Final Fantasy VIII / Nobuo Uematsu (2000)

The year 2000 changed my life as it related to music.  It also changed my life with one other thing: my father managing to cop a PC version of Final Fantasy VIII during one of his business trips abroad... and he also brought a small Lego set, because he had felt bad that this game had been the only thing I had asked for.

As I played along, one thing started to become clearer - the music.  The boss fight theme, Laguna's battle theme, the subtleties it overlaid scripted scenes, the militaristic SeeD march... but the one that got me the most was the song that played during the Dollet mission early on.  Titled The Landing, this song was the first instance where I began listening to a single song for hours.  I'd find an opening, pause the game, and let it run while that delicious, magnificent song played on.

Of course, the soundtrack was decidedly out of reach.  Impossible to find in Turkey, especially when you were me, who only knew then where to get games, not music... and even if I did, I couldn't afford CD's, and I doubted this'd be on tape.

Luckily, the internet was limping along, and I had gotten word from one of my cool-kid acquaintances that there was a website where you could download songs.  Of course, I say that, I mean, "wait for an hour or more for a 3mb mp3 to finally be yours by right." Enthusiastic, I checked it out.

No dice.  I was heartbroken.

Being allowed only an hour of 'net time per day (after finishing with whatever responsibility I had), I didn't want to waste it on some background theme song... but The Landing may have been the one I was looking for, I thought, as the mission began with amphibious transports landing on Dollet beach.  I lucked out, and now, I listened to the song even when not playing the game.

Years later, my first girlfiend would do me the courtesy of getting two albums for me while she was in the US.  One was the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack that I spun with pleasure.  I don't think I thanked her properly, which I wish I had.

On the whole, Final Fantasy VIII has an excellent soundtrack.  If I had to list my favourite titles, it'd make for a long list and probably be more than half the tracks available.  But the significance of this particular collection of songs was that it was the first thing I began listening to that wasn't Metallica, or metal.  The quirky, classical-influenced arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu make the game.

From the pumping action of The Man with the Machine Gun and The Extreme to the delicate touch of Love Grows and Where I Belong; from the eerie tunes of Succession of Witches and Truth to the diabolical tunes of The Castle, Fithos Lusec Vecos Winosec; from the militaristic undertones of SeeD and The Oath to the marvelous, continious suite of the final boss battle consisting of The Legendary Beast and Maybe I'm a Lion, the music itself, even without the game as a context, is utterly beautiful.  Able to punctuate not just scenes but entire contexts, chock-full of great melodies, this album was, and still is, one of the very few instrumental albums/song compilations I enjoy.

Because there was something about what Final Fantasy VIII was supposed to be, about how the epic came together that came alive with Nobuo Uematsu's songs.  Oddly enough, however, I haven't enjoyed his marrying of his work to rock with The Black Mages just as much, mostly because rock and its variants, I can't stomach when they're instrumental.

The year 2000 would come with more developments after this one, and in some way, I'm bound to get stuck on that year and its very near vicinity for a good few entries.

Metallica - Ride the Lightning (1984)

After quite a few years that I'd like to call dark ages wherein my repertoire included the legendary Michael Jackson, the then-still-fresh Will Smith, Ugo Farell (Preces Meae was a haunting, damningly beautiful single), Phil Collins (with ...But Seriously, of course), the Spice Girls... yes, I might add that I believe Spiceworld (1997), that I managed to hear because of a friend and my sister, is a great album.  I'm not kidding.  I think I got it on CD last year.

Interesting contrast with what is to come, no? Anyway.

So the year was 1998, and the music video for Turn the Page and Whiskey in the Jar were going around MTV.  Never mind that I was a hormone-addled teen who thought both were titillating visually, but the music, I was not very used to.  Now, I was back then as I am now a bit of an outcast, always an acquaintance with the cool kids, but never friends with any.  And they were all into it.  Metallica was all they talked about.  So I decided, what the hell, I'm gonna go buy my first damn casette tape.  The internet being in its infancy (56k dial-up, people) I did the next best thing: I took a friend who claimed knowlege on the subject with me.  He thought Kill 'em All (1983) would be too harsh for me to start, so he advised that I get the 1984 Ride the Lightning instead.

Like an idiot, I bought his arbitrary decision wholesale.  We went to the movies after that, and I remember thinking as I twirled the tape in my hands, this is the first album I've actually bought... which was me being forgetful, as that was actually the Small Soldiers Soundtrack*.

So I got home, put it on.

That was the story of the rest of the week.  I didn't get it.  I didn't hear anything properly, it was just a mess of noise.  I could hear someone yelling some shit, and I had the lyrics, but I understood nothing.  Was this what was so goddamn good? This was nothing like the videos I saw on T.V. - not as fucking advertised! But I was determined.  I was going to understand this.  I was going to 'get it' and be 'with it'.  It was just a research problem, nothing more - no different than figuring out why some dinasours developed certain parts or working out ways for Tom to get that goddamn Jerry at last.

And I sure as hell wasn't going to back down until I was sure I had gotten my pocket money's worth out of this damn thing.

Deciding that headphones might solve the problem, and it might help if I laid down with the booklet in hand and tried to read through the lyrics, I unwittingly created my album ritual (more on that later).

Everything started to fall into place. I stopped listening, I began hearing it.  I began to hear the drums, the riffs, I began to get excited when a solo hit... the rumbling in the background was the bass, I was later to discover, and it was something fierce.  Claws out, balls to the wall.  Fight Fire with Fire taught my agression, For Whom the Bell Tolls taught me the slow burn*, Trapped Under Ice taught me white-knuckle-tight despair, Fade to Black taught me loss, Creeping Death taught me about epics.  The album taught me how some albums flow extremely well, as it did; it taught me song structures, choruses, verses and bridges, but most of all, it soldified the notion that yes, I did ineed love this darkness.

Now this was the beginning of me developing an actual affinity for music, in this case heavy metal, and following through.  Before long, I had amassed every album they had put out (except Kill 'em All*), had observed a band's evolution from something like this to something like ReLoad (1997.) Which was, even then, like watching a perfectly beautiful garden slowly wither away into a tangled up mess.

Unfortunately, Metallica albums, for me, didn't hold up well.  I went through the entire discography recently, and I found that they didn't have all that much to offer me.  Perhaps because I am older now and have listened to more (and more versatile) shit than just heavy metal over the years, or maybe because my life had been at a certain place then that it isn't in now, it just doesn't sound good anymore.

But in that two-year period between 1998 and 2000, my whole life was Metallica.  I knew all the lyrics of all the songs, back-to-front.  I carried the entire discography in a backpack, next to my Walkman and a shitload of spare batteries.  I annoyed people when I started headbanging or playing air guitar everywhere.

In essence, this was it, for me.  This was what I liked.

Then, 2000 happened.

*Footnote: 1- I remember that I found Rush's Tom Sawyer to be exceptionally boring.
2- Until sludge metal came along and I found out what 'slow' actually meant.
3- Oddly enough, I never found Kill 'em All, and nobody thought to remind me that it existed, so I forgot about it, and by the time the internet had managed to remind me that there was an album that was supposed to have doubled as the origin of Megadeth also, it was too late and I didn't care.

The Manhattan Transfer - The Offbeat of Avenues (1991)

Now, stop reading this, and go listen to the titular song from the magnificent 1991 album.  The Offbeat of Avenues (the song) recalls a very specific memory: sitting with my parents in the living room, well... I say living room, but it was really a larger space created by opening the doors to our balcony.  Candles lit, just hanging out, waiting for my sister, who would be born a few months later, to come out of my mother's belly so I could have a sister for real*.

And that song.  The Offbeat of Avenues.  My God, that song.

Listen to it now, can you hear it? Can you hear the song? Can you her the darkness of it, the elusive shadows lurking within it? Look at it now, it's a New York song, jive up the wazoo.  It's vocalese, it's jazz, not too dark, going for smooth but... can't you hear it? It's a New York murder mystery wrapped in the supernatural, the avenues after hours holding secrets darker than you'd know.  Sultry mistresses and betrayal - "first you crawl then you walk / scat, then you talk" and then it swallows you whole.

Tim Hauser's laugh is still burned into my mind.  From the first time I heard it, every time I listen to that song, I know it's coming, and I anticipate it as much as I am afraid that it will come.

But back then, I remember sitting there, jawing off as I usually do, thinkin' that this hidden mystery, this darkness... I love it.  God, do I love it.

The album took a bit longer to register because of that.

Truth be told, The Offbeat of Avenues has its other moments, some dark, some not, but all parts of an amazing whole, that are just as memorable... but not as striking to me as the opening.  Immediate recollections of the whole album were, back then: 10 Minutes Till the Savages Come, What Goes Around Comes Around, Confide In Me and of course, the magnificent downer, Gentlemen with a Family.  Upbeat and energetic when it wants to be, like in Sassy; fun and light, like in Blue Seranade; quirky, like in Women in Love.

All lush, sometimes the same color palette as its cover, well-structured and marked with the individual voices of Tim Hauser, Alan Paul, Janis Siegel and Cheryl Bentyne.  I think my love for vocals and distaste for instrumental music might have begun with this album.  I was to be told years and years later by a friend that "he couldn't fucking stand vocalese, because it was all pretty pretty vocals on the forefront, and he'd much rather have instruments do the talking."  But the voices, ah, the voices that took the lead, receded, almost scat-sang in unison sometimes blew me away.

I never did find the same flavor of this album in other offerings made by the Manhattan Transfer, though I do remember that I had given Brasil (1987) a go upon my mother's insistence.  It is, apparently, her favourite Manhattan Transfer album.

The Offbeat of Avenues was symptomatic of my musical taste: I adored the indescribable "spark" contained in that album, but eventhough it was by the same people driving it, I never quite got into their other works.  There are artists who managed to break through, but some never do.  The Manhattan Transfer never did, but who knows..?

Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall (1959)

This is where it all began.

I was told by my parents that when I was a child, they had a really old CD player my father had managed get at a bargain price because the seller was a friend of his who shared his love for music.  Apparently, Chicago (once known as the Chicago Transit Authority) was one of the first things I heard, along with my mother's favourites of Sezen Aksu.

One of my earliest memories is of my father and his grey suit, back when I was 4 years or so, and he worked for the government.  I remember refusing to leave the house before I heard track 11 of Harry Belafonte's (Live) at Carnegie Hall (1959) album.

The track title? "Hava Nagila."

I knew it, of course, I had memorized it and was constantly trying to sing the faster parts.  Aramaic is sort of similar to Turkish, my mother tongue, with its somewhat heavy emphasis on consonents and the throat-purring vowels.  I didn't know what it meant in the slightest, but it was one of my favourite things in the whole world.  Others, I will get to in due time.

So then, as it so happens, one night, there was a party of sorts in our house.  We had guests that I didn't remember but pretended to and then constantly poked and prodded with personal questions.  I don't recall what the fuss was about, but I knew that it involved someone going to the US, by then just a vague idea for the 4.5 years-old me.  But I remember the champagne clearly.  There was a small window in our in-itself small kitchen, out of which they leaned to pop the bottle, and then proceeded to fill their glasses.  Being the curious-as-a-soon-to-be-dead-cat that I was, I kept badgering my parents, before resorting to use emotional blackmail on our guests.

Finally, my mother lost her patience.  She instructed my father to give me what I wanted so that she could be done with it.  I knocked the half-filled glass back... it was strange, but sweet.  I liked what it did with my body that didn't know what tolerance to alcohol was.  Of course, I wanted more, so I took to lurking and then downing the glasses of our guests, getting nice and drunk.

The whole thing came to a head for me when I started to sing Hava Nagila at the top of my lungs.  I don't know how many times I did before I passing out.

Now, as I am still not very much acquainted with calypso, I can't comment on whether or not this particular album was exceptional - I just know that Belafonte himself is.  If nothing else, the Carnegie Hall album has always been an on-again off-again obsession of mine.  When I finally managed to heed a bit of motherly advice and listen to the rest of it, I was mesmerized.  Firstly because I was still very young (we're now talkin' 10 or 11) and so 10 songs of average length until my favourite one was an eternity... and it never ocurred to me that the CD player had a "fast forward/skip" button.

But the way the Carnegie Hall was put together, the order of the songs, the presence of the audience and Belafonte's small anecdotes at the beginning of some tracks held a mystique for me. I didn't yet understand all the words, my English was still too weak for that, but I did work out some of them.  I had help: Belafonte's voice resonated with emotion, and he was so versatile with it that I was blown away.  From the darkness and urgency in Darlin' Cora to the loneliness and disappointment of Sylvie and Come Back Liza from the then-jolly Cotton Fields, The Marching Saints, Matilda and Man Smart (Woman Smarter) to the weary yet ritualistic Banana Boat Song the album was full of incredible moments, even more captivating for me.

So much so that years later, I learned what the rather jovial ballad titled John Henry, about a superhero-like mine worker (from what I understood) was really about.  I sat down, put it on, sang along and cried.  "I'll get it from the man in the mine oh, Lord, yes, I'll get it from the man in the mine..."

I think in many ways, Carnegie Hall was my introduction to many things, things that, years later, would define how I approach music and albums.  It was my first time experiencing an album, however it was, as an entity, not a silver disc that my dad could do technical stuff to in order to put on Hava Nagila.  An unconscious registering of structures, that some parts repeated.  Progression, fills, how instruments, vocals and lyrics put together.  Rhythm, melody.  To this day, it remains one of my favourite albums of all time.

There was one other, however, that I didn't get to lose myself in until many years later that likewise marked my childhood.  That was The Manhattan Transfer's The Offbeat of Avenues (1991)