Feb
14
2011
Playlist Week 5: You’ve Eliminated Any Interruptions Or Distractions
I’m challenging myself to get through a whole shuffle of my music collection on my iPod without skipping. Then I write about what I heard each week.
Hey, guess what? I listened to my iPod this week. And I didn’t skip songs. And this isn’t getting old at all! Sigh.
The title of this post comes from Meat Beat Manifesto’s ‘Pot Sounds’ and I wish that the line had been true this week, as I was a walking distraction every day. “Mindstream’ also came up this week. Both of these songs are from a tape (I know!) that fueled many a make-out session in college. “Peace…Love”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fxPmtu5Y2E
This week I realized that I don’t have any Steppenwolf on my iPod and that made me sad. Must rectify that soon.
Here is the weekly summary:
* Songs listened to this week: 116
* Completed: 24%
* Number of double shots: 4 (The police * 4 (3 live, too many bootlegs!), The Beatles
* Percentage of songs that came up during running that were so totally not helpful in motivating my running: 20% (I only ran on the treadmill once this week, but the songs that came up that day were pretty good).
Songs of note:
Ween’s ‘Flies on My Dick’ came up this week and I can’t say I would have listened to it if not for the challenge. Interestingly, what I couldn’t get out of my head the whole time was how much one of the two voices sounded like Eric the Midget from the Howard Stern show. I’ll never be able to listen to this song the same way again.
Even though I had no desire to see the movie and in fact, didn’t see it in theaters, then DVR’ed it and still didn’t watch it (it was one of the casualties of a full DVR during this year’s Australian Open), I got caught up in the pre-“Snakes on a Plane” fever. I remember sending people phone messages from Samuel L. Jackson in character. ‘Fuck You Snakes’ came up this week and it is so great that I left no stone unturned trying to figure out where I had gotten it so that I could share it. Don’t say I’m not committed to my blogging craft. Jeremy Tague, I don’t know who you are, but thank you for ‘Fuck You Snakes.’
Body Count/Ice-T ‘Body Count’ As a long time fan of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, I sometimes forget about Ice-T’s Body Count. This gem of a song was on the same Sire Records compilation as Merlin’s ‘Feel the Fury.’ “Don’t you hear the guns, you stupid, dumb, dick suckin’, bum politicians?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hX6Wuj1T-E
* Number of new to me songs: 1 (Mew ‘Introducing Palace Players’)
* Number of songs that I’m so totally deleting: 1
Animal Logic ‘Another Place’ Never liked this song, would even fast forward it in my cassette tape days. Jackson Browne sings on this, which does nothing for me.
* Most wanted to skip: Hooverphonic ‘Neon (Hidden Track)’ would prefer that it stay hidden. Also, did you know I had ‘Highwayman’ by Johnny Cash et al on my iPod? I’m not sure I did! I groaned audibly when it came on. Might have gone a little overboard with the Johnny Cash CD ripping in my post “Walk the Line” movie enthusiasm. Once I got over my initial dread, the song actually grew on me. But I don’t know that it will live through the planned post-shuffle challenge purging of the iPod.
* Song I’ll be saddest not to hear again until this is over: The Ocean Blue ‘Sublime’ This song is one of the main reasons I bothered to dig up my missing Ocean Blue CDs and rip them after week 1 of the shuffle challenge. Yes, hearing this song was so sublime.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeMbx2LzwFc
* Weirdest coincidence: Deerhoof ‘Satan‘ My nickname from college is Satan, so Dave put this on a mix for me. I call this song the meow song, as it sounds to me like the singer is saying meow over and over. Dave loves Deerhoof and went to see them in concert on Monday night. I couldn’t make myself go with him. I don’t like them that much. I thought it was weird that this song came up the next day.
* Song that made me smile the most: Ween’s ‘The Stallion, Pt. 2’ (and oh yes, there are parts 1 and 3 as well) actually had me fighting off laughter on my evening commute one night. People must have thought I was crazy. But no, “I am the Stallion…man.” I’m not sure why it took them so long to feel they’d made their point…you know, about being the Stallion…man.
* Only Komeda song I like: Last week I heard what I mistakenly thought was the only Komeda song I like. This week the other Komeda song I like came up. Here is ‘Binario’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvTdbb8PDsw
* Police song with cursing: ‘Someone To Talk To’ “Now that she’s gone I know she was great, but I fucked it up and now it’s too late.” I put this song on the “Fuck Mix” tape I made years ago, filled with great songs that include the word fuck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4alphWN3Xc
* Several random memories this week: The Wedding Present ‘Brassneck’ and Simon & Garfunkel ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’
Actually, most of the songs that come up make me think of something related to when I first heard it or when I listened to it most frequently. Strong associations abound in my music collection. Just trying to pull out a few key songs each week to keep it simple.
The Wedding Present’s Bizarro was the first tape that Dave ever lent me, in the very early stage of our relationship. The excitement I felt to be sharing in something he really liked when I liked him so much allowed me to suffer through, but in all honesty, I didn’t like the music much. Just sounded like noise to me. I’m a singing snob and I didn’t find the singing all that skillful. And there was that little matter of all the songs sounding the same. There are even two versions (which I couldn’t distinguish from each other) of Brassneck on the album! I teased Dave about them only having one song (Brassneck) all the time. Later, I came to find out that I wasn’t the only one who thought that. The band themselves used “all the songs sound the same” as a tag line and put it on swag they were selling. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the Wedding Present more. We saw them play Bizarro in its entirety (and some bonus songs beforehand too) last year and it was a great show. I’d love to have a bootleg of that show, since it sounded better than the CD sounds.
A friend of mine from high school loved the song Bridge Over Troubled Water. She asked me to tape it for her and I don’t remember if she suggested this or if I was being a smart ass, but I made her a tape filled up with nothing but this song over and over. I still have trouble listening to this song because I overdid it so much back then. A biography of Simon & Garfunkel that I read during college includes a sad story about this song as it related to the breakdown of their partnership and friendship. A post that I’ve been working on and has been sitting saved in draft status for months mentions this story and relays my own creative partnership story, but I just can’t seem to tie the pieces together and finish the post in a way that satisfies me. Plus, the other half of my creative partnership seems to have subscribed to this blog recently (hi Flash!) and that ratchets up the pressure to make the post something worth reading.
* Genesis song that seems to be the best segue so far for explaining my thoughts about the group: ‘The Cinema Show’
The original version from Selling England By the Pound came up this week. This song was relatively easy to listen to, because I’ve heard Phil Collins singing it live. I taped a live version off the radio and listened to it over and over again while doing my Youth for Understanding summer in the Netherlands in 1989. So I can handle the original version, but I prefer the live version with Phil singing (here’s part of it, can’t find the full thing in one video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMthy8uVZw
I’m relatively young to be a Genesis fan, given that they formed several years before I was even born. As a teeny bopper, I suppose I should have been taken with New Kids on the Block or some such. But I fell hard for the Police (as is evident in my previous playlist posts) and their absence after about 1984 made me sad. What little Genesis I knew to that point (stuff like ‘No Reply At All’ and ‘That’s All’) I thought was pleasant enough. When the album ‘Invisible Touch’ was released, I was in 8th grade. I now know that die-hard fans of the classic Genesis line up (like Dave) find this album insufferable, but I was 13 years old and my family had fairly recently hooked up cable. Say what you will, but the video for ‘Invisible Touch’ charmed the socks off me. The song is super catchy, better than a lot of the shit being released at the time, and the band seemed fun and self-deprecating. Most importantly, Tony Banks, the keyboard player, was adorable and I developed quite a crush on him.
Almost as if it were for the express purpose of filling me in on the nearly two decades worth of back catalog I had missed by being so ridiculously young, MTV became Genesis central. Their documentary “Genesis: From the Beginning” and their behind the scenes of the Invisible Touch tour (I still have both taped on VHS) both introduced me to the fact that Genesis had existed long before I had and cemented my love of the band, their music, and particularly Tony. During one of the interviews, Tony’s talking about a song called ‘The Brazilian’ and how it’s closer to the kinds of music on his solo albums (during which time I remember thinking, “you have solo albums?!?”). He cheekily says “So if you like the Brazilian, go buy my solo albums,” and then with a huge grin laughingly says “which no one does!” Oh my God, so adorable.
Like I had done with the Police a few years earlier, I started excitedly procuring Genesis’ catalog going backwards from Invisible Touch. My older brother already had some of their more recent stuff, and I devoured and loved everything I heard. I think I had to acquire everything prior to Abacab. Everything was still cassette tape, but then my brother used his Taco Bell money to buy a fancy new stereo system (which I think he still has!) for his room and he let me use it if he wasn’t around. The first CD I ever owned (and the last until I finally got my own CD player in college) was the live double album ‘Seconds Out.’ After going back through the Genesis catalog and liking everything through ‘A Trick of the Tail,’ I finally hit the proverbial (garden, ha!) wall. I skipped ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.’ Not sure why, I think it was just too frightening to start the non-Phil Collins as leader singer era with a double album. I never did buy it. Dave had it and I eventually ripped his copy of it (which I still haven’t listened to start to finish). I did get ‘Selling England by the Pound’, ‘Foxtrot’, ‘Nursery Cryme’, and ‘Trespass’ on tape. However, my mind was just not open to Genesis with Peter Gabriel singing. Strange really, because I have no problem with Peter Gabriel. I like a lot of his solo music. And I love Genesis. I just don’t like them together. The songs don’t seem to be the problem either since I like the songs of that era that I’ve heard Phil sing. Apparently a music journalist said after Phil took over singing duties that Phil sounded more like Peter Gabriel than Peter Gabriel did. I think I know what he meant.
experience