Most of the items on my Countdown to 40 blog symbolize key transitional points in my life. Entertainment Weekly reconnected me to the suburban life I felt I had lost. Jagged Little Pill served as the soundtrack to freshman year of college for my friends and I. A major period of self reflection and realization began when I heard The Velvet Rope for the first time (and several times thereafter). Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends inspired my appreciation for the written word. A few other items simply represent a few of my favorite things (see Pushing Daisies, Super Mario Bros, and Game of Thrones). Somewhere between the the importance of the first set of examples and my pure affinity for the latter set lies World Clique.
Deee-Lite's 1990 album of dance-pop music boasts the distinction of being my very first CD purchase and therefore marks the beginning of an era of conspicuous consumption. (It was the 90s, after all.) Soon after acquiring my first CD player, I quickly grew obsessed with purchasing CDs and building my collection. By the time I graduated college, I owned over 400 of them, ranging in genre from classical to rap and from Disney to grunge. I considered them badges of honor and something to be proud of, proof of which was recently uncovered after rifling through a storage bin of photographs. Tucked away near the bottom of the container sat a box of wallet-sized senior portraits, including one of me sitting among piles of CD jewel cases with several of my favorites prominently featured in the foreground. Clearly I wanted people to know just how important those CDs were to me, and I also thought I would want to remember such banality. Talk about an awkward photo! I laughed out loud before promptly sharing the cringeworthy photo with my husband and one of our good friends, Jen. My addiction, for lack of a better word, was fueled equally by my susceptibility to the idea that buying stuff would make me happy and my desire to "broadcast" my own Top 40 using CDs (rather than music recorded on cassette tapes from the radio). I mean, how could I effectively accomplish creating and listening to my Top 40 without the CDs needed to play each song on cue? For a while, the CDs and Top 40 did bring me much happiness, at least superficially. I considered them my path to popularity, or at least acceptance. This, of course, proved a faulty line of thinking, but I was a teenager searching for acceptance by any means possible and didn't know any better, and the more CDs I purchased, the more accepted and understood I assumed I'd become. In reality, though, they provided more of a curtain to hide behind and false sense of identity. My CD collection never did provide me with the magic ticket to the in-crowd. More often than not, the random and numerous CDs I couldn't live without because of my love for a one-hit wonder were disappointments. Yet despite the glaringly obvious problem with my misplaced consumerism, it did introduce me to some great music along the way, beginning with my very first CD purchase, Deee-Lite's World Clique. I bought the album for "Groove Is in the Heart," number #28 on my Hot 101, but I also discovered that every one of the CD's twelve tracks proved just as delightfully catchy and enjoyable, a circumstance rarely repeated. What I didn't recognize was how World Clique would turn into one of my most listened-to albums. Today, I continue to thoroughly enjoy World Clique and still find myself returning to it a few times each year--far more than I can say for roughly 95% of the other CDs I thought I could not live without as a teenager.
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I am a self-proclaimed pop culture geek and list enthusiast who is celebrating the big four-zero by counting down the most important, influential, and favorite music, movies, television shows, books, and video games of my life so far. Categories
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