Avril Lavigne - Let Go (2002)

What?

Back then, "Complicated" was the hot new thing.  Wearing ties with tank tops was the shit.  Everybody was talking about it - wow, a teenager who didn't want to be the next (insert pop sensation here)? Someone with a punk attitude*, someone with flair, with an identity she wasn't afraid to flaunt... and easy on the eyes, too.

Right off the bat, the reason why I wanted to listen to Let Go wasn't because of that fucking annoying single, it was because I was curious.  What was the deal with this one? The story she had told in Sk8er Boi was a teenage romance gone bad, past regrets over what could have been.  That one intrigued me.  So I went in, got the album, went home, found the first empty room and proceeded with the ritual: lie down, put it on, press play, don't stop until it's over.

To say I was blown away would be an understatement, but the why of it is even more important here: there is an honesty in Let Go, an honesty Avril Lavigne wasn't old or experienced enough to know to filter out.  Heart and soul, it was indeed herself she had put on the record - not pretending, not mincing words, telling it like she sees it.  This was a level of identity I was struggling to find in my own creativity, an unrestrained expression of "That's just how it is." Listen to songs like - y'know what, just listen to the whole damn album.  It's pretty much apparent.

Just listen to My World and tell me it's not the type of blatantly honest/descriptive 90's soft rock you'll always pine for at some point or another.  That's right, you can't.  Because you will.

First of all, almost no album without a sense of darkness has earned a place in my collection.  Let Go has that, not in instrumentalization alone but in lyrics as well.  The cold isolation of Losing Grip, the bitter rejection of Unwanted, the loneliness of I'm With You, the unbelievable ache of Too Much to Ask, the limbo and indecision in Tomorrow* and the undertone of shame in Naked all serve to show that when we were teenagers, our worlds were actually much more complicated than they would become in the years to come.  The simplicity of being naked around someone, worrying that it shows, worrying that it's easily recognized because we just want to hide... who hasn't been there?

But there were notes of optimism.  Bypassing the spirit of fun in Sk8er Boi*, songs like Things I'll Never Say, Mobile, Anything But Ordinary* have more to do with conjuring up images of open skies, of small town/suburbia dry summers*, fresh-mowed lawns, of being young in a place of possibilities, dabbling in bullshit.  Going everywhere but going nowhere but the tank town, knowing the whole world through a television screen or the page of a magazine, always meaning to but never doing.  Friends and brittle, bullshit romances, being young and alive.

Let Go is aptly titled, because I myself can never let go of whatever is holding me back to let loose like this.  What I have to say makes monsters scared, and I don't think I have the strength to see that actually happen.

But back then, I was just 18, thinking I could conquer the world so long as I was myself.

Footnotes: 1- Except, punk was long dead, even though they insisted otherwise, and frequently.  But I didn't know that.  Wouldn't learn just how dead it was until much, much later, but I guess any culture dies a slow an agonizing death only to have its reanimated corpse feed the masses.  That's an essay right there.
2- Tomorrow is actually torn, between optimism and pessimism, but the mood is decidedly a sombre mood.
3- Thing is, Avril Lavigne has tried unsuccessfully to replicate this in later albums, most noticeably with He Wasn't, there's just no equivalent there.
4- Anything But Ordinary is a case of being careful what one wishes for, 'cause it's Hello motherfucking Kitty that's so anything but ordinary that it circles back around and becomes ordinary.  I'd rather go for Robyn's delightfully nonsensical Konichiwa Bitches for that sort of thing, thank you very much.  I think Nobody's Fool is a second good example of this.
5- Yet to see one of those in New York, it's moist as fuck over here.

My Grandmother's House (Introduction)

My grandmother's house, or flat if you will, was a peculiar alternate universe.  Thing is, when my parents married, my father was given the deed of a 2-bedroom flat that was in the same building and immediately across from my grandmother's flat.  35th Street, flat number 2.  Since our house was made by my mother, it was wildly different from my grandmother's house - the layouts were very similar, the fixtures were the same, the only difference was everything.

So returning "home", but having to live in the flat right across from the one I had cried over leaving was peculiar.  Since they were both two-bedroom flats, my mother, sister and I were huddled into the spare room, with my mother and sister sharing a bed.  The room had no room to walk around in, and whatever room there was, was taken over by our luggage - there was no wardrobe space for our clothes.  There was an old sewing machine, the outer shell of which was the stand on which a very small TV sat.

As my mother was looking for a home, me and my sister had nothing to do.  I was attending, well, sort of visiting a study institution.  For context: in Turkey, there is a university entrance exam you have to take in order to get your higher education.  The examination is done once a year, every year, after the classes end.  High school seniors go in.  The exam lasts for three hours, and is comprised of 180 multiple-choice questions on the basic education subjects: Turkish (grammar and use of language), history, geography, philosophy, math, physics, chemistry and biology.  Since high school is split into four separate kinds of paths (Turkish-Math / Science-Math / Social Sciences / Foreign Languages), the groups of categories you had to go for differed.  It's still a minute a question, however, as not all questions can be answered within a minute.

This exam determines which university you'll get into, and that determines, or so we were told, how well you'd be received in the "job-seeking world", then an abstract for us all.  As such, the preparation is intense.  In addition to regular school, since the grades you get are extra points for your overall score, you have to start going to after-school classes in select institutions you pay monthly stipends to.  Junior year is easier, you get one day during the week, and weekends.

Senior year however, means that you are in that place seven days a week: for three classes / hours during school days, and 6 to 8 hours on weekends.  Endless tests, often clashing with schoolwork.  I don't know how many multiple-choice study tests I've gone through, but I'll say this: if I brought together every study book, every booklet, and every practice exam (of 180 questions) I had to go through, put them in a sack and hit you over the head with it, you wouldn't just die, your bones would be turned to dust.

But... starting with our time in my grandmother's spare room, 2002-2003 school year marks the best year of my life.  Despite the constant stress, despite the mounting pressure, despite the ongoing tension at home, some of the best things I've experienced all came during this time.

One of which was a recurring theme.  My mother and I both suffered from bouts of insomnia.  My childhood is riddled with nights where we'd squeeze into my bed (the living room was sectioned off into two pieces, one of which was my parents' bedroom, so no dice) and read books - sometimes all night.  Well, one such night, while my sister was sleeping, I woke up and couldn't sleep again.  I turned on the TV, volume as low as possible, and I found a subtitled, British play.  Having been fond of British sitcoms in my younger years (Dad's Army, Red Dwarf, Last of the Summer Wine), I stuck around.  My mother revealed that she hadn't been sleeping either.

It turns out, we were watching Pygmalion, the 1983 version with Peter O'Toole and Margot Kidder.  It was easily one of the most beautiful things I have watched, and having watched it again recently, I can safely say that this was one of those nights.  I first saw Groundhog Day, Tuesdays with Morrie and the unforgettable I'm Not Rappaport during similar sleepless nights.

Another development was my mother, desperate in trying to keep my sister from being bored, found an innocent little magazine.  She came in one day while I was watching the video of Evanescence's Bring Me to Life, mesmerized (which I'll get to.) This was the translated version of a quaint little Italian comic, W.I.T.C.H. One day, out of boredom, I picked it up.  Issue 3, first arc, just getting started.  I thought it good, at least I wasn't too late.

I kept buying it even after my sister stopped, until they stopped publishing it in Turkey.  Now, I grew up watching Sailor Moon.  I wanted to be Tuxedo Mask pretty badly back then.  I've played with dolls.  I've armed dolls against GI Joe uprisings.  I love Magic Knight Rayearth.  I always got along better with girls.  So this was not new to me, and the fact of the matter is, the first few story arcs in the comic series is pretty dark, the first one perhaps darker, and the issue we bought was one of the lowest points for the characters.  Depressing, dark, struggling... up my alley.

In short, I fell in love with the damn thing.

By this time, I was also attending, as a tourist again, to weekend classes to get me reacquainted with what would be hitting me full-force in the upcoming school year: the preparation for the university entrance exam.  Now, to elaborate further, this requires attending a separate set of classes, sort of like cram school, on the weekends and holidays for your sophomore/junior year, and 7 days a week on your senior year.  That's well beyond what's considered a full-time job in and of itself.  And since cram school isn't part of school property, you often go quite a ways around the city to get to one.

Mine was in Kızılay.  Luckily for me, one of the few advances made before it all went to hell was a rather rudimentary subway system throughout Ankara, which took me about half an hour to forty minutes to get within walking distance.  Ever since discovering the joy of listening to music on the go, this became a goldmine for me.  Since most albums I was listening to didn't quite exceed the 40-45 minute mark, it was perfect to listen to 'em twice - on the way to and back.

Also, I had been blessed with a multimedia store two streets over from the cram school, which I took to visiting to buy cassettes.  This led to an exponential increase in what I listened to, though I was pretty much grounded in the music that had brought me this far.  There were deviations, however, which is where our story starts.  With a very unlikely candidate, a Canadian girl from a small town that everybody had dismissed as not being worth it.

Honorable Mentions and Leaving Bratislava (Interlude)

Honorable Mentions

The thing is, 9 months in Bratislava was really marked with just a handful of albums.  The only store we could find dealt in CDs, and although my little sound system had a CD player, it was rarely used for anything other than Limp Bizkit's Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$.

However.  Being the even-then obsessed collector that I was, I had acquired a handful of CD's in our first foray into the store.  These albums were: Cypress Hill's debut (1991), Black Sunday (1992), Unreleased & Revamped (1996.) I never quite got into these albums until much later, but they did kickstart my discography completionism, only applicable to certain artists.  The missing piece was the critically-acclaimed 1995 album, III (Temples of Boom) that I searched for relentlessly, only to locate it in Vienna well into 2003 or 2004.

Out of all these, Black Sunday has the wonderful cover art, as well as being chock-full of dark, gritty, graveyard-shuffle Cypress Hill songs like A to the K, Cock the Hammer, Lick a Shot and of course, the song that made their name, Insane in the Brain.  On the other hand, III (Temples of Boom) is the twilight before the dark night of IV (1998) and features a song that was the subject of much controversy, as I later learned.

The song is No Rest for the Wicked.  Now, the thing was, B-Real had apparently played the demo of Throw Your Set In the Air to Ice Cube while they were both in the studio.  Things started when Ice Cube allegedly stole the hook of this song and used it in a song of his, Friday.  When B-Real heard it, he decided to go ahead and write No Rest for the Wicked, which is a reference to Ice Cube's 1992 track, Wicked.  The diss elicited a response from Ice Cube, in the form of King of the Hill.  The details branch out from there, but suffice to say, this was one of the most prominent and explosive hip-hop beefs of the time.  One is even tempted to re-create the opening feud of Romeo & Juliet. "Do you quarell, sir?"

Another album that came during this time was System of a Down's third effort, Steal This Album! (2002.) The main reason why this album gets an honorable mention alone, despite the fact that it was pretty good at time is because System of a Down, right around this time, was taken over by Serj Tankian's politics.  Perhaps it was just me struggling with my own lack of nationalist sentiment, or any sort of patriotism whatsoever, but on the whole, I've never liked too much politics in my music.  I even majored in political science, gave six years to it, but I still do not like it when music-with-politics turns politics-with-music.  But, nevertheless, the album gets a mention, as it was very big with me in those days.

Matchbox 20's Yourself or Someone Like You (1996) was given to me by a dear, dear friend whom had expressed some concern as to my rapidly deteriorating condition.  She had already linked my growing obsession with music to my psychological well-being or lack thereof, and she gave this one to me to, in her words, help me see that there's other stuff out there.  I did listen to it once, out of respect for her, but honestly, I forgot every moment instantly even while I was listening, and although I tried in later years, there's just nothing for me there.  This has happened before and I am certain it will happen again.

Of course, there is my almost natural aversion to recommendations.  Although I have been known in some circles as the guy who always breaks a silence with, a "Oh, by the way, I discovered this great band the other day..." I have a hard time taking recommendations.  This may be due to my main problem with authority, authority itself, and it projects itself unto friendly suggestions.  If I indulge in something you recommended me, then know that if I happen to take a look, that's because you have managed to earn my respect.  Otherwise, in one ear, out the other.

Leaving Bratislava

In the end, the situation at home deteriorated to the point that either my father would have to be by himself in Bratislava for a while, or there'd be a divorce.  We opted for the former.  I remember feeling relieved that I wouldn't have to be in a house where my family either avoided one another or constantly balanced out a clear and present tension.

Upon returning Ankara, we found that we didn't really have a home anymore.  We moved in with my grandmother's while my mother was out every day, looking for a 3-bedroom rental.  My sister and I were on our own all day, and though I had friends, she had few, so we spent most of the time trying to do whatever.  We watched a lot of TV, talked bullshit, went to get something to drink and so on.

Those few weeks would change me in many ways, move me forward, making way for the actual prelude of who I am now.

CrazyTown - Darkhorse (2002)

After a hellish four months in Bratislava, a small repreive came in the form of a week-and-a-half long winter holiday, an opportunity we took to return to Turkey.  While there, a few things happened.  I dragged my honorary cousin through the mud to get a few new albums and in return, he took me to a party at another friend's house.  That night, introduced to alcohol, partying with my peers, and thinking constantly that this isn't it, there is more to this, is full of things I fondly remember and want to forget.

After two full days of activities, drenched in sweat and probably stinking, what excited me more was that I had gotten the new CrazyTown amidst the insanity: our final location was a bowling alley, near which was a multimedia store that luckily had the new CrazyTown that I actually managed to give a go on my way home - a subway ride of roughly thirty minutes, and then a fifteen-to-twenty minute uphill walk.  Dirty, hungry, miserable, tired, head full of notions like the fact that I was told one of the girls there had taken a liking to me*, all I cared about was: listening to the album, getting home, eating, taking a shower, listening to it again, and sleeping for two weeks.  In that order.

Thing is, this wasn't my daddy's CrazyTown.  They had gone in quite a different direction than the amazing The Gift of Game (1999) It was still CrazyTown, with Shifty Shellshock and Epic Mazur exchanging verses, singing choruses, spitting rhymes... but the mood was different.  Even though the cover image carried that angel-devil* I knew, the vibe was entirely different.

For one thing, Darkhorse is undoubtedly the superior album among the two.  It's production is cleaner, glossier - the rhymes thrown are harder-hitting.  The rock/metal aspect has been pushed up a few notches and taken center stage, so the music is largely in harmony with the vocals rather than play a hip-hop beat-like second fiddle.  This harder approach makes for some wonderful moments: Battle Cry ("I used to stay quiet but look at me now!") being a clear-cut example.

This bleeds into the second difference: Darkhorse is a darker album by all counts.  Right from the get-go, CrazyTown takes to my favourite kind of opener* with Decorated, dealing with drug addiction and the insanity induced by it, invoking a sort of head-in-hands misery.  The trend continues in other songs as well - the first single, Drowning is a testament to how well a simple, down-to-earth song about being and feeling lost can be.  This sentiment echoes in Change, the wonderful summer-depression song that hit home during several difficult times in my life*.  The sugar-coated but desperate Candy Coated ("-pain is the ball and chain, pulling me closer to death") also adds to this misery.

As for the aggression, it's clearer in two distinctive songs: Battle Cry which at times features pretty sweet drumming and is a riot; and the smile-inducing Take It to the Bridge which actually uses a phrase my mother used on me a couple of times: "Would you jump off the bridge if I told you to?" (only her version was "Would you jump off the bridge if they did?") The somewhat scream-like vocals in the chorus of Take It to the Bridge and the still impressive fist-in-the-air duet delivery of the final line, "We'll take it to the bridge to jump the fuck off!" gets the blood boiling.

The album has softer moments that I couldn't believe worked as well as they did.  The poppish half-ballad, Hurt You So Bad and the soft-spoken but bitter and vindictive Sorry are two of those.

But there is no song on this album like the absolutely beautiful, melancholic, personal apocalyptic misery song that closes the main album, Beautiful.  The thing about this song is that it felt, as it feels every time, like it's twisting a splinter in my chest.  There is an interesting balance here, as Shifty takes it to the personal level, drags it down and makes it smaller, but Epic Mazur, with the chorus, expands it: "'cause nothing could be more beautiful than watching the whole world crumbling down on me / so beautiful, so beautiful, to witness the end" and when coupled with Shifty's self-questioning, "How far will I go; and will I grow? Will I learn to know?"

There are two sore thumbs, however, that break the routine, but while one does it while managing to keep up with the album's overall flow, the other breaks it, and just before the best song on there.  The former is Waste of My Time, which gives one side of a messy, summer-day break-up with a lot of bullshit involved, and is a breath of fresh air in and of itself.  Its aloof vibe balances out the relentlessly dark flow.

However, the latter, Skulls & Stars is not as successful.  Thing is, the album has two bonus/hidden tracks, titled You're the One* and the reggae-influenced, mindlessly fun trek through Shifty and Epic's nostalgia that is Them Days. That's where the point is - both Skulls & Stars and Them Days deal with the same topic, of going from an underground act to a success, but Skulls & Stars does it with a watered-down, more poetic sort of way that falls short.  Them Days cuts loose, doesn't give a fuck about whatever, and as a result, is a far superior song.

On the whole, however, Darkhorse was a few steps up for CrazyTown, and it remains one of my favourites.  I have had friends bewildered at the fact that I still listen to it sometimes, and welcome the memories it brings.  Because CrazyTown was never poised to be the "next big thing in rock", nor did they have such a claim.  CrazyTown is and always was there to make good, memorable songs.  Yes, their claim to fame was a song that heavily sampled a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song, sure.  But Darkhorse proved that it wasn't all just fun and games.

Thing is, Darkhorse is, for me, also the first instance of finding a band or an album, loving it in every way, and then never seeing a follow-up, or hearing from the band again.  It's 2015 now, thirteen years after the release of Darkhorse, and while things are slowly happening, the third album still isn't out.

Yes, I have been following.  Yes, I'm dedicated to the point of obsession when following certain bands.

*Footnote: 1- Self-loathing takes time to mature, but suffice to say that my somewhat unusually high EQ had been an enemy all my life.  Given the way I had been treated throughout my teen years, I remember finding this notion laughable - in fact, I did laugh at my cousin when he told me.  Funny thing is, completely unrelated, this girl, the one date we had and countless texts exchanged would set the precedent for a quirk in my relationships: picking unlikely candidates for "our song." In her case, it was System of a Down, Prison Song.
2- The cover of The Gift of Game also had her, which Shifty had said in an interview was the girl outlined in Lollipop Porn - carrying devil horns, but with a halo over her head, angel and devil in one.
3- The kind that doesn't fuck around with intros and ambient passages and whatever.  It's go time, let's fucking go!
4- "Sometimes I wonder if I'll change / can I change, will I change, or am I always gonna be the same? / I blame the world for making me such a freak / but the world wants to blame it on me" and the impressive "I'm like a piece of shard glass / laying in the frame of a window that was broken by the bricks of pain" which a dear, dear friend found to be interesting enough to hit me with it years later.
5- It's basically Shifty Shellshock talking about a girl he met that he was taken with.  He tried to stretch this song out in his failed solo venture, Happy Love Sick (2004), but it didn't work in Darkhorse, and so having more of it wasn't such a good idea.

Cypress Hill - Skull & Bones (2000)

There used to be a small shop in the corner of a bazaar in Tunalı.  It sold various decorative things, like salt and pepper shakers shaped like chicken, as well as things like full dining sets.  And apropos, there were many things I adored in my parents, but one thing about my mother was always intriguing - she is the type who can get friendly with any shop owner, to the degree that they'll recognize her coming, give her impromptu discounts, et cetera.  I never quite got the hang of that.  Sometimes, the apple falls far from the tree, after all.

As a child and as a teenager, some of my weekends weren't spent with the practially non-existent friends, but in these shops.  I often caught flack from my girlfriends later in life, as I tended to shop better than they did, even (or especially) when we were out to buy them clothes - that's because I learned from the best.  We would go around, she would have her conversations, I'd buy something if I was after it - and having pined for Skull & Bones, I had bought it, merely a month before going to Bratislava.

The first thing I noticed was that the album was separated into two sections: Skull and Bones.  The Skull part had 11 tracks, while the Bones had a mere 6.  Further, the album had two versions of what, even from the tracklist, appeared to be the same song.  These were the legendary twin singles, a high point in Cypress Hill's career: (Rap)/(Rock) Superstar.  

The sound in Skull & Bones surprised me with its clarity.  The grittiness, the static-y, almost lo-fi beats and the overall delicious dusty, dirty sound was gone - everything was crystal clear, coming through easily.  There was little noise and it was polished to perfection.  That was the first surprise*.

The second surprise was actually spoilered by the album name: Skull & Bones.  A moment's thought after I had found out why they were separate yielded that: Skull is full of rap songs and nothing else.  In some way, rap comes from your cerebral, it's a mental thing, you have to think about what you're saying, work your rhymes.  Plus, the art of freestyling (making up lyrics on the spot) also is done "off the top of the dome." Therefore, Skull was rap.  Bones, however, was Cypress Hill's balls-out assault and full-on venture into rap metal, or, metal rap.  Every song on that part was backed by an otherwise hip-hopified metal track, full of the distorted guitars and fat bass, the goodness I was used to, and the reason why Trouble opened Stoned Raiders.  It was called Bones as a reference to both the fretboard, and the fact that you think rap*, but you feel metal in your bones.

The Skull section was chock-full of goodies.  From the delicious (Rap) Superstar detailing the dark side of the music industry, to the brainless fun of Can I Get a Hit? and Certified Bomb, to the tired but indignant Stank Ass Hoe*, it's one hell of a ride.  Of course, the rightful posturing in Another Victory, the representin' tracks Highlife and We Live This Shit also easily got stuck in my head.  Perhaps, however, the bitterness in What U Want from Me hit the hardest, or rather, it would in the upcoming years; but back then, it felt like premonition.

Throughout this side of the album, Cypress Hill had a fine layer of veneer that not only came from getting where they were, but also, their shifting focus.  Their heavily gangsta raps and tales from the streets were gone, and in their place was reflection in the vein of From the Window of My Room.  Some of it had to deal with the byproducts of fame (Stank Ass Hoe being a prime example), some of them just the Cypress Hill brand of depressive, but overall, Skull was in harmony with my state of being at the time.  I did feel renewed, changed and bettering with every obstacle, be it myself or others, and I did feel the need for something mindless to make me laugh... I did posture that I, NoVA, was who I said I was, even though I actually wasn't, because writing raps was another jailbreak method.

But then there was the other side of the coin, Bones.

I wasn't expecting what came when Valley of Chrome kicked off with heavy guitars and then just steamrolled into a energetic, teeth-smashing metal rap track.  I thought at first that it might be a one-off like Lightning Strikes had been, or something like Stoned Raiders*.  I was in for a very pleasant surprise when the trend continued.  Unfortunately, I've never considered Valley of Chrome as a song that hit its mark.

There is, after all is said and done, one very crucial difference between the genres being blended, the same difference that had put nu-metal in the crosshairs of every puritan and critic out there - fundamental structure.  Rap, by nature, is rhythmic, as it's all about the beat, the flow.  Metal is largely melodic, depending on riffs and memorable passages rather than words.  As such, Bones has its miss moments: Sen Dog-centric A Man being the clearest one in memory.  However, the other songs, such as the insanely catchy Get Out of My Head, the legendary Can't Get the Best of Me, and finally the epic closer, (Rock) Superstar more than makes up for the weakness in the

That said, Dust is one of the best songs I've ever heard.  Simple yet effective riff, the nearly double-time rhymes strung up in a glorious chain, magnificent flow and damn good interplay between B-Real and Sen Dog on the third verse... it is undoubtedly a very high point in the album.

To his day, Skull & Bones remains one of my favourite albums.  One of my happiest memories is when my sister heard Certified Bomb playing, and wanted to hear more.  It didn't take, of course, but we did end up dancing in the middle of the living room to the song, singing along to whatever lyrics we knew.  A point of light in a world of darkness.

*Footnotes: 1- Well, actually, Stoned Raiders was a very clear album in terms of production and overall sound, so it had been IV that had hit me on the head with its gritty sound.  I just wasn't expecting things to improve as much as they had on Skull & Bones.
2- The expression, "I'm feelin' it" is often used not to indicate that one is indeed "feeling" something, but as an approval, which is a mental faculty.
3- In which B-Real carries a singular rhyme throughout the entire damn track.  Impressive, to say the least.
4- Stoned Raiders features three songs with the same rock/metal flavor: Trouble, Amplified and Catastrophe.  To a lesser degree, however, It Ain't Easy might also count.

Cypress Hill - IV (1998)

One evening, Alexis, the other transfer student, took the trolleybus with me, and I went out of my way to go down as far away from my own home and as near hers as possible, because her conversation was delicious.  At the time, I was obsessively spinning what I consider to be the absoute peak point of Cypress Hill's career, IV, and I happened to quote a line from the chorus of a song; "From the window of my room, I shoot all stars." I don't think I'll ever forget that little sparkle in her bright blue eyes when she commented that that, she wanted me to not forget, because she would, and she wanted to write it down somewhere.

One snowy night in Bratislava, and I had From the Window of My Room in mind.  I walked back home, quite a ways back, with IV in my ears.  I remember that I was all the way up to Audio X when I got there.

Cypress Hill's IV is part of what I call an unholy trinity in their discography*, but I happen to think it as the finest album of their career.  The first reason is obvious: the darkness inherent in Cypress Hill reaches maturation with this one, having brought itself to the fore before.  Further, the cover image you see up there reflects the album perfectly, as it is plague green and riddled with skeletons, in the closet, under the ground and walking the streets.

There is something about IV that always brings fond memories to mind and a smile to my face.  At a raging 18 tracks, it has some of their most brilliant work.  Lyrically, Cypress Hill is on another level. Not fond of messing around, the album kicks open with Lookin' Through the Eye of the Pig.  This one is a police officer's musings through his regular day, and while it starts as a hard day in the life of a cop, it quickly degenerates into pure personal apocalypse and the cop turns out to be in the middle of a divorce ("My marriage is all fucked, my wife is with the neighbors"), corrupt, dealing drugs, and fades out during a standoff... it's bone-chilling.

Then comes Checkmate ("Checkmate, fool! Hang them high!") which is a fun fist-in your face song with a rocking sampled piano.  It's sort of in line with the later Riot Starter, which I'd remember when I was in an actual riot, screaming my lungs off.  Siren-like synthesizer laid under the rapid-fire lyrics, it carries that fist-in-the-air spirit, a touch of anarchy.  (Goin' All Out) Nothin' to Lose is the unhinged, more personal version of that, more to deal with finally sayin "fuck it" and dealing with it.

In these harder-hitting songs, Cypress Hill's first brush with metal, Lightning Strikes.  While rap and rock had met a few times before, this was a different beast altogether.  Also of note is that B-Real would feature on a Fear Factory album, the 2001 Digimortal, on the track Back the Fuck Up.  This little experiment would branch out within Cypress Hill as well, and end up making the song that made me pay attention in the first place.

In another vein, From the Window of My Room is a profound song, with Sen Dog delivering "From my window I can see: reality has gone insane, G." No wonder she was impressed, it is an introspective song that taught me to look inside first, not out - who you are, not who you want to be.

Similarly, High Times, the mellow companion of Dr. Greenthumb and the closer, Case Closed were, in isolation not notable at all, but as a part of the whole, perfect parts in a well-oiled machine.  Case Closed  in particular is one of the best closers I've heard... yes, that includes now.

Of course, it wasn't all serious. When it's Cypress Hill, fun is always on the menu, and two songs deliver: I Remember That Freak Bitch (From the Club) which would supply me with a hilarious line about protein ("High and rich!") and, the unforgettable single about a marijuana expert that does his own TV commercials, Dr. Greenthumb.  The latter song is hilarious not because of the tribal chanting in the chorus or the commercial that opens it, but because it ends on a cliffhanger, with Dr. Greenthumb on the run from the DEA.

The album also has skits*, four, I think, that aren't marked separately but are parts of a song.  The storyline is interesting: a gangster, straight out of jail, wants to celebrate with his homies, so he goes to the local weed man for party favors.  The weed man, reputed to have the best shit ever, gives him a time and a place.  They meet up there, they wait, but he's a no-show.   When the album ends, finally, long after night has fallen, he actually does show up, and hands them a single joint.  He then produces seeds - seeds that you "put in the ground" so you can "grow it", telling them that with two seeds, they have a hundred pounds' worth.  He then gets in his car and drives away, leaving the homeboys with a single joint and two seeds they don't know what the fuck to do with.

An example of this is Tequila Sunrise, famous for its Latin flavor, which, being a rather bright, under-the-sun tequila and good times vibe, has the line "Realize we're all gonna die - so get the money" that instantly changes everything.  In the vein of mischevious fun and gangsta raps, the album houses the double-time masterpiece Audio X, the ghastly Steel Magnolia, the slightly pirate-themed 16 Men Till There's No Men Left ("Yo-ho ho and a bag of endo!"), the infectious Dead Men Tell No Tales that hooks the listener with its simple but hard-hitting melody... it is all just marvelous.

But one song, I saved for last.  One of the best songs ever written: Clash of the Titans.  Normally, that title would suggest some hip-hop rivalry, or a boast rap where the rapper proclaims himself a Titan, but B-Real chooses a different path.  With it's epic instrumentals, the repeating "Attention!" and the wordless chorus that only features disjointed whispers of "assassins"*, Clash of the Titans was epic on every scale imaginable.  Carrying the battle from the streets to the endless bloody fields, dispensing with the gats to make way for the sword, it is a work of genius and to me, one of the finest songs they have made.

Cypress Hill's IV, eventhough it inevitably recalls dark days with little sun and constant snow, has a special place in my heart.  This album is basically the reason why I got into the habit of collecting entire catalogues if I am invested enough.  As for the companion to this sentiment, that was their 2000 follow-up, Skull & Bones.

*Footnotes: 1- This consists of its predecessor, the 1995 III (Temples of Boom) which also featured the ghastly track Stoned Raiders, and of course, the monumental 2000 effort, Skull & Bones.
2- There are variants of this in the 2010 effort, Rise Up.  Doesn't work as well.
3- One of the best rap-metal hybrid songs in existence is on the successor of this album, and it takes its title from this song: it's Dust.
4- Referring to Cypress Hill's label, Soul Assassins.

Bratislava (Interlude)

So, picture this: a kid born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, who has had his fair share of bullshit from his peers.  That was me.  I'm not posing here to say "oh, woe is me." I never meshed, that was that.  I was into shit like Cypress Hill, most didn't understand it.  Some wondered why I didn't rap in my mother tongue when I wrote rhymes - forget the fact that Turkish is a more suitable language due to words being able to carry multiple meanings (sometimes up to five or six), and that suffixes are easy to rhyme, it just didn't carry what I was interested in.  The entire context of hip hop was missing, the context that even offshoots of it had.

In any case, my father had been working for the UNDP for a while then, and he managed to get himself a post in the Bratislava regional office.  I remember us talking about for a good long while, using the term "going international" for what he was doing.  He went on ahead to take a look, see what's what.

That was the beginning of a time I remember with fondness and a lack of desire to remember it at all.

See, what he did was, he stayed in the Danube Hotel (don't know if it's still there) and then told us he actually had seen what's what.  When tensions rose between my parents, we followed suit.  This was also influenced by the fact that my father had issued an ultimatum, that none of us wanted to call him out on.  So we went.

Disaster struck on our first night.  My mother somehow managed to acquire a tooth infection during a 2 hour flight, so bad that, while she did manage to get through dinner, she began throwing up.  So it was my sister and I in a hotel room, waiting for them to come back.  It was an era without cell phones, where internet was still in dial-up mode.  We turned on the TV to see if we could find something, but all the channels we found were either in German, which I spoke very little and my sister didn't at all, or Slovak, which we didn't speak at all (we just noted that it was a Slavic language, to be sure.)

Two things happened in that hotel room, staring at that T.V. One was that we came across a German-dubbed version of The Vision of Escaflowne, to this day one of the finest mecha anime I have ever watched*.  The second was that the video for Eminem's Lose Yourself was on.  That was an interesting moment for me - to see that he had elevated his game not with a baby step but with a flying leap.  Like a splash of cold water to the face: Em had grown, and he hadn't just grown, he was so sharp, it could cut armored cars in half.  This drilled into me right then and there a need to outperform myself constantly, or just not to drop below where the bar previously was.  Thanks, Slim.

We stayed in that hotel for about a month.  My mother, sister and I often went out during the day, to discover the city of Bratislava.  There was nothing.  Well, not nothing, to be sure, but nothing to appeal to us.  The European architecture that we had found so mesmerizing lost its allure quickly to the blistering cold and the awareness that you didn't speak the fucking language.

When my father finally found a home, we began to move in.  Moving day, I got to understand just how difficult it is to coordinate eight people who don't really speak the language into putting the right box in the right room.  With my mother sitting on a rather sturdy cardboard box with the entire manifest, with me constantly directing everyone around me, with my sister bored, and with my father pissed off for some reason, the day went by in a blur.  I supervised everything from the moving of those damn boxes to the installation of the IKEA-like furniture by the movers, who basically did a good job of putting up the basics, such as wardrobe doors, but in reverse position.

I wonder if they were more frustrated than I was.

When the night came, we were too tired to move.  So while my dad went out to get some pizza, hungry, cold and in a house with no electricity, my mother,sister and I slept on the unopened boxes stacked up in the living room.  I don't recall any food tasting better than that stale, cheese-only pizza I had that night, before or since then.

Then, it was time to get settled, get moving.

Since I was on my senior year before we had gone to Bratislava, and since my sister was five years younger than me, a school was found for the both of us.  The International Baccalaurate was picked out.  My sister would be learning Slovak.  I didn't have to, since education was done in English, but I was given a year to audit classes - responsible for the work, not getting graded for it.  This was all fine and dandy on paper.

On paper.

I hate the paper.  The paper's an asshole.

See, the weather in Bratislava was enough to drive any slightly unstable person to suicide.  Constant snow, sub-zero temperatures, insane wind, and very little daylight did not a pleasant experience make... I mean, not unless you were a gothic rock band, and I wasn't.

But regardless of the paper, it all went south pretty quickly.  Having never been outside of my birthplace, much less in a place where people from different walks of life, different cultures were, where the weather was basically either really cold or really hot, and the really hot didn't come around until summer, I found myself in situations and places I had never imagined I'd be in before.  Yes, it improved my writing as I obsessively wrote rhymes, trying to get better flow,better rhymes, better vocab.  Writing started to provide me with an escape.

Things deteriorated at home.  My parents were constsantly playing the escalation game.  My mother's dissatisfaction and depression was pitted against my father's seemingly endless rage and resentment, and my sister and I were caught in between.  My sister was never the sharing type, but during this time, she retreated into her shell and never quite came out again.  I was still a good long while from having my little psychosis come out in force, but the depression I had been wrongly diagnosed for at 14 was wearing me down.

Around this time, I would also meet someone who would influence me in more ways than I care to count.  She was the only other transfer student, except that she was a full-on student, not an auditor like me.  She wrote poetry.  I said I wrote raps, which counts as a form of poetry.  She wanted to read.  We compared notes.  Her writing, as well as other things about her, remained a significant element after that.  In the years to come, it turned out that we shared a dysfunction as well: she was bipolar, I knew, way before I found out that I was bipolar as well.  So different from me, yet much the same.  The time I spent in Bratislava and with her would later turn me towards poetry, proper, which would snowball into something similar but different.

So the time came and I decided that going to classes weren't compulsory (a running joke between one of my friends and I.) But there was enough bullshit going on at home that I didn't actually inform anyone of my newfound perspective on the nature of attendance.  The only place open from dawn to dusk in the school was the library.  Nobody cared at all what you were doing there, you could eat and drink all you liked, and there was no silence rule... just a "a little bit of hush hush, if you want." So I went there every day.  I had a corner, between a bookshelf full of Slovak translations of books, some of which I had read, and a waist-high cupboard.  There was a mat there, the kind you found in gyms, so I settled down, and I spent the day doing two things.  The first was writing, of course.

The second was listening to music.  I listened to any album that I had with me during the day, in between conversations with friends, and the occasional class I bothered to go to.  I kept listening on the trolleybus that I rode to get back home.  Since I didn't think to get more than one album with me lest my folks got suspicious, it was one cassette, which would be roughly 45 minutes long, for the entire day.

I had nothing else to get away.  Music gradually became a form of escape for me, in that when I put my earbuds in and pressed play, the world stopped being the dull, suicide-inducing prison cell with cheap wall insulation that let the wind through. It transformed into this beautiful, dark, twisted Wonderland* that shut everything I hated about it out.  Things moving "out there" stopped mattering, stopped being important.  Trivia, that was all the world was, but when I had music surging through me, I pressed my hand on the wall and felt the wind rushing through the cracks and the holes within, as if the air could actually caress my skin.  The dead, yellow lights of the library became luminous orbs, the worn-out books a gallery of decay and a special kind of dead.

Music got me out of my head.  That was the one place I needed to go in those days - out of my head.  Almost 18, in the grip of a difficult situation, feeling the early symptoms manifesting but without context, out of place and learning that I was just that, the outsider*.  Music became my shrine.

In many ways, Bratislava changed me.  Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but regardless of which way any of me went, my love for music was to gradually take a different turn.

*Footnotes: 1- Of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion shares the top spot.
2- Around this time, upon discoverring fanfiction, I have also stumbled across the first version of Lani Lenore's legendary American McGee's Alice fanfiction, Behind Sanity.  Only then, her pen name was psychotic_butterfly.
3- This does read like posturing, but the outsider isn't the outcast.  There is a very real difference.