quoted 7 lines I dug through some CDs and found _(Who's Afraid of?) The Art of Noise!_> >I dug through some CDs and found _(Who's Afraid of?) The Art of Noise!_
> >today and am marveling at how primitive it sounds. Not that that's bad, of
> >course - it's been ten years since it came out - I still find it fun.
>
> i was just listening to it recently and marvelling at how fresh it still is.
> this is definitely one disc that changed my life, and bits of it are still
> amazing.
This album absolutely changed my life. I can trace the entire development
of my musical taste back to that album. It opened the mind of a willing
13-year-old to a world of strange, weird, new musical possibilities,
completely apart from top-40 radio. Granted, it doesn't sound "clean," but
then, the best experiments never are. It's got a sense of humor (even if
you don't read the liner notes), it's got just plain strangeness, it's
smooth, it's abrupt, it's got style and grittiness. My early musical diet
(courtesy of my father) consisted of Elton John, the Rolling Stones and
Dire Straits, and I can still remember the look on my dad's face when I
played this tape for him, and it was not a look of bemusement, a look of
disdain, or a look of helplessness, but a look of wonder, just like mine.
And, yes, it is a fun record. But not a novelty. It's a very "important"
album, at least to me, and I think it's underappreciated just how much
this album contributed to the music we hold so dearly today. It was
certainly ahead of its time, if not way ahead. Every time I go back to
that album, there's something new in it, and it sounds like it could have
been put out today. It is more than occasionally that I think, "the world
hasn't quite caught up with this yet."
- Adam J Weitzman
INDIVIDUAL, Inc.
weitzman@individual.com