Duran Duran - Ordinary World
The second album I ever actually owned, as in bought with money I had earned, Duran Duran's "The Wedding Album" was a huge part of my 7th grade life, and "Ordinary World" was the biggest part of that album for me. If it's possible to mainline yearning, then this song was my first experience of that. Strictly speaking, I didn't have a whole lot to yearn for: I had clothes, shelter, food, friends, a decent collection of baseball cards, and an incipient relationship with a girl in my class. Not bad, really. But this song, for whatever reason, made me vulnerable to new dimensions of dissatisfaction: I wondered why my life wasn't full of dramatic, windswept, rainy episodes with forlorn women (or, at that time, girls), and why I wasn't tormented by loss and longing. Also contributing to this was the four-tracks-later bomb of "Come Undone" which, when coupled with "Ordinary World," served to propel me into a frenzy of mid-pubescent Romanticism, which led to many long solo walks around my neighborhood, and into the habit of reading nineteenth century literature (this was the year I took "War & Peace" out of the library for the first time and read the first 100 pages, intermittently and uncomprehendingly, for the next three years). I loved "Ordinary World" because it felt so adult back then--it felt like a token of the future, and it was, to some extent--and I still love it, for reasons that don't involve imagined scenarios of windswept tortured drama, but because it's retained its mystery so well. It still feels like a window on another time and place.[Buy The Wedding Album]