Languages Inhabited: Teju Cole's Favourite Albums


"My early memories are of loving visual art – drawing and painting – and of learning to read quite young. Music was sort of peripheral. There was plenty of it around, and in good variety, everything from '70s soul to classical in my parents' LPs, but there was also Michael Jackson and all the Nigerian music that poured out of the cars and shops of the city. I was into 'Thriller', but not more or less than my schoolmates. And then there was the R&B of the late '80s and early '90s. I think the big musical moment happened for me in my second year of college, after I went to the US. That was when I really got into both jazz and classical, at the same time. I was amazed at how well certain things held up to repeated listenings: Coltrane, Mahler, Beethoven. Not long after came 'world music', and I had a similarly stunned reaction to my first encounters with the likes of Ali Farka TourĂ© and Oumou SangarĂ©. ..."
The Quietus

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