In the summer of 1998, I found the album that changed my life. I was a smart-ass teenager, fresh out of high school and living on my own, soaked in Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, and Ministry, and making tapes of my favorite Ween songs for my friends to listen to. Electronic music was present in pop culture: Madonna was throwing out dance hits, I knew every radio play Information Society song, and C&C Music Factory was still on the radio waves and at every sporting event. However, what we would think of as the grandparents of our dance hits we still hear today was well hidden in the underground in Texas. It was there, but I didn’t know it.
I was leaving a pawn shop with my then bad-decision boyfriend with a stack of $3 CDs to go absorb, when we decided we wanted to stop and get some coffee. When we pulled into the Starbucks parking lot, and when I opened my door, I saw a goofy, brightly colored CD that reminded me of a laundry detergent box with “Kickin’ Mental Detergent” written across the front. It was slightly scratched, but not enough to warrant throwing out, and probably not enough to skip (thankfully, that was true). We decided we would go home and listen to this in the big stereo (alas, the car had no CD player) along with the rest of our CDs.
I will say, with the exception of a few tracks, most of the CD was hokey at first. It was the type of heavily sampled techno that was haphazard, full of movie quotes, and definitely a snapshot of the times. I’m not going to lie and say the entire album was revolutionary either. But the first song, the way this album opened up caught me off guard. The CD announced “WHO LOVES YOU, AND WHO DO YOU LOVE?” and then dropped into a Running Man sample; “It’s time to start RUNNING!” It was chaotic and melodic without being fluffy or feminine, despite the sample cooing “Did I dream, you dreamed about me.” It was extremely aggressive without the use of guitars, acidy, and was SO sampled and gleefully muddled with arpeggiated synthesizers. It was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. It was so far removed from the fluff I heard on the radio; it was like a heavy breath of fresh air and being hit with a 2×4 to the face at the same time. This was techno. This CD blew my fucking mind.
Since there was no case or insert with CD info, I had no time frame of when this album came out (1992), or that 2 of the songs, my 2 favorite songs, were by an English techno group called Messiah. They were contemporaries with Utah Saints, the KLF, and Orbital, and were hugely popular in their day. The song, “Temple of Dreams,” was apparently a huge hit, and you can still scoop it up on vinyl on eBay.
My then-jerkface boyfriend absolutely hated it, despite the fact that we were listening to some music that most of our friends thought was weird. I had to listen to this album in our recording studio, alone, with my headphones on, in my precious few private moments. I had fallen in love with music that was so strange and wonderful, and I knew deep down that it was going to be an issue for us in the long run. I dumped the boyfriend and started reaching out to find more music. In the next year, I went to my first “party” and then fell in love with electronic music booming through my body. I was the person that never danced ever, and I was moved to move exactly however I felt I needed to dance at that second. The music and the parties in general taught me to quit caring so much about what other people thought of me, and learned to unleash that strange little girl I used to be again. I was taught by the music, and most importantly that album, to give zero fucks.
This scratched album that I found in a parking lot became my gateway drug to the music that I’m still fawning over with teen-like fury to this day. This led me on to the softer side of Paul Oakenfold and Dave Ralph’s “Tranceport” CDs, BT, and then to darker territories with pretty much all of Ram Record’s catalog, and on to house music. I was thirsty, like a 4/4 addict that needed a fix, ANY fix, ALL of the fixes.
It wasn’t that this song and album just changed my life, it’s that it managed to entwine itself with it. When I met my now-husband and we hung out for countless hours listening to albums, he brought out an album, Messiah’s “21st Century Jesus,” a 1993 snapshot of the state of techno as it was blossoming in the European underground. This album had 2 of my favorite songs from the “Kickin Mental Detergent,” but it also had a song, “Thunderdome,” which had a re-sung sample of a line from The Who’s “Tommy” (a favorite musical of mine in my childhood) that had been remixed heavily in another one of my favorite tracks I had latched onto once I got into the rave scene. It was a sweet, strange bonding for both of us having latched onto music that was almost 10 years old, and almost before both of our times. From there, I dove into his collection of Utah Saints, Orbital, The KLF, and all the things that I missed being in love with the trance and drum and bass.
I still listen to everything I can get my hands on, from ambient to electro, trance to dnb, dubstep to house, and everything in between. As with everything it seems musically in my life, I always have to search backwards, educate myself, fall in love, and then love to move forward.
“Kickin Mental Detergent” Full Album
Tracklist:
- Messiah – “Temple of Dreams”
- Wishdokta – “Evil Surrounds Us”
- Zero Zero – “World Famous”
- Third Mind – “Beans & Barley”
- Messiah – “There Is No Law”
- Zero Zero – “Zeroxed”
- Third Mind – “Just Makes Me”
- The Scientist – “Exorcist”
- Wishdokta – “Sunrise”
- DEA – “You Think It’s Over Now”
- The Scientist – “The Bee”
What was the song or album that changed YOUR life? Let us know in the comments!
Journalist/blogger since 2009 and music lover since 1980. Bex now travels the world and writes and takes photos of dance events, creates art in various media, sings quietly to her cat in the shower, and occasionally builds something that tends to involve a blowtorch. She can usually be seen hiding behind some sort of camera rig.
