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Plethora of Pop Album Challenge
Music is a Series of Years, Year After Year
My favorite albums from every year of my life
July 15, 1956. I am born. My grandmother yells at me from the dividing window in St. Vincent Hospital’s nursery.
“I hate you…you nearly killed my baby!”
Am I not the baby here? Did I try to kill myself? But then I realize that it’s the person whose body I emerged from that she means. And yes, getting out here was tough. I kept butting my head against something rock hard and unforgiving. It literally took hours, and I heard all sorts of moans and sighs and screams; some of these were surely my own. Though as I look about me now, all seems well, and what is this notion of “hate” anyway?
On day three when I leave this place and arrive at what everyone tells me is “home,” my grandmother asks forgiveness:
“I love you,” she says. “I honestly love you.”
And so my first life lesson is that there is truly a “thin line between love and hate.”
I won’t know this until later, because my family doesn’t pay any attention to Billboard Magazine and its Hot 100 charts, but the week I was born, and apparently many weeks before and after, the #1 song in America is something called,