20. True Romance by Charli XCX

 20. True Romance by Charli XCX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGmM2l39LEs&list=PLrwB2tGkO7bKz-kWcRP7MSm2DYpoQfPUz

When I first heard Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's song "Fancy" on the radio in 2014, I didn't care much for Iggy's rapping. In fact, I found it more annoying that pretty much any rapping I had ever heard. But there was this ear-worm chorus sung by Charli XCX that got me to wondering what else this dark-haired girl had written. What Google told me was that while Charli had put out some music on MySpace and released a few mix tapes, she had only one bona fide album from 2013 called "True Romance." So I YouTubed the album and upon hearing the first song "Nuclear Seasons" I knew I'd found a type of music that was much different from anything that I was used to listening to. It sounded a bit like electronic dance music, but it had lyrics and layers to it that were much more interesting than the typical EDM club music I'd heard before (all of which I found to be really repetitive and boring). I wasn't sure what to call it. It wasn't quite pop music, and it wasn't quite dance music. It seemed to be more akin to art rock, but it really wasn't rock. It was its own thing.

I found out later that the term for this type of music is "Hyperpop," although it's also been called synth pop and gothic pop. However, Charli rejects all of those labels, even though she did refer to the music on her debut album as "Emotional Pop." At first, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. But I found myself going back to the album repeatedly over the next year as one of my get-ready-in-the-morning albums. And the more I found out about Charli XCX -- her real name is Charlotte Emma Aitchison -- the more intrigued I became with her music. It turns out that she has synesthesia--a condition in which the brain interprets sound by seeing colors--and she actually sees colors in the music that she writes. She said that the songs on True Romance are mostly shades of purple. She prefers music that she sees as black, pink, purple or red, and she gave away what turned out to be the first hit song that she ever wrote--"I Love It" by the Swedish group Icona Pop--because she thought the song was the wrong color for her. Anyway, I bring this all up to show that there is a reason that the album cover is predominately black, pink, purple, and red. How you see the colors on the cover are similar to how she sees colors in music.

2014 and 2015 turned out to be a banner years for Charli, as she had her first big solo hit with the song "Boom, Clap" from the movie "The Fault in Our Stars." Her record company wanted to capitalize on her new popularity, so they got her to release a more mainstream pop album titled "Sucker." Along with "Boom, Clap," the album had hits with "Break the Rules," "Doing It," and "Famous." The rest of the album songs are really good pop, but they are a different kind of sound than what we got on True Romance. The record company continued to try to pressure Charli to do more mainstream songs, but after 2016, she said she wasn't going to release any more songs that she didn't love. She took back control of her own artistic future, and she faded from the pop music scene. Well, not really. She kept writing really good pop songs that other artists charted with, all the while experimenting with new sounds and collaborating with other artists. Her influence on other pop artists is pretty big, which is one reason why Taylor Swift asked Charli to go on tour with her in 2018. Of course, when the pandemic hit in 2020, a lot of artists stopped performing and took time off from making music. But Charli recorded and released the album "How I'm Feeling Now" while on Covid lockdown in her home. But of all the songs, mix tapes, and albums she's released over the last decade, I still like True Romance the best. 

Warning! Charli does use the F-word in some of her songs, so they aren't the kind you can listen to while around the kids. But I discovered True Romance around the time I started hating my job at Boise State, and the F-word was uttered by me more than once every morning while I was in the shower and started thinking about how I was about to face another work day in which every single meeting with my so-called superiors would be a humiliating kick in the crotch. Fortunately, a mix of Charli XCX and AC/DC (who never curse in their lyrics) somehow got me by until I managed to find a better job that didn't make me feel like dropping F-bombs in the shower in the morning. Also, Charli will use "shit" quite freely on some songs. It's definitely not the kind of album I could have listened to as a teenager in my basement bedroom. And my wife doesn't understand why I listen to this album either. When she hears me playing it, she'll say something like, "Why are you listening to that?!" Fortunately, I'm an old man now, and I get to listen to whatever I want. At least, I get to whenever Julie has already gone to work and I'm getting ready in the morning by myself--or with my poodles that like Charli XCX just fine! Yes, I realize that hyperpop written by a 20-year-old English woman is not really the kind of music that most people would think and old 50+ year old man like me would be listening to. But what can I say--maybe my ears aren't always as old as the rest of me.

Nardo

21. Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack by The Bee Gees

21. Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack by The Bee Gees  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_izvAbhExY&list=OLAK5uy_k2P31OPRADjYdtzYiDjFmk5Q5wxGIYm_U

If you hate disco, you hate this album. But if you fondly remember 1977 and 1978 like I do--which is that sixth grade year just before I turned 12--then this is album is not only the soundtrack to the movie, but it's also the soundtrack to pretty much your entire school year from September of 1977 through May of 1978. 

While there are a variety of artists on the album, most of them were previously released songs that got included in the movie. But it was the new songs by the Bee Gees that really made this album a true disco juggernaut. Two of the Bee Gees songs on the album had been previously released--"Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancin'." But they wrote five new songs for the album, all of which became major hits, including:

• Stayin' Alive
• How Deep Is Your Love (one of my Top 200 songs) 
• Night Fever
• More Than a Woman
• If I Can't Have You -- performed by Yvonne Eliman 

Fun Fact: John Travolta wasn't dancing to the Bee Gees during the filming of the movie. He was dancing to...you guessed it...Boz Scaggs. But the record company wouldn't license the Boz Scaggs music because they wanted to hold on to it for another disco movie. Bad move. So the Bee Gees were brought in AFTER the film was shot, and they made sure that the music beats of their songs matched that of the Boz Scaggs songs that were being danced to in the movie.

This soundtrack won the Gramm for Album of the Year, and it's the second-best selling movie soundtrack album of all time. (The Bodyguard soundtrack overtook it.) But as good as the album was, it could have been better. The Bee Gees wrote other songs for it that didn't get included, so they gave them to others to record. "Emotion" got recorded by Samantha Sang with Barry Gibb singing backup vocals. And little brother Andy Gibb recorded "(Our Love) Don't Throw It All Away." 

There are some other fun disco songs to listen to on this album, including "A 5th of Beethoven," "Disco Inferno," and "Boogie Shoes"--a B-side song for K.C. and the Sunshine Band that found new life when it got included on this album and got rereleased as a single. There are a handful of other instrumental disco songs that might work well as elevator music, but nothing so good that it deserves repeated listening. Nope. It's the Bee Gees songs that are the main attraction of this album, and it's because of the way that those songs trigger memories of that sixth grade year--playing fear-free at recess because all the bullies had moved on and we were at the top of the food chain, me and Sheldon getting in trouble for wearing bandanas and then stealing them back from the principal's office during the night of the school fair, riding the motorcycle on the farm for hours after school until it was time to watch "Wonder Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk." There just aren't too many albums that can conjure up the feelings and memories of that wonderful time for me anymore, but this one always delivers.

Nardo

22. Invisible Touch by Genesis

 22. Invisible Touch by Genesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpmiZ7zsHXY&list=OLAK5uy_kSuRYdMa1N5VchHRcr5qSLo8AsFcXNwos

When this album came out in June of 1986, I had just returned from the heart of Sweden in Dalarna back to my beloved Sodermanland, where I was district leader in Esklistuna. Now, I have nothing against the city of Eskilstuna, but we called the area in which our apartment was located the "Concrete Jungle." It was a large section of multi-story apartment buildings with mostly immigrants and young, poor Swedes. I had both good companions and not-so-good companions during my time in Eskilstuna. And during one of the not-so-good companions, I looked for any opportunity to extract even a tiny little bit of joy from tracting for 10 hours a day and getting rejected by almost everyone we came in contact with. One steady source of joy was the local burger joint where we could get a burger and fries and sit down and eat them as slowly as possible while the MTV played on the television. One night, to my delight and horror, a Genesis video started to play. I was delighted because it was a new Genesis song that I had never heard before. I was horrified because it featured these freaky looking muppets that were satirizing Ronald Reagan and his vision of America as a nuclear superpower. 

Now, I wasn't a big fan of Ronald Reagan in 1986, but I had voted for him in '84 election because my other choice was Walter Mondale--who managed to only win his home state of Minnesota that election. (My father--a true-blue Democrat--would have been super upset if he had known how I'd voted.) However, when I went to Sweden, I started to really dislike Reagan, not necessarily because of how his policies had destroyed jobs for local truck drivers AND farmers, but because of all the angry Swedes that yelled at me at their front door because of bombs Reagan had dropped somewhere else on the planet. Swedes really dislike war, and they really disliked Reagan's policies when it came to building more and bigger nuclear weapons. 

Anyway, I knew that this new Genesis video was going to make my life more difficult. Yet, I couldn't help but enjoy watching it. I mean, it's got two things that I really love--Genesis music and freaky muppets! 

Over that summer, I got to hear many of the other songs on the album, and I instantly loved "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight," "In Too Deep," and "Throwing It All Away" because they were perfect songs for The Great Depression soundtrack. So when I got home and found out that my brother-in-law's record collection included this album, I made a tape of it. Actually, I made a tape of all the songs except for "Anything She Does," "Domino," and "The Brazilian"--the three weakest songs of the album. But the other songs were so damn good that they became an important part of my post-mission Great Depression playlist. They have a quality about them that is very similar to the Phil Collins' songs on No Jacket Required. Some music critics have said that is a problem with the album because it signals a change from the kind of music Genesis had created in the past towards a more pop-oriented sound. But in my opinion,  I think that it is a good thing. See, the band had put out the Trick of the Tail album 10 years earlier, and although the critics liked it, the band didn't see a single hit song from it. Some said this meant that with Peter Gabriel leaving the band, the fact that the album had no hit songs meant the group was headed towards obscurity with Phil Collins as the lead singer. But 10 years later, that same band puts out an album with five charting songs from an album with only 9 songs on it. So, yeah, music critics, it's okay to like earlier stuff, but lets face the fact that a lot of bands want to make music that makes them money. That's how they get to keep making music instead of having to figure out a way to make a living doing something else--like making freaky muppets for bands that know how to write a hit song.

Nardo

23. Xanadu by ELO and Olivia Newton-John

 23. Xanadu by ELO and Olivia Newton-John

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDmjEN-6ekE&list=OLAK5uy_mkHO_6VKXNhs5G5MnxG0cEprdLLB6uT_U&index=1

The summer of 1980 was a summer of "Magic." Literally. I heard that song played on the radio pretty much every day of that summer. It was released as a single at the end of May, about a week after school let out. And it spent four weeks at the Number #1 spot on the charts in August until it got knocked of by Christopher Cross (the artist) singing about how sailing takes him away. If, perchance, I didn't hear "Magic" on the truck or tractor radio while out helping Dad with all the farm work, there was a good chance that I'd hear it on the stereo when I got home, because Ruth added this album to her record collection right after it was released at the end of June. 

Now, normally, in the summer of 1980 I would have wielded the awesome power of the older brother song veto to keep any album off the turntable that would have taken up valuable listening time that could have been otherwise devoted rocking out to Billy Joel's "Glass Houses." However, this album also had ELO songs on it, and that changed everything. So as long as the album got played on both sides so that ELO got is fair share of listening time, I was okay with letting it play without objection.

Truth be told, I didn't mind hearing Olivia sing "Magic" and "Suddenly" at all. The other three songs on the front side were not my favorites. But listening to them was a reasonable price to pay for getting to listen to all five of the ELO songs on the flip side, including the hits "I'm Alive,""All Over the World," and "Xanadu." I thought "Don't Walk Away" and "The Fall" were also very good songs. Ruth didn't like the ELO songs as much as the Olivia songs, but she was willing to listen to the flip side all the way through because at the very end of Side 2 she got a little more Olivia and I got my beloved ELO with "Xanadu." And during a summer of "Magic" could there have been anything more magical than a song that had the power to bring about sibling harmony between brother and sister?

Nardo