“Full use of your powers along lines of excellence.” – Happiness, Greek Definition
For me, they are Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major (K467) and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in C Minor. You’ll know them when you hear them, and they are just… perfect. If those two do not convince you to delve deeper into the cavernous genre of Classical music, I’m not sure what will.
Anyone disagree? Any better suggestions?
New, Awesome Music
Sarah Harmer
Sarah Harmer is a bluesy/folksy/bluegrassy/acoustic-guitar-oriented, environmentally and socially conscious, lovely, tender artist. I happened to run into her fantastic song I Am Aglow while listening to BSR one night and I’ve been following her ever since. I recently downloaded another song from her called Escarpment Blues, which has an interesting story behind it:
“Escarpment Blues tells the story of a current land-use conflict in Southern Ontario on the Niagara Escarpment, a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. I grew up on the escarpment on the farm where my family still lives, within a long green corridor that is prized for its fresh water resources, its endangered species habitats, its prime agricultural soils and its wetlands and forests. These lands are under serious threat from the aggregate (sand, gravel, shale) industry. The problem is that large multinationals companies want to open new quarries on top of the escarpment and extract the rock below these ecosystems, thereby removing and destroying them. So, after writing the song, I got the idea for the “I Love the Escarpment” Tour and set out in June 2005 with some of my best musical mates to hike the escarpment and make music along the way.”
She’s highly recommended.
Teddybears – Different Sound
On occasion, I hear a song in a commercial and it just sticks. Sometimes this is terrible, like the time I walked around for 4 days with “Bu-da-ba-bah-dah – I’m lovin’ it” stuck in my head. Sometimes the song is actually good and I’m intrigued, like that new Intel Core Due Processor commercial. I wanted to know who sang it and where I could get it. This used to be an idle daydream, as even googling for “music in X commercial” rarely turned up anything good. Now there’s Splendad.com, to satisfy just that desire. It can be sorted by advertiser and by artist, so I looked up Intel commercials from 2006 and boom: I got my info. The background song is Different Sound by Teddybears. It’s a slammin’ techno song. As it is techno, it’s not for everyone, but I really dig the beat and can listen to it repeatedly with no problem.
Tom Petty – Saving Grace
Tom Petty’s new single is, quite simply, the perfect rock’n roll song. You really feel that deep core of blues in there, but it’s got a rock edge. Talk about perfectly evoking an album’s title (Highway Companion). I would none-too-subtly add that it’s been conveniently placed on my Amazon wishlist, if anyone’s interested. 
Gomez – How We Operate
Gomez is one of those bands that’s been floating off in the rock/blues/country/bluegrass/acidrock wilderness for far too long. I’ve loved them since my buddy Leo gave me a copy of Liquid Skin when I was in Sydney. I’ve psyched myself up and bought every album of theirs since then, and the experience has gone downhilleverytime . There was a ton of great music in there, but it was uneven and confused and confusing. So when I heard that Gomez had finally put out a new album this year, I sort of shrugged and put it out of my mind. They weren’t dead to me; far from it. They were just not as inspirational as they had been in the past. Then a few reviews of this new album, How We Operate, passed my way and they were generally glowing. That was enough for me to acquire the album and I have not been disappointed. Gomez has come in from the wilderness and put out abadass album that tied together– intelligently–all the disparate musical strands they’d been playing with for the past few years. I’m elated and you should be, too. If you don’t already own Liquid Skin, just do yourself a favor and get it as soon as you can. Ask for it for Christmas. Whatever. But both it and How We Operate are classic must-haves.
The Killers – A Great Big Sled
A Christmas song from The Killers? I laughed too, but it’s a damned good song. I haven’t heard the new album yet, but from the singles they’ve released it very well could be as good as their first one. (The second one was classic terrible sophomore effort, in my humble opinion.) The single they just put out, A Great Big Sled, is notable not just because it’s a good song and it’s seasonal; it’s also a (Product)Red track, which means a hefty percentage of the revenue from every track goes to The Global Fund. You can read more about it here, but, suffice it to say, if you can buy (Red), buy it.
They were supposed to be so bloody cool. They look cool. They have a little thing that does “noise reduction” and volume control right in the middle of the cord. Wow! They fold up! They come with a pleather case! Wow! At first glance, they are coolness defined. That’s certainly what the dude (and, if ever someone would self-describe as a “dude” it would be this man of blond hair and surfer parlance) at BestBuy told me: “Ah, they’re cool, dude. No problems there. Totally worth the clams.” Seventy clams, it should be noted.
Surfer boy was a no-good bastard liar. He’d never tried these headphones before. I’m absolutely sure of it. If he had, he’s bordering on legally deaf from all those crashing waves and accumulated sand in his ear canal or he’s just plain mean. Either way, he should not be someone to sell me some damned headphones. They sound terrible. When I first got them home last summer, I wasn’t immediately blown away. They sounded tinny, unbalanced, and any mildly-palpable bass would make them distort. “A ha!” I thought. “I just didn’t put the battery in the funky noise-reduction doohickey. That’ll fix it. It’s trying to reduce noise with no power!” I put the battery in. I pushed the “Noise reduction” button on the guitar-body shaped, soon-to-be-bain-of-my-existence pill in the middle of the cord. It got quieter. Indeed, the brilliant engineers at Phillips had managed to reduce environmental noise. The noise was just the music I was trying to listen to through them.
I took them off, the pill clattering across my desk. I didn’t understand. I still thought I was doing something wrong. I unplugged them, and put them in my drawer. “I’ll experiment again tomorrow.” And I did. Same result. I put them back in the drawer and thought about it for a while. I went through every possible variable. I put them in all different sources: iPods, computers, TV’s, a 1988-era Walkman that I found in my room. All of them sounded like crap, though the Walkman did sound just like I remember it sounding. I tried to see if any of the cords were loose. I read through the instructions sheet a few times. I even read the French version of the instructions, just to see if Phillips had hidden some secret recipe for good sound where only Quebecois and the French could find it. I glanced at the Japanese version, as well, but, really, context is everything in that language.
You know how it goes: you walk into a liquor store. You know nothing about the specific wine grape that was requested of you to buy. You see three bottles that sound and look like they’re the right thing. The liquor store you’re in speaks English as a third language, and you think you’re both a man’s man and pretty damned smart, so you’re not about to ask for help. So you look at the three bottles you’re trying to impress with and, assuming it’s not an egregious price difference, you get the most expensive one. Higher price = higher quality, right?
Wrong. There are some amazing wines (and apparently headphones) out there that are fractions of the cost of others in their category that blow them away in quality. The rule of thumb, in terms of these items anyway, does not hold.
So, no, I didn’t return them. By the time I really got up in arms about the whole thing (and despite some rumors to the contrary, I’m very difficult to actually make angry) Brown started back up again and there was the deluge of class-picking, parties and a surprisingly front-loaded semester of work. I didn’t have time to listen to music on headphones, really. I should have gone to the Rock and read while listening to headphones, but that really didn’t happen much last fall. I took the time to both give my headphones one last (I thought) listen
and find my receipt. “Yes, definitely, these are crap and I’m taking them back,” I thought as I went through my file cabinet for the receipt. I checked the date, on a whim, and realized that that day was the 60th day after my purchase. It was 11pm. BestBuy was closed. I had officially just wasted my money.
I can’t really explain in words how annoying this is.
In the 21st Century, your music is your soundtrack to life. You can literally choose your own theme music. What song really expresses the mood that mega-star Brian J. McGuirk is in as he walks to the library, a warm breeze flowing at him, his thoughts filled with thoughts of the pressing issues of the day, the week, the month, the year, the century and the whole human race? Bohemian Like You, by the Dandy Warhols, of course. He rocks out, he struts down the street. The last few minutes, just as he’s feeling down and feeling the temptation of pessimism, he hears the voice of Winston Churchill:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
And with that, that last touch of inspiration, he smiles, opens the door, and goes on. The scene ends. (And yes, I know a great speech isn’t exactly music, but it’s part of a soundtrack nonethless, and is on my iPod.)
Now, if your headphones (at LOW volume!) distort like crazy with every drumbeat in the first song, and the second crackles more than radio listeners in 1940 would have put up with, the scene is totally different. The whole scene is one man walking down the street swearing and shaking his headphones as if they’ve personally offended him.
Do you want that to be the movie of your life? Don’t buy these goddam headphones.
I’m quite giddy.
I’m seeing Coldplay tonight at Mohegan Sun
With my lovely girl E.
The tickets were a birthday present
For when I turned twenty-three.
I’ll file a review tomorrow,
After my class at three.
Maybe I’ll “take a picture
Of something I see.”
Chris J Davis, one of the coders of K2, which I obviously use on this blog, threw down an interesting blogging “meme”: guilty pleasures. His is Natasha Bedingfield.
A select few of you know this, but it’s time to come out of the closet (so to speak): I am a Kelly Clarkson fan.
Here’s the deal:
That’s my deal. That’s my guilty pleasure.
And, before you ask: yes, my girlfriend approves of this.
There are those that believe in the transcendental power of the rock star. People like Bono, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, even Chris Martin. These people feel that 50,000 in one room is a chance to connect on a spiritual level with every single one, that a great song performed with sufficient passion can elevate everyone within its auditory orbit to another plane of existence. At that point, that high note in the anthem, the peak of the emotional and musical crescendo, the rock star is not merely a person, he is a conduit to some other place, a sharper shade of Platonic shadow of that perfect, beautiful world that heretefore we only thought might exist but could never could let ourselves believe in. When the last note of these songs echo loud and fade away, and the audience walks away stunned and sublimely joyous, a true work of art has been done. We listen to tinny recordings of those overwhelming, connecting songs and catch glimmers of memory of that other state, that other world to which we were transported.
Then there are those who believe only in rock n’ roll’s eternal ability to get one sex and drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. Liam Gallagher is such a rock star. Liam Gallagher performs because it’s his job, and it supplies his lifestyle. When he swaggers onto stage, looking every bit the Manchester punk that invites violence from otherwise peaceful people around the world, his hatred of his job, his audience, and, a less-amateurish psychological evaluator than myself might conclude, his life is kept just under the surface. The little cretin is cleverly conscious of this, and thus wears sunglasses and a hat pulled low, hoping the venom inside can be contained with fabric and plastic. His palpable ire is multiplied when forced to sing the sweet, eloquent songs of his brother, who he reportedly hates more than anyone else in the world.
His singing stature, instantly recognizable, is an upward thrust towards a downward facing microphone. He is yelling up at his psychological enemy (metaphysical father figure perhaps?) with every breath. What he sings isn’t rock ‘n roll, it’s contempt with cadence.
Was it a good show? Yea. It was a good show. The repertoire of brother Noel’s hits and just flat out rockers was, in the end, too powerful not to overtake Liam’s leering delivery. The best parts, when Liam actually left the stage for the few songs that his brother sang, were, well, joyous. Almost transcendentally so.
I just finally read Bono’s commencement address to Penn last year. Money quote:
Me, I’m in love with this country called America. I’m a huge fan of America, I’m one of those annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask you all kinds of annoying questions about why you didn’t live up to that.
I’m that kind of fan. I read the Declaration of Independence and I’ve read the Constitution of the United States, and they are some liner notes, dude. As I said yesterday I made my pilgrimage to Independence Hall, and I love America because America is not just a country, it’s an idea. You see my country, Ireland, is a great country, but it’s not an idea. America is an idea, but it’s an idea that brings with it some baggage, like power brings responsibility. It’s an idea that brings with it equality, but equality even though it’s the highest calling, is the hardest to reach. The idea that anything is possible, that’s one of the reasons why I’m a fan of America. It’s like hey, look there’s the moon up there, lets take a walk on it, bring back a piece of it. That’s the kind of America that I’m a fan of.