Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Baby, Go On and Live: "Tell It Like It Is"

I've wondered what the first song to be featured here twice would be.

I knew it would happen, given how much I love to listen to songs repeatedly and how much the meaning of songs can change over time.

And this one I feel like I gave short shrift the first time around in service of proving a point (something that sadly happens all too often). The point was that many songs that call themselves love songs are actually not all that loving when you look at them too close.

But this song deserves to be more than a stepping stone in the construction of an argument. It is actually one of my favorite songs of all time, and one that always stops me in my tracks when I hear it.

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The song: Aaron Neville, "Tell It Like It Is"; 1967

The second that piano arpeggio hits, you know this song is NOT fucking around. And it doesn't: it's leisurely and measured in pace, but in a way that imparts confidence. What's more, if you listen to the horns in the background it will make you feel like there is something there that is restrained, but barely.

"Life is too short to have sorrow/you may be here today and gone tomorrow/you might as well get what you want" is a line that gets me right in the Chronic Existential Pain Syndrome. But that's okay, because it does what I need things to do to me, which is to shake me out of it.

Tell it like it is: a phrase I love because it uses short and simple words to make a deceptively complicated point.

One of those things that's so much easier said than done, but that doesn't mean it's not worth a try.

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

So You Used to Shake Em Down but Now You Stop and Think About Your Dignity: "Rock and Roll Never Forgets"

Those who know me these days know that I spend a fair amount of time listening to various flavors of Comcast Music Choice, also known as those weird 400-level channels just after the Mexican wrestling and just before pay-per-view porn.

The depth and variety of the channels available (everything from Top 40 to Broadway show tunes to ambient electronica to Latin romantic pop) has expanded my musical landscape substantially. (Not to mention the Did U Know section of the screen, which adds facts like "Gilberto Santo Rosa is known as the Gentleman of Salsa" and "Bjorn Again is an Australian ABBA cover band" to my ever-growing collection of completely useless knowledge!)

One of the most interesting experiences on this Music Choice journey has been listening the 70s channel. But perhaps not interesting in the way you might expect.

Having raised myself on oldies radio and other music of the 1960s and 1970s, naturally I adore those tunes. But what I had never really realized is that the simple fact that I WAS hearing those tunes as a child in the 1990s meant that they had already passed the test of time and been proven as lasting classics. But what I am realizing now, both through listening to the 1970s channel and through listening to Top 40 radio of the current day, is that most songs released in any given year are NOT lasting classics. In fact most songs released in any given year are kind of crap. The reason why the music of the past sounds better to so many of us (and by us I mean "YouTube commenters") is that it's been filtered out of the crap to stand on its own.

Perhaps this is a self-evident conclusion, but it was news to me. When I realized that I wasn't just continually catching the 70s channel on a bad day, but that there really WERE that many white-bread awful songs about kissing girls named Brenda in the rain, it did two things for me:

- Cured me of the vestiges of the 1970s fetish I developed in college. While I still want to spend the rest of my life dancing to the Bee Gees under a shower of glitter confetti and/or lounging around under a tree reading Salinger and wearing corduroy, I now realize that I can do those things even though it's not 1976 anymore! Whoa, man. In fact, even better, I can do BOTH those things and many more things because we are fortunate enough to live in an era of great musical and cultural diversity.

- Made me really excited to hear what songs and artists of my own era will filter out as lasting classics. I have my suspicions but I'm interested to hear what happens. Guess it's just my incentive to continue investing in the sometimes soul-harrrowing pursuit of loving popular music.

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In any case, this song came on last night as I was listening to the 70s channel and it struck me as very refreshing in its earnest rock-iness.

In college I had an ongoing argument with a good friend about this song, which was mostly based on my irrational anger at the following two lines:

"So you're a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be" (20-year-old Amy: "A LOT LESS BOLDER??")

"Check your local newspaper, chances are you won't have to go too far" (20-year-old Amy just thought that was inane and not in the endearing way either.)

Both of these arguments my friend pretty effectively shut down by saying (words to the effect of), "20-year-old Amy, how is it that you rail on this song for those ultimately harmless lyrics but you put up with lines like 'I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar'?"

He was right. And he was also right that this song is charming. That's the power of music: it's just waiting for you to remember.


The song: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, "Rock and Roll Never Forgets"; 1976

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com


Sunday, September 15, 2013

And That's A Pain I Can Do Without: Fall

As I've written about here before, I have what I call (in a tongue-in-cheek fashion) Chronic Existential Pain Syndrome.

By which I mean the very keen awareness of the fragility and specialness of life, which is often expressed as the fear of death but actually means its inverse, the fear of not living life well.

I'm in my Eastern philosophy phase at the moment (it seems to be a rite of passage), and in my Eastern philosophy phase I came across this well-known haiku by Kobayashi Issa, which is meant to express a dueling knowledge: of comfort with the temporary and beautiful nature of existence, but anguish at what that means when you get it down to brass tacks.

It goes like this:

The world of dew --
A world of dew it is indeed
And yet, and yet. . .

*

I know this is a facet of my personality that may be found morbid, or depressing, or uncomfortable. But it's not something I'm willing to change, even if I could, because my existentialism is the engine that gives my life meaning. When you don't believe in God, you should still believe in something. For me it's the terrifying and exhilarating thought that life is an IKEA cabinet -- you build it yourself.

*

These thoughts are always very pressing to me in the fall, because fall is my favorite season and because the nature of its beauty is change and death.

Very often I see songs in colors, although I don't know if that's an aspect of my reaction to the song or whether it's something more mundane like the color of the album cover or the dress I was wearing when I heard it one time.

This song that I am about to play is a very beautiful color, reddish-brown. Like an autumn evening.


The song: Rod Stewart, "Maggie May"; 1971

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

A Change of Key Will Let You Out: "Strange Overtones"

David Byrne is really doing it for me right now.

This morning as I did my radio show, I found his album Here Lies Love and experienced a gradual dawning of increasingly exciting revelations:

1. It's a disco/club album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.

2. Not only is it a disco/club album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, it features guest vocalists ranging from Cyndi Lauper to Tori Amos to Florence (of the Machine).

3. Not only is it a disco/club album etc etc etc. . .it's a DISCO OPERA!

4. Not only is it a DISCO OPERA, it's a disco opera about the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos!

Needless to say, I purchased it on CD immediately. . .and have spent the rest of the day in what I will admit is a little bit of a post-excitement hangover. I only have so much capacity for excitement in one day, a sad truth I will never fully realize in the moment it seems. My grandma had a hilarious story about the family dachshund visiting the family farm, finding somehow an entire cow's worth of cow-fat, and eating her weight of it and more. They found her in the field, and I'm not sure if this is the story or my embellishment of it, but I always picture the dachshund unable to walk because her stomach had distended further than her legs.

Well, I am a dog in my personality, and in this I am no different from a dog. When presented with something that is aesthetically pleasing to me, I will eat it until my legs can't carry me any more.

But I am pleased to have used this capacity on Here Lies Love, because it represents not only what is compelling to me about David Byrne at the moment but also something that is compelling to me in general.

Which is to say, the combination of strangeness and passion, which Mr. Byrne does so well -- which he seems unable to not do.

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The song: David Byrne and Brian Eno, "Strange Overtones"; 2008

This song is not from Here Lies Love, which is still too new to me, but from David Byrne's collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

But I'm posting it because it's good, and also because it thematically sums up what I am trying to say. David Byrne's music is comforting to me right now because it's unexpected (he always seems to come at music at a right angle from where most others do) but it still sounds appealing. So often strangeness comes with unpleasantness. Or not unpleasantness so much as, deliberate offputting-ness.

While I recognize the artistic value of deliberate offputting-ness much more than I did even a year ago, I also know myself well enough to know it's not my taste and probably never will be. I like to be welcomed in and to welcome music in. I like things to be beautiful and good. (That may seem like an obvious statement, but it's a taste just as much as anything else is a taste -- this much I have learned at least from a year's time at a college radio station, where I went in turning my nose up at music that I found ugly. I try not to do that any more.)

A few months ago I had the thought that I would sincerely like my tombstone to say, "Here Lies AW, Crushed By A Wall of Sound". It sounds flippant but it is true.

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com