Music My Parents Might Like

I've been meaning to do this for a while. I've made a little compilation (or "mixtape" if you're a hipster) for my dad and mum.

My parents had a profound impact on my musical preferences. It took me a while to start listening to music that didn't conform to their taste. In college I rapidly expanded my aural horizons, and during the holidays I occasionally attempted to get them to listen to what I had picked up. At some point I gave up, despite my success in getting them to appreciate The Grateful Dead's American Beauty, and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. I recall playing OK Computer in the car once. My mother found it soporific and sad. Which it is. But she didn't like it.

Here's my playlist. Some of these songs are obviously chosen to suit the children of the sixties, but some transcend their era. Or at least I'd like to think so.

1. Findlay Brown - Don't You Know I Love You
2. The Shins - New Slang
3. Elbow - Leaders of the Free World
4. Dido - Mary's in India
5. David Gray - The One I Love
6. Elvis Perkins - While You Were Sleeping
7. Travis - Why Does It Always Rain On Me?
8. Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good
9. Neutral Milk Hotel - King of Carrot Flowers - Part One
10. Interpol - NYC
11. The White Stripes - You've Got Her In Your Pocket
12. Youth Group - Under the Underpass
13. Regina Spektor - Field Below
14. Coldplay - The Scientist
15. Oasis - Who Feels Love
16. The Killers - Read My Mind
17. Wolf Parade - This Heart's On Fire
18. The Decemberists - Sons and Daughters

You can dowload the whole album here.

If music were food

Let's delve right into this subjectivity thing.

If bands were food, what kind of food would they be?

We'll include drinks. Some things are too bitter to chew, but they can be swigged with a minimum wincing. Like tequila. No that you can chew tequila. Er.



So anyway. Off the top of my head:

The early Beatles (pre-Rubber Soul) - Biscuits. Cookies. Simple, sweet, and perfect.

The psychedelic Beatles - Increasingly elaborate confectionery. Fringe gourmet. Like chocolate covered chillies.

The Rolling Stones - Hooch. Moonshine. Country Liquor. Toddy.

Pink Floyd - Scotch. (I'm thinking The Dark Side of the Moon.)

Oasis - BEER!!

Nirvana - Blood. Salty and delicious.

Simon & Garfunkel - Fragrant herbal tea.

ABBA - American chocolate.

Radiohead - Tasty bile? Hee hee. I have no clue.

Led Zeppelin - Steak. Fortified wine. Or maybe "Lembas" bread from The Lord of the Rings. And then, as the seventies wore on... fruit. Often stale fruit.

Cake - cake.

The White Stripes - Red and white candy (obviously). With a hint of cinnamon.

The Grateful Dead - Apple pie. Spiked with magic mushrooms.





We can do this for genres too.

Heavy metal in general - heavy metals.

Disco - Sticky sweet cocktails. Some are good; most are awful.



I could go on forever. But I won't.

People, contribute in the commentspace! Feel free to disagree with me, of course. One man's halal is another man's kosher, after all.

Pete Doherty had a cheap Indian guitar!

Could it have been a Givson? Hee hee.

Check out Pete Doherty interviewing Paul McCartney in OMM. A genuinely charming interview.

In Rainbows

This could be a swan song. This could be a grand finale.

It's Radiohead, so who knows?

Listen to it.

So Here We Are

For me, listening to music and travelling go hand in hand. No matter the type of transportation (boats/ships aside) or the distance to destination, I must absolutely listen to music. This has been the case ever since I was little; more specifically, when my parents got their first car after coming Stateside. It all started with listening to cassette tapes of Chinese (and the occasional Western) artists my parents love/d, some of which I came to love myself. That eventually progressed into listening to my walkman, then CD player, and then the ol' ipod.

While driving or being a passenger in a car, particularly, there's just something about watching the landscape pass me by, especially if it's accompanied by the perfect song. It may be the music, the lyrics, or both that make every turn, every place more...alive? So unmitigatedly indescribable. Regardless, there is nothing else like it.

Here are a few travelling favorites:

Nick Drake - Pink Moon
I actually discovered the music of Nick Drake from this commercial (my favorite), which pretty much sums up the point I made. I love listening to this, especially at sunset/night.

Iron and Wine - Naked As We Came
Mellow song that's perfect for travelling past less populated areas/farm areas or for a smooth drive.

Cat Power - The Greatest
For a cloudy or dreary day or when particularly thoughtful.

The Postal Service - Clark Gable
The beat of this song gives turns more of a whimsical feel and almost seems to push you forward. But I really added this because I love this song and especially this one lyric: "And I want life in every word to the extent that it's aburd."

Bloc Party - So Here We Are
Perfect for listening at night in a city or some place with a lot of lights in the distance.

To Boldly Go

I am constantly in need of new music. And by this I mean music that is new to me, whether it's from the noughties, the eighties, or the eighteenth century.

The first phase of my musical life has been written about elsewhere. Here I want to talk about the current phase -- the Age of Discovery.

By the time I got to IIT I was tired of Classic Rock fundamentalism. I started discovering more and more new bands that kick serious ass. it's just that that since hip-hop dominates, these bands consider selling half a million copies a reasonable success. Far from the days of Dark Side of the Moon's 14 years on the US album chart. Oh well. Rock excess gave us hair metal.

In IIT I got into early UK Punk Rock. The Sex Pistols are spectacular. Menacing, crazy, funny, and they made some righteous noise. Not for everyone though. To my great irritation, someone once asked me if I had "graduated" to the Clash. Philistines! Of course, the Clash are awesome. I'm surprised that their album London Calling wasn't a college favourite - it has bits of reggae and ska, and plenty of good guitar. In any case, my tastes sort of became a bit more edgy and less laid back - not at all heavy metal, but up-tempo jangly guitars. Maybe pent-up IIT-related restlessness found its outlet that way.

Punk and New Wave set me up very well for the 21st Century's "New New Wave" or the "New Garage Revolution" or whatever you want to call it. Franz Ferdinand was the first of these bands that I heard. I first saw then on TV in 2004 -- on MTV India no less. The Libertines I discovered on the LAN in IIT. They really hit the spot. Much of the UK's rock scene can trace its origins to the Libertines thrilling, shambolic exuberance. The Strokes were the next band I picked up. I can't express the particular way their jaded rock reaches in and grabs me.

I don't recall how, but I started finding a fair number of bands that suited my taste from mp3 blogs. The mp3s they talk about are collected on sites like The Hype Machine and Elbows. The Hype Machine has a pretty awesome little flash player to sample mp3s. I also follow NME, a venerable old UK rock magazine, which, back in 1994, was the first to champion a new band from Manchester called Oasis. I like their taste normally. They're unapologetic about being smug trend-spotters. Another good website is The Guardian's music section. So I hear about a new band, then listen to them on their MySpace page, or on HypeM. And if I'm sufficiently curious, I download the album. I probably download an album once a week on average. If I like an album, I check out the band's wiki page. And If I really like an album, I go to Metacritic and All Music Guide. I love reading reviews of things I already like. It supplements my musical vocabulary. That's how I picked up the word "shambolic". Occasionally the reviewers talk about the band's influences, and then I do some musical archaeology/anthropology.

In the US you can find some pretty diverse musical tastes (every possible niche market has been explored-- I attribute it to Late Period Capitalism and its associated saturations.) In my department I found several people with strongly overlapping tastes. (My department is full of brilliant musicians -- I feel like the odd one out.) We go for concerts together, and I get recommendations from them. Some good, some weird, some awful. So it goes.

~

The mp3 I'm going to post now was not discovered by any of these methods. I saw it on TV. It's a My Chemical Romance song. Pop punk went and got all prog. In their new album they shamelessly lift musical ideas from Pink Floyd and Queen, and their clothes hark back to Sgt. Pepper, albeit in and emo avatar. I admire their ambition. However, the song I am going to post now is not prog. It's a regular rocking stomper, and I can't get enough of it. (Salil! Can you detect the T. Rex?)

My Chemical Romance -- Teenagers

~

September '07

When I got my very own laptop, nigh on 15 months ago now, I was overjoyed. Here at last was a computer I could organise the way I wanted to. No more folders scattered all over various hard drive partitions, no more desktops filled almost completely with icons and shortcuts (YUCK!), and no unwanted programs whatsoever.

(You should see our desktop at home. Sheesh. I guess it can't be helped, when more than one person uses a computer regularly, without making use of different Windows logins.)

Then the question arose -- how to organise my music? Some people, especially those with many gigs of mp3s, have a different folder for each artiste, and subfolders within those for each album. It's a reasonable system if your music consists mostly of entire albums, or if you're the type who knows exactly what he wants to listen to at any given time.

But it made far more sense to me to organise my music by genre, and only broadly. And it also made sense to use Windows' pre-set folders such as My Music, My Documents, My Pictures, and My Videos. Why go to the trouble of having another folder somewhere else entitled 'Music'? That just leads to complications when ripping, downloading, and so on.

And my 'system' works well for me. This is what my My Documents folder looks like:

I've tried often to remove Azureus Downloads, My eBooks, and My Sharing Folders, but they keep coming back. And this is My Music:

Tee hee. You may notice I had to look up how to take screenshots. And to think I used to want PrintScreen (SysRq), Scroll Lock, and Pause (Break) to be removed from standard keyboards.

Anyhow, so my Rock, Pop, & Hip-Hop folder is by far the biggest. Duh. It has three genres in it. Starting from January of this year, however, (i.e. when I got internet access in Delhi-- prior to that this laptop had never been connected to the 'net), I began to keep my new music in separate bunches for easy access, rather than have it lost within Rock, Pop, & Hip-Hop, where apart from a few folders all the songs are merely listed alphabetically:



For example, January had a lot of Keane downloading (I love them!), and this is reflected in its icon.

Finally arriving at the point of this post (!), here are some recommendations from my September 07 folder:


(1) Don Henly - Boys of Summer

This Eagle apparently had quite a successful solo recording career when his band split up prior to Hell Freezes Over, and if all his songs are like this one, I don't doubt that. After timestamp 2:30 it sounds like something off Pulse, only slightly faster than Floyd's usual stuff.


(2) The Eagles - One Day at a Time

Alright, I confess, I got both of these songs after happening to catch an Eagles concert on Zee Cafe's Sunday evening show, 'The Gig.' (Ten out of ten for imagination.) I like Boys of Summer better, but this is pretty good too, IMHO. Oo-la-lala! :)

By the by, I didn't know that so many of the Eagles sung. It was a different lead singer on almost every song I saw.


(3) Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights

If you don't already have this song, you must get it. The chorus is rather eighties English adult poppy, and, like Rihanna's Umbrella, the song was born to be played on the radio. Eminently listenable-to.


(4) Newton Faulkner - Dream Catch Me

Could be criticised as being a bit monotonous, especially the rythm section, but I like it. I'm trying to think whom his voice reminds me of: a younger hybrid of Gordon Lightfoot, Rod Stewart, and John Mayer?!

NB Please do comment if you listen to Gordon Lightfoot. I've never met anyone else who does, although I'm sure many people do. It's a parent thing, if you know what I mean. Only those whose folks listened to him are likely to have even heard of him.

(5) The Go-Go's - Head Over Heels

This one is pure eighties, and is in fact flicked from the soundtrack of a movie set partly in the eighties. (13 Going on 30, with Jennifer Garner. Forgive me.)


(6) P Diddy feat. Keyshia Cole - Last Night

I never thought I'd ever download a Puff Daddy song (apart from that cover of Every Breath You Take that he arranged.) I lost what little respect I had for the man who called himself Sean "Puffy" Combs when he changed his name to P Diddy after he split up with Jennifer Lopez. I mean, dude, she's blazing hot, but duuuuuuuudeee.. you can't change your NAME every time you lose a girlfriend! And from Puff Daddy to P Diddy!!! Did he? Didn't he? Diddy?!!?
Jeez.

But you know what... he does make some pretty darn good hip-hop songs. I stumbled across this while downloading the other one - Come to Me, featuring Nicole "PCD" Scherzingerburger. While Come to Me has been ingrained in my head as a "club" song (bound to come up while on the dance floor), Last Night isn't that common yet (in my circles, anyway), and I like, I like.


EDIT: Sorry, the screenshots came out far smaller than I expected. Bad Blogger!