Sir Mix Alot "baby got back"

I hate karaoke.  I've tried to like it.  I don't mind going with others who want to sing but I hate doing it.  There was a stretch of time where a bunch of my musician friends were roving around western New York trying out different karaoke nights at different bars.  They were all into it and it made for fun nights.  My friends put on shows.  Acting like schmaltzy lounge singers (even going so far as to attend events in tuxedos and wigs) or stadium rockers with abandon.  Some could sing very well, some couldn't.  They started entering competitions and the whole thing took on a life of its own.  It was great fun to spectate.  My dirty secret is that I hate performing.  Yeah, I've been in bands for years and played many shows around the country.  It's my least favorite part of being a musician. I loved rehearsals.  You and your friends conjuring songs and jokes. I loved recording.  The wizardry of the studio and documentation of your efforts.  Performing live in a band you can sort of hide personally behind the band is an entiry. That and beer were the reasons I got through it.  Always had the jitters and always wanted to bolt afterwards.   The only thing more embarassing than performing is small talking about your performance afterwards. 
This is the only song I've ever sung at karaoke.  I chose it because it's goofy,  it's a rap  (so tonality doesn't matter as much) and because I know all the words.  I twerked, I lap danced and I spat the lyrics out.  I received riotus applause and knew at that moment I would never do anything like that again. 
By the way I also know all the words to the b-side "cake boy".
"You drink much brew-ha, got a body like buddha"

Curve "frozen"

I sorely miss the days when CDeps and CD singles were widely used.  I miss their exclusive tracks/b-sides and remixes.  They were affordable and came with artwork outside of the band's full length canon. They were a way to get a sizable sample of band's work outside of an isolated compilation track.  This ep by #curve sounds really dated. It's '90s production is almost overpowering but it is a compliment to the dark and sultry electro -pop.  There are shoegaze elements and a twin peaks/Angelo Badlamenti vibe to the thing that I loved when I purchased this back in 1991.  This was a period in my life I was into indestrial/electronic music.  I'd buy anything on wax trax! Records and coveted my Ministry, Skinny Puppy and KMFDM albums.  Curve fall into a more shoegazey end of that sort of music and the song "the colour hurts" was making it onto all of my mix tapes.  I bought their follow up full length "doppleganger" (one of my favorite words) and they continued in the quasi-gothic brooding vein but I seem to always return to this ep.  What's especially great about this ep is that as far as I know none of these four songs appeared on any other of their releases.  I have carted this copy around since 1991,  that is saying something.  Through my countless moves and subsequent collection purging this cd has consistently made the cut.  I've liked this disc enough through all my musical phases to never let it go to make room for new stuff.  It may be the nostalgia, this thing is a time capsule that teleports me back to my freshman year of college, it may be my underlying affinity for anything melancholic or it might be an effect of how deeply I miss the extended playing format.  In any event I don't see this cd going anywhere.

Garden Variety "knocking the skill level"

In the '90s I had been doing illustrations and writing reviews for fanzines.  I didn't get paid for it, but I did receive CDs which I would have inevitably spent the money on anyhow.  This period of my life opened me up to a ton of stuff,  a great deal of it I didn't like and would often wrestle with writing non-dismissive reviews because I appreciated someone spent a lot of time and effort on these shiny plastic discs.  There were a few real game changing gems that I received though too and this #gardenvariety disc was one of them.  It's a D.C./post-hardcore vibe with personal lyrics.  Getting an album this good in the mail just affirmed the time I spent on the art and writing.  I mean I have been obsessed over music since I discovered it as an amassable entity.  At this time of my life though nothing else really mattered to me.  I had started playing bass guitar in a band, I was neck deep 'zine culture, I was working with a punk rock television show, I attending any show I could and drank coffee (which was not musical in nature but was social and I would yammer on about music to anyone who was within earshot).  I was singular in purpose.  That singularity of purpose has happened a few times in my life: tattooing and fatherhood being the others.  That trinity of obsessions really does define me.  There is nothing I do that doesn't fall under those three catagories.  While writing this the song "soft on the name" is playing and the lyrical refrain is repeating: "you're always the last one left to find out" and maybe there are people who find their "centers" in life sooner than I did. It turns out to navigate there I had to triangulate.
This disc came out in 1995.  If I really think about the 22 years since I got it on its release alot of heavy shit has transpired, but this disc still sounds great and still resonates with me.  It makes me want to play music.  It makes me want to drink the rest of this pot of coffee and research what these band members have been up to.  It makes me want to listen to it again while I tattoo tomorrow.  It reminds me of walking around buffalo with headphones so I'm going to get the boys together and go for a walk today. Centered.

Mentors "you axed for it"

I discovered the #mentors by listening to the college radio station WBNY in the late '80s.  Where I lived in the suburbs it took a lot of work to listen to the station.  It's grossly under powered transmission was meant for the campus only so tuning it in my neighborhood was like summoning a demonic overlord.  I would go to the northwest corner of my grandmother's apartment upstairs in the duplex where we lived.  I'd sit by the window (opened if possible, weather permitting ) and in this precise area at a precise time I would fold what must have been pounds of tin foil in exotic origami like shapes to the fully extended antennae of my boom box. I would constantly wiggle and adjust the setup until the crackly semi-clear transmission could be heard.  I would have a cassette tape cues up to record with the pause button engaged so that I could record songs with a gentle button push so as not to disturb my delicate and tenuous set up.  The metal show on wbny was legendary to my circle of friends, they played tons of underground stuff that we devoured.  A friend of mine had captured the song "four F club" from this album on tape and we all poured over it's vulgar lyrics and cave man metal. We had spent hours memorizing John Valby tapes (look him up) so the sexist dirty lyrics were a welcome addition to our collection of forbidden media.  It was a song I had always hoped to catch myself.  It was a quest.  We traded these tapes we made of the show and compiled our favorite songs (Thrust's "posers will die" became legendary this way)  but I really wanted my own Mentors song trapped on my own cassette.  Actually, come to think of it that song had no business on the radio but WBNY felt like a pirate radio and I suppose at the time it kinda was.  I eventually caught "four F club" and "sandwich of love" on tape.  It wasn't until pretty recently that I ever owned a proper release by the band.  I try not to smirk at the gross lyrics but I still do.  This is not a cd I play when the kids are around.

Slayer "show no mercy"

In the spring of 1985 I had been given a cassette which had Venom's "at war with satan" on one side and Slayer's "hell awaits" on the other.  That tape opened Pandora's box of heavy metal.  I searched out albums by both bands and at Cavages record store I found my own copies of #slayer "hell awaits", "haunting the chapel" and "show no mercy". I was already hooked on Iron Maiden but this was a whole new level of dangerous sounding music.  By the end of ninth grade I was ready to replace my Maiden back patch (I had shredded the jacket it was on getting drunk in a field behind the elementary school)  I went to our trusted head shop Pavillion International and got a back patch of this album cover.  A goat - headed sword welding satan in front of Slayer's original (and sorely missed) logo.  I wore that badge of confrontation proudly.  It led to confrontation.  That jean jacket never left my flesh and every day in the cafeteria there was a table of jocks that would mockingly exclaim "slayer!" as I walked past their lunch table. They had done it for weeks and laughed to each other.  One day one of them upped the humiliation and chucked a tater tot at me as I slunk past.  I was already an angry kid and the rage had been building over this incessant harassment.  The tot hit my shoulder and then ricochet to my head. I stopped and pivoted 90 degrees to my left, took three steps and smashed the closest dude in the face with my lunch tray. He tried to stand up and I punched him and he toppled.  I grabbed the chair he had been sitting in and threw it indiscriminately at the person who had been seated at his right. While I was enraged I remember time slowing to an almost serene pace. I threw some ineffective punches at someone's back, whoever I could reach and was then grabbed from behind by our gym teacher. He roughly and silently shoved me out of the cafeteria towards the school office.  I received a week of in-school suspension.  When the week was up and I returned to classes I was dreading lunch and the jock retaliation.  My head was on a paranoid swivel all day. Every guy in a letterman jacket a potential threat.  I anxiously waited for retribution all day.  None came.  Not a peep.  I nervously went to school the next day.  Still nothing.  No jeers of "slayer!"  Years later I ran into a guy I didn't know who was at that table.  He was bouncing at a bar on Chippewa.   He asked me of my name was Joel Menter. I responded that it was.  He then told me that I beat his friend in high school with a chair (not entirely accurate) and that it was the most bad ass thing he had ever seen.  He said they were all terrified of me and believed I was a satanic cultist.  He laughed and shook my hand and let me in the bar without paying the cover.  Man, I wish I still had that jacket.

Immolation "here in after"

In the late '90s I was working at a silk screening shop.  We hand pulled greeting cards for a local company. It was here I ended up meeting one of my best friends.  When I started at the shop he had long hair down to his ass, and was obviously a metal head.  I had been deeply involved in indie rock and the first wave of emo for a few years but found myself welcoming his turns on the shop cd player.  It was through him I rediscovered my love for death metal.  I had asked him to make me a "best of" compilation of Morbid Angel and he also made a general mix of death metal.  On that mix was "Christ's Cage" by #immolation .   Back in the day I had a cassette that someone put their demo on.  I remember loving the vocals but I don't remember much else.  When I heard this song I was hooked on death metal all over again and through my buddie's guidance (and his personal cd collection ) I started mining the depths of the genre again.  My rekindled relationship with metal became kind of an inside joke with the bands I was involved with at the time, most of the other members  (actually, none of the other members) had any history with heavy music let alone death metal.  It became a special sort of insular musical cocoon for me at the time.  My buddie and I started attending the odd metal show together and all the reasons I loved metal in the first place kind of just bubbled to the surface again and it wasn't long before I was re-immersed in it's evil din.  Prior to working at that print shop my cd collection contained Slayer's "reign in blood" and the first four Black Sabbath albums.  Now almost half of my collection falls under the heavy metal flag.  The music just doesn't ever let you go.  "Christ's Cage" is still one of my favorite songs in its wide world.

Sparks "angst in my pants"

I learned everything I know about romance from the movie "Valley Girl".  Nicholas Cage was my spirit animal in 1984.  The sound track's centerpiece is Modern English's "I melt with you" and is in my opinion the greatest love song ever written, but that's another blog.  This #sparks album has two tracks in that movie.  I discovered this record over a decade later while in my late twenties. It encapsulates new wave music for me. Catchy synth - driven pop songs with lyrics informed by punk rock's self deprecating and crass sense of humor.  In the movie the song "angst in my pants" played during a valley dance party in which the party goers eat sushi and molly-ringwald-dance in a carpeted living room.  The setting was as alien to me then as much as now.  The other song in the movie: "eaten by the monster of love" plays during a jeans-tightening scene where a girl's mother tries to seduce her teen daughter's love interest.  A risqué concept then and taboo beyond belief now.  So yeah, that sequence and sing shoot straight to my id.  I imagine that if I make it to nursing home age while the nurses are sponge bathing my wrinkled nethers that song will be playing in my head. A fitting bookend to my sexual awareness.