A very good place to start. I've been bouncing around the mp3 blogs for a few months now, and thanks to the esteemed bloggers listed on the sidebar, I have discovered Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, and loads of other good stuff. Sadly, with none of my close friends around the place, I cannot indulge in the urge to be a music missionary.
Peoples, please to be enjoying and commenting and whatnot. You know who you are. And so do I.
Music started out as singing. I can't even remember when I started. Everyone in my family sings. My dad sings Hindi songs from the Golden Era, doing more than justice to the memories of Mohammad Rafi and Kishore Kumar. My mum sings those wonderful folksy songs found in your typical chord-and-lyric books from the 70's, strumming her guitar. My sister can sing all sorts of things. She sang O Holy Night on a few occassions, for carol services. No easy string of notes to hit. She sang Zombie at some coffee pub - live band and all. (There was an annoying period when she used to belt out R&B numbers, overdoing the caterwauling Whitney-Mariah nonsense. Thankfully, all things must pass.)
Me? I sang in choirs as a li'l kid. Then my voice cracked, and silence descended on me for several years. Until my third year of college, when I was asked to sing Maxwell's Silver Hammer for a wonderfully kooky play. The response was quite unexpected, so now I think I might sing in public again someday. If someone askes me to of course! Nothing like singing with intruments to back you up, and help you find your way.
The Ancient and Mystic Art of Singing lies at the very root of my musical appreciation; for all my forays into hard rock, prog-rock, instrumentals, psychedelia, funk, punk and sundry, I still look for The Sing-a-long Song. The catchy tune. There's a lilt in certain voices (the Sound of Sincerity, my dad might day) that tugs the heartstrings, inviting me to try and keep up. I think this is the common thread that links me to John Lennon, David Gilmour, Thom Yorke and Freddie Mercury - to name a paltry few.
Hence the Sound of Music reference in the title.
I want to quickly get to the new stuff I'm listening to, but I think I should warm up first, leafing through my dusty musical photo-album, searching for origins.
These are the roots of rhythm and the roots of rhythm remain.
- Under African Skies - Paul Simon
So in the next few posts I shall work my way up to this nameless decade. A lot of the bands are the standard Greatest Bands in the History of the Universe, so I can't say anything 'original' about them. What I am going to do can basically be summed up as follows:
A History of Rock 'n' Roll 'n' Me
(Being a meandering discourse on my subjective experience of listening to music)
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Music Is My Monkey.
