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there will be more when i can find the words.
since i'm in total geek-out mode for the radiohead show tomorrow i decided to add a radiohead song to my myspace profile. (to the right is my countdown: 1 day!)
the first thing that came up in the search for radiohead on myspace (so that i may find, and add, a song), was radiohead: an afrobeat crunk band from maine. do you think no one has told them about...radiohead? or are they using this as a clever myspace marketing tool, so that people who do like radiohead will find them and listen. i suspect that these may actually be a bunch of kids who have never heard of radiohead (!), because if it were the latter reason i'd assume they'd pick a genre of music closer to their own. to think, here i am listening to an endless rotation of radiohead songs when there are kids in maine who are going hungry. i think i will message them. teach them to fish.
update: upon closer inspection, the aforementioned band actually has "fake plastic trees" as one of their songs. so they have in fact heard the real radiohead before, though it seems they prefer the bends-era. and i don't really know why they've included this song on their profile music, if they are also a band. and also called radiohead. i'm confused. lost, scared, and cold. so cold.
moving on, next we have the actual URL myspace.com/radiohead - this belongs to a 24 year old young man from greenwich, england. he is 5'11". if you are looking for more useless information, similar to that of the height of a guy in england that you don't know, keep reading.
there isn't a radiohead song i can add to my myspace page from his page. however, visiting his page wasn't a complete waste of time, as it led me to waste even more time. and as we all know, wasting time + wasting time = knowledge. when myspace is added to this equation it is equivalent to multiplying the sum by infinity. so...the tag line for his profile is "his words were empty, just like his head." i liked this quote, so i googled it. the guy has bukowski and dylan thomas in his top 8 friends...so i figured it would be a line from a novel i may want to check out.
nope, i was wrong. it was from a movie called "gingersnaps". which, according to imdb, is a movie about suburban goth girl sisters, outcasts of course, that uses werewolfism as a metaphor for puberty.
okay, maybe that's not "useful" "knowledge".
stay tuned for a semi-informative post about the art of the tribute band...
all i could think of while watching the sounds tonight was...that singer looks just like the girl in "not another teen movie". okay, that's not all i thought. i also thought, "wow, this band doesn't suck as much as i thought they would."
a friend of mine tells me that i judge bands too much on image. i claim i do not like them on principle. declaring i do not like a band for this reason or that, or because i don't like their album cover or something that really has nothing to do with their music (which i usually don't hear, because of the whole "principle thing").
this friend is right. i need to stop taking music so seriously. tonight was a perfect example. i went to the old workplaces party to celebrate their music issue. the sounds are on this years cover. for reasons i won't go into, i thought this was a bad idea. an irrelevant, fad band that plays music you pretty much only want to hear after doing drugs in the bathroom at misshapes at 3am - should not be on the cover of any music issue. but in this case, the band fits the magazine. so i guess that's fine.
so there i was in front of the stage. waiting for the band to go on, a million rays of color from the stage lights basked over my jaded, jaded skin. suddenly they went dark and the remix of fall out boy's "dance dance dance" faded. the deejay, tommie sunshine, surprised me with (an unremixed) "don't stop believin'" by journey.
this is the best. song. ever.
earlier in the day i had been listening to this very song on my ipod, walking down madison avenue. it was raining, i was in the midst of tourists and the business set grabbing their mid day caffeine fix. i sloshed through the streets in shoes entirely innappropriate for the weather, thinking: there is never not a good time to listen to this song.
this intro music to the band broke down my wall of pretension. (i know, here i am talking about not listening to any music that isn't "important" and referencing my love for journey. very well then I contradict myself!) but there i was, ready to give in. and you know, they weren't bad. they weren't breaking any new ground musically - but they were fun. remember fun? in that atmosphere they were the perfect music to be listening to. would i have rather been in toronto for this? yes. but i wasn't.
my friend jordan has a shirt that says "music is not a fashion statement". i like that shirt. i like bands who follow that statement. but it isn't always true. i wish it were, but these days catchy hooks + looks (unfortunately) = music. not all the time, but a lot of the time. and i think many of these bands (the sounds are a perfect example) use not only clothes, but instrumentation and lyrics, as an image and as result their image and music are "one". it's not going to end, there will always be these bands. so...when in rome...
lately i've been obsessing over the origins of music, musical timelines and everyone's personal sonic roots. it's a broad topic and i've brought it up with at least 3 people in the past few days. there are no answers, just opinions and personal stories. i sort of began to write about the topic of one's own musical history on this blog 2 years ago.
i personally grew up in a household where everyone had unique music tastes. the important part was that there was always music on, somewhere, even if i didn't like what was playing (example: my grandmother had an accordian and listened to german music).
my mom listened to country, the beach boys and air supply
my dad listened to led zeppelin, pink floyd and the beatles
my brother listened to inxs, queensryche, guns n' roses , U2, phish (the list goes on, chris - feel free to amend in the comments. and note i did not mention you listened to simply red. oops.)
when i was little i was scared of my dad's led zeppelin poster in the garage (and on second thought that may have been a poster of nostradamus), i threw at least 3 of my mom's air supply tapes away, but she kept rebuying them. and i basically listened to whatever my brother listened to - because i thought he was cool. but all of the music was there, getting in my head, my soul.
i always listened to stories about my parents relationship with music. my dad was at the led zeppelin concert that is now a dvd called "the song remains the same". he is very willing to educate anyone willing to listen on musicians he thinks are good. he usually does this while playing his music dvd's on surround sound at a very high volume.
my mom (once she moved here from germany as a teenager) became fully immersed in the elvis/beach boys/teeny bopper music scene. she had so many programs from these big shows she went to, where every popular musician seemed to play on one stage, in one night.
my brother made me sing all of U2's "sunday bloody sunday" before he allowed me to listen to any of his tapes. i remember the day clearly. i was very anxious to prove that i loved music. i sang the song in our driveway on a sunny afternoon, and that was my first real memory of mainstream music (ie: not a nursery rhyme).
my mom let me be in control of the radio when i drove around with her in the car. she didn't like it. she wanted to talk (or listen to air supply). i wanted to sit in the car and stare out the window while listening to whatever tape i just took from my brother. i wanted to get inside the music. it couldn't be loud enough, there couldn't be enough of it, i always needed it on. to this day i try to drown out any car chatter with music. the only person who doesn't get annoyed by this is my dad.
we used to have a van that my dad gutted and rebuilt. it had two front seats, then a cushioned and carpeted wall/floor/ceiling and a mousehole that went to a double bed in the back. somewhere in the plush walls were speakers. we would go for drives and listen to my dad's 8-tracks. i would roll around the carpet listening in a disoriented sort of way.
in return for them introducing me to "their music" i repayed them by making them listen to "my music". i made them watch nirvana's "live! tonight! sold out!!!' vhs tape. i don't think they "got it".
prior to that, i would do things like play music on my boombox outside, while throwing around a basketball or attempting to learn to skateboard on our pot hole ridden driveway. in particular i remember playing roxette's "the look" every day at 3pm for at least a week. this is when my friend/crush colby hausmann would ride by on his bike. he was in to much darker music, even at an early age, so my pop songs never enticed him. later i taped a special on whales for my science teacher so we could watch it in class, i "accidentally" taped over a section of it with the video for "one" by metallica. i liked to believe this washed away any prior opinion colby had about my previous music tastes. but i'm not apologizing, my musical quilt isn't soley made of fine fabrics.
this could go on forever. i'll leave you with some mp3's of songs that will always be a part of who i am:
trampled_under_foot.mp3
- led zeppelin
sloop_john_b.mp3
- the beach boys
strawberry_fields_forever.mp3
- the beatles
stuck_inside_of_mobile_with_the_memphis_blues_again.mp3
- bob dylan (this influence comes from a teacher in high school who brought us to the west village and talked about dylan)
bell_bottom_blues.mp3
- eric clapton
on_a_plain.mp3
- nirvana
wish.mp3
- nine inch nails (some of my nin history)
there's plenty more (i can't even pick just one radiohead song), but you get the idea.
