First Album I Bought

Most days I only check Bluesky and Mastodon for a few minutes while I’m in between sets at the gym. When I happened to have loaded up Bluesky recently I saw a variant on those old email chains that seem to reappear on each new social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc). This one was asking people to post the first album they ever bought. Thinking back to my first ever CDs, I knew the first 3 or 4 were birthday gifts. Eventually I figured it was most likely Going Public by The Newsboys. When I had both a CD player and enough money to buy my own music I was basically only listening to oldies (thanks to my parents) or Contemporary Christian Music (thanks to my faith and the fact that it was the only rap or rock that my parents approved of). But then I thought a bit more and I realized I bought an album before that…only I bought it on cassette tape.

When I was in my older years in elementary school (4th grade, or thereabouts), there was a song that was unavoidable even though my parents stuck to the Oldies Station or 70s and 80s music: Whoomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team was EVERYWHERE. Given the fact that my kids are often exposed to music at school, I must have heard it there. I also remember (and this can’t have been kosher, now that I thin about it) that the bus driver used to play Power96 (the party station!) because I heard the Miami Bass song Toosie Roll on the bus. So maybe I heard it on the bus.

I used my allowance to buy the cassette tape that had the entire album by Tag Team. This turned out to be the first time I came across the concept of a radio edit, although I didn’t really understand that is what occurred until I was older. Unfortunately for me, as soon as I bought the tape I couldn’t wait to listen to it so I unwrapped it and handed it to my mom to play in the van’s tape player. (In my memory we already had the van, but it might have been the station wagon). She immediately heard some bad words (she has some kind of radar for that, because I didn’t hear it) and I never heard that tape again. I assume she threw it away, because I never saw it again, even when I was older.

I was very confused because I didn’t remember hearing any bad words on the radio and, certainly, my teachers wouldn’t have played any music with profanity. To be perfectly honest, I’m not even sure I knew music COULD have profanity. I truly understood how much things could change for the radio edit when I was in high school during the early Napster days. I had heard Eminem’s The Real Slim Shady on the radio. I thought it was funny (and hadn’t yet found his schtick tiresome and annoying) and when I ended up getting the album version from someone on Napster I was shocked! By that time I was used to bad words on the radio being literally bleeped or even (and I don’t know if this was a station-specific thing or came from the record company) random sounds like honks, car horns, etc. I didn’t know that artists would CHANGE the words. Even worse was Insane Clown Posse’s The Nedden Game. Power96 used to play a radically changed radio edit. I’m sure it was still rude in a way that old man me would shake his head at, but it was NOWHERE near as raunchy as the real version.

The biggest disappointment for me, coming back to this story some 30ish years later is that the album seems to have disappeared from our cultural history. Only the single is available on Spotify - and it’s only the radio edit. Attempts to find any digital versions of the album have come up empty. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to spend money to buy a CD (assuming I can find it) of that cheesy type of rap that was made in the 1990s. I just want to see what it was that was so scandalous that I wasn’t allowed to listen to it.

• Rap
• Rock
• Contemporary-Christian-Music