What Was Your Favorite Album in High School? — Junior Year
The less said about my junior year in high school, the better. I don’t look back on the transition from 15 to 16 with much fondness or nostalgia. All I truly remember was being hungry and sad. All I wanted to do was eat chicken pot pies and cry over whatever breakup I was going through at the time. Telling a 16 year old boy that people have lives outside of his orbit is a near impossible task.
Some other things that stick out from that era:
— Staying up until 5 in the morning playing Call of Duty. I had a clan called OBEY and we were very good at the game.
— Drinking hella Mountain Dew without gaining a pound. Today I have to shovel abut six Tums down my gullet if I drink anything with carbonation.
— My brief rap career
— My first real introduction to parties and drinking and being a DD
— Exclusively listening to sad songs
— Wearing skinny jeans and straightening my hair
— Working at Subway
— Relapse by Eminem
Listen, I’m a white guy who loves rap. And if you’re a white guy who loves rap, Eminem is automatically your favorite rapper. White people love Eminem, it doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard any of his songs, it’s specifically coded into our DNA. Eminem’s fan base Venn Diagram are multiple overlapping circles of white people, Call of Duty fans, Monster Energy drinkers, and people with tribal tats. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we are lame asses.
Relapse is my favorite Eminem album. I have a particular fondness for the horror genre and Relapse is a near horror concept album rife with ridiculous rhyme schemes and shaky accents. There is a loud majority of people who don’t fuck with Relapse in any way, which is understandable because he spends an entire song talking about being molested by his step dad. The subject matter is a little iffy, but the album means more to me than that.
The album represents a period in my life where I finally got to spread my wings and be rebellious. When my cousin would make me DD to apartment parties, this was the album everybody played beer pong to. When I was so tired that I was crying and my cousin would plead, “Come on, one more beer,” I would sit on the couch and nod my head along to the album going through its fourth spin at the party, which made it okay. These people were about 5 years older than me and didn’t have any reason to care for my existence, but for a brief moment we were all together in the same room like a collage, nodding our heads along to Eminem rapping about sawing a poor young girl up with a chainsaw.
When you ask people what their favorite album is, most of the time it isn’t about how groundbreaking, innovative, or culturally important the piece of work was. It’ll be about how that album specifically spoke to you during a period of time. It doesn’t matter what Pitchfork or Anthony Fantano said about it, it mattered that when you listened to the album, it was like an invisible friend sitting next to you and saying all the right things to make you feel better. Your favorite album either got you through dark times, exacerbated a feeling you had about someone, motivated you, or took a snapshot of a moment you wanted to remember. And that was Relapse for me.
HONORABLE MENTION
808s and Heartbreak by Kanye West. If ever you needed a whole ass album to get you through a breakup, Kanye had your back. 808s is still a perfect album and one that immediately transports me back to a specific time in my life. I can remember where I was, what I was doing, what time of day, and who I was with the moment I first heard this album.
Viva La Vida by Coldplay. I haven’t listened to this album since I went through my pretentious phase in college.
Paper Trail by T.I. I legitimately never thought T.I. would ever fall off because this album was so perfect. But lo and behold I’m not even sure T.I. makes music anymore. “Swagger Like Us” still goes.
Folie à Deux by Fall Out Boy. It should be stated that I’m not a Fall Out Boy guy, which makes sense why I would love the album nobody really cares about. The sound was mainstream enough to make 16 year old me zoom down the streets blasting “The (shipped) Gold Standard.”
