![]() ![]() This was not just because of my illness, of course. Liquefied but also somehow hardening into something past the point of changing. Everything in my world at that moment felt in transition, careening out of control. ![]() Personal history and pop-cultural narrative have always swirled together in my recollection of the past, so one of the only things I know for sure about the humid, late-August night I was rushed to the emergency room for the first time was that it was also the night Princess Diana died. I was an athletic kid, then eagerly preparing for another season of soccer, but in the weeks that followed I grew wan and weak. Had he taken either of us more seriously, he would have detected the potentially lethal infection that was slowly spreading through my body. When I first went to my pediatrician late that summer with a bright, shooting sensation in my abdomen, he dismissed both my condition and my mother's concern, telling us blithely that it was probably just a stomach virus that was going around. Just before I started fifth grade, I suffered a small tear in my appendix - a rare, random occurrence that results in a more gradual release of bacteria into the body than happens when an appendix fully ruptures. I listened to Fiona Apple's Tidal for the first time in a hospital bed. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Photo Illustration by Estefania Mitre/NPR Getty Images Courtesy of Columbia Records When she first heard Fiona Apple's album 1996 Tidal, writer Lindsay Zoladz says the record stood out to her for how it "validated experience of pain."
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