but they loved us the best way they knew how,” she said. When she went out on her own, she made the mistake of marrying a man she now admits was a person who “didn’t know the first thing about love”. She was young, too young to know any better. Adrienne probably married a man who reminded her of a father “who didn’t know how to love”. We all make mistakes when we’re young and we could chalk her first marriage up as mistake of youth, but how did it affect the kids she had with the man? Her first daughter entered into a loveless marriage, but she was young and she made the same mistake Adrienne did. Why did she make that same mistake? Was it a cyclical mistake? Now that we’ve met most of Adrienne’s children and grandchildren, we know that they’re all good people. They appear, at first glance, to be the type of children and grandchildren we all want. Everyone from the matriarch of the family, Adrienne, to the youngest grandchild, appear to be nice and well mannered. It’s obvious that she taught her kids how to raise their kids to be pleasant and respectful people, but if we spend time getting to know them, we notice that they all have a certain detached quality about them. They’re all successful in their own right, and they know how to be on their own, which is a quality all parents should strive for in their children, but they’re not exactly warm, inviting people. They’re reserved, detached, and they don’t accept outsiders well.

Tough love is such a vague term. We can employ it on a case-by-case basis, but we can overdo it. We can do it so often that we accidentally slip into some realm of ambivalence to our kids’ injuries, and we can do that so often that we could slip into some level of emotional detachment? Is it possible that such progressions could serve to harm the child’s adult relationships, later in life? If we fail to react to his small accidents and accidentally begin to ignore his larger accidents too, our children will be disappointed. They’ll adapt and all that, and they might develop some tough skin, but they could also develop some problems with attachments and love as an adult? Our initial instinct is to laugh that off as a dramatic example, but the human being is so complex and varied that there is no one-size-fits-all guide to parenting. Could our child develop such a thick skin that he develops personality disorders that lead to unusual levels of selfishness? When a child doesn’t receive the kind of attention from their parents that they need, some adjust and adapt to it wonderfully, and they become more independent and everything the tough love proponents profess, but others seek refuge in the form of substance abuse to mask that pain. We can say that Adrienne’s generation was tougher that we are, but how many of them became alcoholics to swallow the pain they could never communicate properly?

“No matter what you do, you’re going to mess up as a parent, we all do, and the kid will have to deal with the ramifications of your mistakes, but they’ll probably be in the same exact place, at around age 35, whether you were the best parent who ever existed or the worst. The trick is to prepare them for the years between 18 and 35, and the best way to do that is with tough love.”    

Those of us who had parents who intended to employ touch love measures and probably took it too far now find it difficult to watch those movies, or TV shows, that depict parents who don’t care about their kids. With the full power of honest reflection, those of us with an adult, rational mind know that our parents cared about us, but something about the depiction of emotionally detached parents still affects us so much that we can’t watch. The art of comedy involves breaking taboos, and at this point, there aren’t many left to exploit, so the exaggerated jokes about parents not caring about their kids is one of the few left. This situational story line is not new though, as there were shows, movies, and various other productions in the 70’s that depicted narcissist parents who wouldn’t make time for their kids. The kids were the main characters of these productions, as the parents floated in and out of their lives, and the thrust of these pieces involved how children learn to adapt. The children in these pieces would say heartwarming things like, “Our mother was a wandering soul who couldn’t stay in one place for long. We knew her, and we knew she loved us in her own way, but we had to learn how to love her [on her terms].” I add the latter, because I view these parents as selfish narcissists, though the productions never craft the message this way. They paint the mother as a strong, independent woman who considered the term mother too stifling. We were too young at the time to ask the question, “Why did she have them then?” but that question wasn’t too far away. Most of these concepts were too complex for us, but the portrait they painted in these productions left us with a pit in our stomach, and we often just changed the channel. We didn’t know the details regarding why we considered this such a  model painfully flawed, but our exaggerated reaction to it should’ve told us more than we wanted to know about our situation.

Our exaggerated reactions to our parents’ emotionally detached ideas on child rearing might also result in our exaggerated reactions to our child’s accidents. Those of us who cater to our children too much might be trying to rectify the problems of our past, and we might be trying to break the loveless cycle.

Kids learn the nature of their world at a very young age, and the imprint their parents provide often shapes their worldview in an almost irreversible manner. They have a wonderful ability to adapt to the changes that occur in the home, but that imprint often remains. They also gravitate to the notions people have regarding their characteristics. If they’re pretty when they’re young, for example, they gravitate to that notion. Similarly, if they’re funny, smart, strong, athletic, etc. they develop a passion for the pursuits that call for those attributes. In this sense, we could say that passion is almost exclusive to the young for they don’t know better than to invest emotions in something otherwise consider unattainable by more experienced adults. The pain involved in learning limitations is also the province of the young, for nothing hurts worse than discovering limitations for the first time. “You’re pretty,” the guardians at the gate say, “but you’re not that pretty.”

We all learn our limitations, at some point, and we adjust. We learn our limitations when that employer says we’re not smart enough, when our peers say we’re not as funny as we thought, or when a woman says we’re not so handsome that they will date us. We might adapt and adjust by choosing a different pursuit, or a different profession, but we never have the same amount of passion for our adjusted pursuit as we do the dream we pursued in youth when we fantasized about what we might become. On that note, we could say that when a child cries out for attention, as opposed to pain, they are passionately seeking the extent of their parents’ unconditional love, and if the parents fail to respond, the children will adapt, but they might never pursue love again with the same passion. That might prepare them for the ways of the world, but it will also leave an almost irreversible imprint.

In debates such as these, we often reach an impasse. One of the two parties might say, “Can we agree to disagree on this matter?” Proponents of tough love might even say yes, at first, and they might try to move on, but they can’t drop it. It sickens them too much to see parents climb all over themselves to react to a child’s obvious cries for attention to remain silent in the face of it. They cannot hide it, and they keep coming back to it. My rhetorical question why was Adrienne so angry about this? Did her dismissive parents leave such an imprint on her that she’s almost jealous when she sees a child receive so much attention that she finds it sickening? She truly believes there is a right way to raise a child and a wrong one, but is there something much deeper, something in the pit of her stomach that resents her parents for not loving her as much as she needed, and when she sees an example of the opposite, it “just sickens” her. 

“Why does it make me so angry?” I asked when I witnessed a mother smother a crying child with affection in a mall. I was so convinced that people like my dad, Adrienne, and other proponents of tough love were so right that I never never fully explored the question why do I get so angry when I see someone violating their tenets of good parenting. They taught me to consider the ‘smothering’ reactions to benign accidents a violation of those tenets. I didn’t just consider it a violation, I considered it such a violation that I thought of saying something. Some people intercede when they witness a parent correcting a child in a manner they deem too harsh, but I was planning on saying something to a parent who was lovingly cooing her child. After I finished ridiculing myself, it dawned on me that I’ve never fully explored why seeing egregious violations of my dad and Adrienne’s code made me so angry before. The answer to that question is that some of the times these impulsive reactions are so impossibly complex that we don’t even bother searching for them. It’s just kind of who we, and how we’ve been raised, but I would never see what I considered the harmful results of his mother’s actions. Why did I care so much? As I always do when I search through all of the impossible-to-navigate complexities, I consider Occam’s razor: some of the times the answer is so simple that it gets lost in our search for complexities. The answer to why we get so angry over something so trivial that we’re all but baring teeth also reveals deep-seated begrudged feelings and psychological underpinnings. The simple answer might also have something to do with the idea that when we were kids, and we had our minor accidents, no one ran to our aid. They were employing tough love, we say and know, but did they do that too often? Did they, in fact, go overboard in the opposite direction? While we concede that we might’ve been drama queens, and who isn’t when we’re young, it hurt our feelings when they left us alone to cry in the middle of the park. The final answer I arrived at is that I, like Adrienne, became so angry because we craved so much when we were young that when we see a kid get that over-the-top attention, we’re jealous on some deep level most of us will never acknowledge or see.   

The Complex Art of Lying

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Are you an unusually good liar? Can you deceive people without much effort? As with anything else, we all know that effectively misleading people requires practice and trial and error, but if you believe a study by Theodor Schaarchmidt, summarized in Scientific American, not only does lying require peak cognitive function, it also involves cognitive peaks and valleys similar to those in our physical abilities.

“Lying is among the most sophisticated accomplishments of the human mind, and the complexities involved often require peak capacity of the mind.

“Young adults between 18 and 29 do it best,” Schaarchmidt found, “and after about the age of 45, we begin to lose this ability.”

Our physical peak is relative, of course, but even elite athletes who work out for hours a day, every day, will admit that their physical peak occurred somewhere around 25th birthday. Those who extend their professional careers, learn how to compensate for the fact that their ability isn’t what it once was, but most of us recognize a relative physical decline as we age. Those of us who aren’t as reliant on physical ability as a professional athlete, might not recognize our decline, or how we’ve compensated for it. If one of our eyes loses some functionality, for example, we learn how to compensate for it so well that we might not notice it for years? Does the same apply to our mind when it comes to the ability to lie? 

We’ve all witnessed seven-year-olds try to lie, and their tells are often so obvious when they do that they’re hilarious. They need to learn how to do it, and that knowledge only comes with experience.

When elderly people display the fact that they’ve lost some of the complex functions required to lie, we might make the mistake of believing they’ve voluntarily disregarded the filters we all maintain for polite conversations. “They’ve been on this earth 85 years, and they don’t care what anyone thinks anymore,” we say. “They’re done with trying to spare our feelings with the little white lies we all tell ourselves.” We think it’s funny and intriguing to see this live, but studies cited by Schaarchmidt suggest that there might be a U-shaped curve to truth telling, or an (‘n’) shaped curve to lying, and it’s all based on the complex functions of the brain that operate in some of the same peaks and valleys of our physical abilities.

It seems so odd to suggest that lying requires advanced cognitive function. Lying seems as easy as telling the truth, as it all comes down to a simple, snap choice. If we ask them, “Did you steal my copy of Journey’s Escape?” that’s a simple yes or no, regardless the truth. How about, “Do you think your nephew Mike has a bright future ahead of him?” That question requires careful consideration, as it’s entirely possible that Mike can turn it all around, regardless how it appears right now. Not only that, but most of us know that our answer will likely get back to Mike and harm future family relations. Our aunt obviously didn’t consider any of that when she said, “No, he’s a lazy, ambition-less, privileged piece of junk.” Wow, where did that come from?

How does advanced cognitive function affect our ability to lie? The Scientific American piece cites an illustrative story involving a man Theodor Schaarchmidt nicknamed Mr. Pinocchio. Mr. Pinocchio was a 51-year-old who “was a high-ranking official in the European Economic Community (since replaced by the European Union), and his negotiating partners could tell immediately when he was bending the truth [lying]. His condition, a symptom of a rare form of epilepsy, was not only dangerous it was bad for his career.” The article states that doctors found that a walnut-sized tumor that caused seizures whenever he told a lie. “Once the tumor was removed, the fits stopped, and he was able to resume his duties [his lying]. The doctors, who described the case in 1993, dubbed the condition the “Pinocchio syndrome”.”

Some, like Mr. Pinocchio, lie to serve an agenda, some tell white lies to be nice, and some BS to make others think they’re more successful, more adventurous, and happier. If we catch them in a lie, we’re likely to hear something along the lines of, “Everybody does it,” or “if you say you don’t do it, you’re lying.” Those lines are effective, because there is some truth to them. We all tell harmless white lies occasionally. We fabricate, and some of our lies require more creativity that truth telling does. Yet, we all know the difference between stretching the truth and lying, and we fear that greater acceptance of small, white lies can affect our relationships with these people, our society, or our culture. The latter might seem exaggerated hyperbole, but we fear that the society and culture cannot operate properly without some demand for some level of consistent honesty from our fellow man. We can’t help but think that such lines also give liars license to continue to lie without guilt.

***

“A lie is not a lie if you believe it,” the writers from Seinfeld wrote for the patron saint of all untruthers, George Costanza. The implication in this line is that the art of deception requires some effort on the part of the liar to convince himself of a falsehood if he wants to convince another party effectively. That line, right there, summarizes the theme of this article better than any of Theodor Schaarchmidt’s scientific studies, because convincing yourself of a lie you’re going to tell others obviously requires advanced cognitive abilities. How are you going to introduce your lie, how are you going to sell it, and what face are you going to wear to sell it? Liars also know that the art of deception lies somewhere between effectively selling it and avoiding the dreaded over-sell. They know we can see someone over-sell a lie, and they know we can see it. So, they might study their own delivery, in the manner an effective Major League Pitcher does to keep the batter off balance by making the delivery of their fastball appear exactly like the delivery of their curveball. The difference between the two, if you can spot it, for both the pitcher and the liar, is often called: “A tell.” A tell, often used in poker parlance, is the subconscious physical actions we make when we are trying to deceive. The final stage for the liar to execute, and that which most without peak cognitive function might fail, is the backdrop. When we create a new base, based on a lie, it forces us to create Shakespeare’s tangled web, and that, needless to say, requires even greater cognitive abilities. 

Schaarchmidt’s piece suggests that if the liar is between 18 and 29, they might not have to put forth as much effort, as the lie will flow more fluently, if there is no damage to the area of the brain required for the convincing lie.

Who’s lying, and why are they lying? How about we take the Costanza lie one step further and suggest that the liar believes what he’s saying with every fiber of their being. Is it still a lie? The separation of the two is, of course, that the liar doesn’t have to convince himself of the lie. He believes it. Even if it was technically a lie and we can prove its lack of merit beyond a reasonable doubt, it would be difficult to prosecute or persecute them in just about every court in the land, including the court of public opinion.

Perhaps, the liar is guilty of the “blind spot” lie. Blind spot lies are often momentary blotches on the liar’s otherwise stellar record of honesty. Blind spot lies are born in the bath water of the loathing they have for their adversaries. They loathe them so much that their competitive spirit gets the best of them. They cannot see the hole until they fall into it, and some of them cannot see even see it then, but their followers wonder if he hates his opponent so much that he can no longer see the truth with regard to their opponent. If he can see it for what it is, the blind spot lie often permits its purveyor to lie without compunction if it serves his goal to do so.  

Regardless, he can no longer view simple disagreements with his opponents on how to resolve pressing matters in an objective manner. He can no longer see an honest disagreement as a simple case of differing values. We don’t know if he has a personal grudge or a professional one, but it’s obvious to everyone but him that his is an emotional pursuit as opposed to a rational one. He is convinced that nefarious influences affect his opponent’s agenda. He views his opponents’ motives as impure. He views his opponents as uninformed, incompetent, selfish, and divisive. He does not view any of his opponents’ mistakes as genuine, of if he does, he capitalizes on them and characterizes them as intentional. He does not think that his opponents are prone to human failure, or if they are, he seeks to characterize them as some sort of institutional failing on their part. In his quest to seek motive, he incidentally accuses them of matters for which he has the most guilt. If he accuses his opponent of thievery, in other words, chances are he knows the thief’s mentality™ better than his opponents. Whatever form of deception lines his accusation, pay careful attention to the particulars of his charge for it might say more about him than it does his opponent. We call this psychological projection.

This blind spot is most disheartening to the liar’s believers, for they believed in him, and they might feel disillusioned and disappointed by his actions … if they find out the truth one day. If the blindspot liar is good at what he does, and he’s unusually charismatic, the chances are his followers will never want to see how he seduces, dominates, and exploits them for his gain. We enjoy it when “our guy” calls their guys names, and we might even repeat those names and those lies, until we arrive at the Svengali-effect, which is defined as “a person who manipulates or exerts excessive control over another.” As we all know, only “their guys” do this. Our guy never would. 

When “our guy” does it, We might enjoy the name-calling, and we might even believe it, but on some other level, we thought “our guy” was above such street games. We thought he was an intellectual, and that no other intellectual would dare seek battle with him. When we witnessed others challenge him, it shocked us to see him use his power to shut his opponents down to shut them up. He then called upon others to help him shut down dissenting voices, and it shocked those of us who thought he was a fellow dissenting voice. We didn’t think he would stoop to the other guys’ tactics of corruption, lies, and the ‘whatever it takes’ mentality to bring his foes down, but we found some of his actions troublesome. Some blind spot liars knowingly engage in wanton deception, but others have such an emotional blind spot of hatred that they can’t see it for what it is. Most of the times, it is difficult to see the difference, as we can’t know what’s in a man’s heart.

We all know that “the other guys” lie, and we all know an idiot who falls for it, but aren’t the lies our beloved guys tell more destructive? Some of us don’t see it, and others won’t see it no matter how often others show us. They’re our brothers, sisters, peers, friends, co-workers, and politicians. They are “our guys”, and we know them well enough to know that they wouldn’t lie to us, so we repeat what they say, and we learn to live the lie, because we know the other guys are lying to us. 

Some famous writers suggest that it’s preposterous to suggest that even the most fair-minded among us are objective, as we don’t have the capacity for it. Our opinions, regarding the other side, are so emotional that they colorize how we view their lies. Our emotions, on the matter, blind us to facts, thus the term blind spot. The term blind spot and blind hatred are different, of course, but they intertwine when the former provokes the latter to view the other side as the most dastardly demons who are incapable of truth, and we write pieces like this with a certain person in mind, but we run the risk of having a reader read this piece with one of “our guys” in mind.   

We choose sides. In the never ending quest to determine who is being deceptive or virtuous, we believe our guys. Regardless how many white lies, and egregious deceptions our guys engage in we have reasons to believe them, whether they’re the Hatfields, the McCoys, the New England Patriots, or the Democrats, we choose to believe our guys over the other guys. Our side is right, and the other side contains villainous liars and corrupt cheats who are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. The other guys don’t care about us. We can guess that disinterested parties chose sides during the infamous Hatfields vs. McCoys feud, and they proceeded to follow the newspaper stories from a specific angle. They probably developed loyalties that led to their own blind spots on the matter. Even though most of them never met a Hatfield or a McCoy, or ever saw one speak, we can guess that their interest in the story spawned certain loyalties on the matter that let them to believe “their guys” were incapable of having blind spots, lying, or any form of corruption bent on destroying the other side. We still have matters that divide us in seemingly trivial ways, as observers around the nation were intrigued, and divided, by an episode in history. We might never know the truth of the matter and in some ways, we don’t care. These episodes rarely affect us directly, so no one really suffers, until it dawns on us that everyone does when it becomes apparent that by picking sides we forego a quest for truth.

The Organically Weird, Strange, and Just Plain Special Music I Enjoy

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This is not a complete list of my favorite albums of all time. To make that list, I would have to include popular, mainstream albums. Saying that I enjoy popular, mainstream albums might get me kicked out of some clubs, but I do like some of them. I just find it less interesting, and redundant, to write about them. This is a piece about some relatively obscure albums that I love so much that those who care about me ask me not to play in front of friends they hope to impress. I write the term relatively obscure because some on the list are certified platinum, and some might consider it odd to list any platinum selling album obscure. Others might see some of the albums listed here and say they are not obscure by any stretch of the imagination. My excuse for listing them is that age has led some of these albums to the dustbin of history, and experience has informed me that a wide variety of people have never heard of albums that I consider the greatest of all time. 

I’ve read seasoned musicians I respect list their favorite albums, and most of those albums are truly obscure. I’ve tried to listen to some of those albums, but I’m nothing more than a fan of music. I don’t appreciate music on the granular level that most seasoned musicians do. That having been said, I am a music aficionado, whose music appreciation is not that of a player or a critic, but greater than the casual fan who only appreciates the surface level of music that spent time on the Billboard’s top 100 or repeated on classic rock radio ad nausea. By the end of this, the reader might consider the albums selected purposely obscure. If I am purposely obscure, or I seek some level of contrived weirdness in my music, I have been doing so for thirty years, and I can now tell the difference between those artists who attempt to achieve something different in a less organic manner and those who just plain weird, strange, and special. Many have used those adjectives to describe me, at various times in my life, and if I do hit any of those marks (others consider me so normal I’m boring), all I can tell you is I’ve learned to embrace them in my life, and in the music I enjoy.

8) Captain Beefheart—Trout Mask Replica—This is the strangest album on this list, and one music magazine rated it the second strangest albums ever made (behind Todd Rungren’s A Wizard/A True Star). We don’t know what went on in the mind of Van Vliet, when he created this Joycean mess, that some call “anti-music in the most interesting and insane way.” The most listenable track, and that’s compared to the others on this album, might be Ella Guru. Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of fifteen: “I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard”.

If Trout Mask Replica is one of the strangest albums ever created, Pena might be the strangest, most inaccessible song ever made. It’s so discordant, we might want to reconsider whether to classify it music. It is, but it stretches the boundary that much. If you convince a friend to listen to this album, prepare for the backlash, as they might consider it a mean practical joke. If you listen to this song, do not do so at high volume, for you will run across the room to shut it off. It might be one of the least melodic songs ever made from the least melodic album ever created. Friends don’t understand why I love this album, and to tell you the truth I can’t explain it, but it’s not weird for the sake of being weird. It has its own inexplicable mathematical appeal that very, very few will appreciate.  

If you brave all of these disclaimers and decide to listen to this album, and you find yourself getting “fast and bulbous” after repeated spins, you might want to reconsider recommending it to friends. Be prepared for some of them to hate this music with such feverish intensity that they hold it against you personally for recommending it to them.

7) PJ Harvey—To Bring you My Love—This is PJ’s strongest album to date. The two albums she made prior to this one were incredible, but To Bring you My Love made those two albums look like building blocks to this one. Her albums following To Bring you My Love run the gamut from relatively boring to fantastic, but To Bring you My Love was without question her peak. One album of note following TBYML is White Chalk. It’s the most powerful quiet album you might hear. The standout tracks on To Bring you My Love are: Meet Ze Monster, Down by the Water.

6) Mr. Bungle – Disco Volante— If Trout Mask Replica is the second weirdest album ever made, and I don’t think it is. I think it’s number one, I don’t think A Wizard/A True Star compares in the category of strange, but I don’t enjoy it as much as the others on this list. If Trout Mask Replica is number two, then music critics and writers should consider Disco Volante third on this list. This is an album of songs, as opposed to an effort with a cohesive theme. Each song is so different that they probably don’t belong on the same album. The only song that is less than brilliant is Everyone I Went to High School is Dead. I am not a track skipper, but I skip this song every time. The most brilliant song on this album occurs at the 4:42 mark on Carry Stress in the Jaw. Some listings, list it as [The Secret Song]. My advice, if you choose to accept it, is listen to this album from start to finish. Then separate individual tracks out in playlists, or what have you, to appreciate each song in its own right, until you obsess over them and you know every beat so well that you might be able to play them yourself (I say as an individual who hasn’t picked up an instrument in decades, and even then I couldn’t play them).

The strange element of Disco Volante defines strange people. Listeners who have a strong foundation of normalcy can listen to this album unscathed, but if you have any fear that you might be abnormal, be forewarned that if it gets around that you enjoy Disco Volante, your friends and family will consider you strange. That sounds like a joke, but I’ve witnessed it. Those who are totally normal will not enjoy this album, because it’s so weird, strange, and just plain different from any album of music I’ve ever heard. I know that goes against everything I wrote in the previous paragraph, but I think it’s that weird. Disco Volante is only for weird, strange, and just plain different listeners who are confident that they can survive all of the recriminations that will follow saying that you like this album.

[Writer’s Note:] When I went in search of this album, as a completist who needed to own everything attached to the names Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn, and Trey Spruance, I walked into a Music Land at a mall one day (yes, I’m that old), and I asked the employee if he had an album called Disco Volante. He stared at me silently. A small somewhat bemused smile began to curl at the corner of his lips. “It’s by a group called Mr. Bungle,” I said in the weird, somewhat uncomfortable space that followed. 

“Very funny,” the employee said. “Who put you up to this?”

“What?” I asked looking around. “I want to know if you have an album that I have been trying to find.” We stared at each other for an uncomfortable moment after I said that. “I’ve been to all the record stores in town, and they don’t carry it. None of them do.”

“Seriously, who sent you in here? Was it Sandy?” After a brief back and forth that consisted of me convincing him that no one sent me in his store, he said, “No, this place would never carry an album like that.”

The man was wary of me, as if he expected a group of camera men to enter the store to reveal the practical joke we were all playing on him. 

“Okay thanks,” I said. As I turned to leave, I said, “Why would you think it’s a joke to ask for an album?”

“That’s my favorite album of all time,” he said, “and a couple months ago I joked with my girlfriend that no one would ever come into a Music Land in Bum[fudge], Nebraska to ask for it. So, when you asked for Disco Volante, I thought she sent you.”  

5) David Bowie–Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars—Perhaps no musical artist in the history of music made the weird, more mainstream as well as David Bowie. He was an organically different man who made weird music. If he were alive today, he would confess that he wasn’t as original as critics often said he was. His music was an amalgamation of the weird.

Ziggy Stardust might be the most popular and least obscure album on this list, but it’s so old that I wonder how many people have never heard of it. A few mainstream artists in that era tinkered with the weird, but very few of them explored it as thoroughly as Bowie did while achieving some level of fame for doing it. I could’ve picked any of a number of Bowie albums to include on this list (Hunky Dory, Alladin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Low, Lodger, Scary Monsters, and even Blackstar), but Ziggy seems to be the most accessible starting point for Bowie novices.  

The best songs are the first four songs on the album, and the last six. The only song to skip on the album is It Ain’t Easy. I have to think Bowie had other songs to put on this album that he dismissed in favor of It Ain’t Easy. [Special Mention:] The best non-Ziggy Bowie songs that every Bowie fan needs to hear again and again, Alternate Candidate (This is a tough song to find, but I found it on YouTube) and Lady Grinning Soul.

4) Mother Love Bone—Apple—If I were a musician, this is the album that I would’ve created. I loved playing around with words, and I loved describing the normal in hippy, trippy ways. Apple is thirty-years-old now, and it doesn’t have the appeal to me it did back then, but the music and the lyrics that Ament, Gossard, Wood, and the rest created captured me in a time and place manner that no music had before and few have afterward. To say I was blown away is an understatement. I listened to this album in a way others listened to The Beatles, Elvis, and The Rolling Stones.   

Some critics, musicians, and others who know far more about music than I do, say Pearl Jam was better in every possible way. (A number of the members of Mother Love Bone gathered together and found a new lead singer after Wood died to form Pearl Jam.) I disagreed, and I still disagree, but when you’re a member of the screaming minority, you eventually buckle to those who know more than you. They didn’t change my mind, of course, but I recognize the limits of my musical knowledge, or my taste. I loved Pearl Jam, but Apple absolutely blew my mind.  

The story of Mother Love Bone is a sad “could’ve been, should’ve been” tale that could’ve and should’ve rewritten the narrative of the whole Seattle, movement in the early 90’s. Andrew Wood, the lead singer, died of a heroin overdose at 24, a month before the record company released this album. If this album received the promotion record companies normally put into an album in which they outbid five other record companies, coupled with radio airplay, touring, and all that, this album would’ve been the first multi-platinum disc coming out of Seattle in the 90’s. This album, this group, would’ve been bigger than the later incarnation Pearl Jam in my humble opinion. 

I think Apple would’ve been so big that it would’ve divided Seattle into two camps, those who loved the silly, rock star side versus the serious, sad, and angst-ridden Nirvana side. It would’ve been Mother Love Bone versus Nirvana, and Nirvana probably would’ve hated Mother Love Bone the way they came to hate Pearl Jam. (They may have hated them more, due to the contrasting styles of the two, as Pearl Jam wasn’t such an exaggeration of differences.)

The tracks on this album might all have a certain familiarity to them, as glam rock, arena rock fans will recognize some Queen, with a dash of Zeppelin, a little Elton John mixed in, and a big morsel of Aerosmith mixed in the stew, but Mother Love Bone combined these influences with a heavy dose of individual interpretation mixed in. I’ve read commenters on Allmusic.com say that the Apple has not aged well. As I wrote, thirty years has dulled the magnitude of this album for me, but I still do not have such perspective on this album, for I am an adoring fan boy who cannot view Stargazer, Captain Hi-Top, Gentle Groove, Crown of Thorns, or Lady Godiva Blues from an objective perspective. When people talk about how they still love the music from their late teens/early twenties, this album is one of the primary ones that formed that inner core of my favorite music.  

[Writer’s Note:] Some suggest that the Seattle music from the early to mid-90’s killed rock and roll. If we look at the timeline of rock and roll, we could easily make that leap with them, but I would suggest that the Seattle music, that some call grunge, might have been the last gasp from a dying beast. Seattle music was retro. It was Black Sabbath, KISS, T. Rex, and various other artists from the 70’s. It was a return to the music before the glam, heavy metal 80’s redefined everything. If we could go back through the timeline and remove grunge, rock and roll would’ve died earlier after the damage the music of the 80’s did to it. Grunge was the chemotherapy that kept a stage 4 cancer victim alive for a little longer beyond its life expectancy, and I suspect that if Andrew Wood hadn’t needed one more heroin fix, rock and roll might have remained on a life support a little longer.   

3) Pavement—Wowee Zowee— This album might form the basis of my album oriented preferences, for I find it difficult to pick just one track to note. This album should be listened to top to bottom. Rattled by the Rush might be one of the few songs on the album that follow a traditionally accepted song structure, but I find it hard to hold one song out for individual praise. This album is a collage album, a collection of songs that didn’t quite fit on their previous albums. Some call them pastiche albums. Whatever the case is, I loved this album so much that I honestly don’t care that some might consider it inferior to their two prior albums, and I loved (and I mean LOVED) their two previous albums. This album achieved something so different that it achieved the hallowed status all artists strive for with their fans of being “my music”. The previous two albums might have been better on the scale critics use to rate such albums, but I love Wowee Zowee more for the intangible qualities that leads us all to prefer some albums more than others. I won’t write that every track is perfect on this album, but that’s its appeal. Wowee Zowee is a raw, flawed album in serious need of better production, but seeking perfection with more production would also ruin whatever raw intensity the fellas in Pavement captured here.

2) King’s X—Gretchen Goes to Nebraska—Some grunge artists say this was the first grunge album. Some suggest that Alice in Chains took the sonic formula of this album and applied it to their album Dirt. Listen to the two albums back to back, and you’ll hear a surprising number of similarities. One of the members of Alice in Chains joked about it with a member of King’s X, saying, “We need you to come out with another album. We need a new sound.” (The author loves Alice in Chains, and the album Dirt, and he does not intend to diminish the band or their best album.)    

The Burning Down and The Difference are the only two songs on GGN that I skip. Other than those two songs, I’ve gone through phases with just about every other track on this album. The uninitiated should start with the hit, Over My Head, move onto Summerland, Everybody Knows a Little Bit of Something, and then work their way through the rest of the album song by song. By the time the intrigued listener is done, I don’t know how anyone could say these guys didn’t write beautiful, transcendent, and timeless music.

Normally, I couldn’t care less if an artist makes it or not. Mainstream music is just that, and as this list indicates, I am not a huge fan of mainstream music. The idea that King’s X didn’t achieve mainstream success, and others did with their formula pained the members of the band and their producer Sam Taylor. I doubt that any of the others on this list, save for Bowie who achieved worldwide success, experienced depression as a result of the lack of sales. They had to know, somewhere in the production of their album that it would not appeal to the masses. King’s X wanted it, expected it, and they experienced some depression as a result. The idea that very few regard King’s X as one of the top bands of its era, however, seems like an historic injustice to me that it needs to be rectified.

Other artists, and some critics, adored King’s X. A compendium of quotes from them suggest that on talent alone, coupled with the producer Sam Taylor, and the combined and consistent efforts found in the first five albums that King’s X created should’ve led them to the hallowed Beatles status. Upon discovering King’s X, reports state that Sam Taylor said he thought he found the next Beatles. King’s X were a combination of progressive metal, funk and soul, combined with vocals that remind one of gospel, blues, and the various groups in the British Invasion.  

It confounded critics, and other artists, why this band never broke through to the mainstream. In my experience, King’s X had two strikes against them, their looks and the “God thing”. Anytime I introduced my friends to Gretchen Goes to Nebraska, it blew them away. “Who are these guys?” they would ask. When they investigated them on their own, and they saw them on MTV, they soured on them to the point that they didn’t buy their album. The lead singer (Doug Pinnick) had a funky look. He had a high mohawk, and he was black, and there was something different about him. (He was/is gay.) Coupled with that, King’s X lyrics were uplifting and spiritual, and some critics labeled them “God music”. Sam Taylor and King’s X had gorgeous musical arrangements, Beatle-like harmonies, top-notch production, and the record company supported them, but Doug Pinnick looked funky, and their lyrics suggested they had a “God thing”.  

King’s X might have been one of the few bands who were hurt by the video age of MTV, for when people saw them they thought they were weird, and not in a good way. To further this thesis, Alice in Chains took the King’s X formula, and they fit the mold better than King’s X did. As much as we hate to admit it, the idea that the lead singer (Layne Staley) was a junkie and on the verge of overdosing had/has enormous appeal to some, their look was more socially acceptable, and the idea that they were obsessed with the dark elements of death had far more appeal than King’s X spiritual and uplifting lyrics. I consider that opinion so based in fact that I don’t consider it debatable.  

Alice in Chains was also cool in all the tangible and intangible definitions of the term, and King’s X were the antithesis of cool. What’s interesting, on this note, is that most of those who bought AiC’s albums, considered themselves the opposite of superficial. They considered themselves deep, thoughtful people who wouldn’t buy an album based on the band’s look. They loved the music on Dirt, but they didn’t buy music equal to, if not superior, to that on Dirt, and it all boiled down to looks and a packaged commodity that they considered nonconformist. 

 

more consumable, and the idea that the latter was “God music”.     

1) Mr. Bungle—California—This album, particularly the songs None of Them Knew They were Robots, Retrovertigo, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Goodbye Sober Day, and Ars Morendi, are timeless classics. As opposed to most of the albums I’ve listened to on this list that I’ve played so often that I have to remember how much they affected my life when I first heard them, California sounds as fresh and vibrant to me as the first day I listened to it. Pink Cigarette and Sweet Charity were, of course, my first loves on the album, but to my mind there’s something wrong with people who fail to recognize the greatness of those five songs.