Tuned In

The overriding principle in karaoke is, “If you can’t be good, be loud.”  Which is a nice way of saying if you’re going to suck, at least own it.  Don’t tip-toe up to the edge of the cliff; throw yourself off the damn thing.  Unless you did something insane like choosing “American Pie,” it’ll all be over in about three minutes or so, and you can get back to your drinking and making fun of the other singers who are no doubt worse than you are.  Until you decide you’re better than you think are and get up and try it again.

See, karaoke is no fun when the singers are actually good.  That’s like a gold medal sprinter showing up at the Special Olympics:  yeah, we get it, you’re good, but did you really have to prove it against this level of competition? Oh, we’ll clap and cheer, but inside we’re all thinking, “Wow, thanks for blowing the curve, Pavarotti.”

It also helps if the song isn’t very good.  Nobody wants to hear some beloved classic ruined by a guy on the fourth night of a five-day business conference who just found out the hotel lounge’s happy hour runs ’til midnight.  Save “Yesterday” and “Thunder Road” for the car stereo when no one’s paying attention.  This is the time for “Kung Fu Fighting” and bad Old Elvis songs, where you can parlay how untalented you are into some kind of ironic commentary on the quality of what it is you’re singing.

You’ll also need to carefully monitor your alcohol intake.  There’s a sweet spot that exists a few drinks in where you’re just about perfect.  Your inhibitions are lowered enough to get on stage and possibly make a fool of yourself, but you still retain the mental faculties to read the lyrics off the screen.  It also helps relax your muscles, so you actually sing a little better.  Not enough to fool anyone, or let you reach the high notes in “Take On Me,” but it’ll do.

I’m giving out this useful information because last night I did karaoke for the first time in at least five years, in a smoky little dive bar that helpfully advised us that motorcycle club colors were not allowed.  Good thing I left the leathers at home.  I busted out my old stand-by, “Mack the Knife,” a song I can do passably well.  I usually sing better when I can do it in some kind of character, so I get all lounge singer and just ooze smarm for a few minutes. Good enough to be enjoyable, just ragged enough not to be a show-off.  I just wish I enjoyed hard liquor more, because singing that song with a tumbler of scotch in my hand would be downright perfect.

But not too perfect.  That’s not karaoke.

Pod People

I’ve always been a little dismissive of the whole podcast thing.  As tuned into the internet as I am, I’m somewhat of a grognard at times.  It bugs me when I click on a link expecting to read a story and instead it’s a video.  Yep, the box on the floor next to my desk that has more processing power than the computer that sent Apollo 11 to the moon is streaming video at near instant speed and I’m complaining because I’d rather read an article at my own pace than wait for a couple of talking heads to say the same thing.  Call me ungrateful.  But I also have a preference for the carefully considered word over a stream of consciousness from a couple of guys sharing a web connection.

But now that I’ve been walking on a regular basis and I’ve listened to practically every song on my playlists what feels like a dozen times, I’ve been looking for something else to keep me distracted.  Not having something going on in my ears is out of the question.  I need something to keep my mind off of the sheer repetitiveness of what I’m doing, and the sound of passing cars just isn’t going to cut it.  I tried bringing Mike and Mike along with me, but the ESPN radio app is, to be kind, a buggy piece of crap, and the other radio choices at my disposal weren’t all that appealing.  I needed another option.

Of course I went with the dorkiest option available.

I’ve become a little obsessed lately with the new Star Wars card game from Fantasy Flight, and in my web-based wanderings for discussion about it, I came across The Smuggler’s Den.  It’s a podcast that talks about the game in the most minute, exacting detail.  Just the kind of thing to make me forget I’m crossing busy intersections and possibly doing permanent damage to my feet.  I burned through all their episodes so far, went looking for more game-related podcasts, and settled on The Dice Tower.  This one covers games of all kinds, and it’s possibly even dorkier than The Smuggler’s Den.  But the floodgates have been opened.  I’ve installed a podcast app on my phone, and I’m scouring about for more subscriptions to add.

Some of the problems behind my reluctance still remain.  Just because you could talk for an hour and forty minutes on a subject doesn’t mean you should talk for an hour and forty minutes. A tighter focus would do wonders for some of these.  The Dice Tower, in particular, runs through so many topics and so many guest commenters that, despite its length, it still feels rushed.  They’ll just be getting into an interesting topic before it’s on to the next one.  I’d rather hear one or two things gone over in depth than listen to them skim the surface on everything.

But I’m clearly just scratching the surface.  So feel free to recommend any interesting podcasts some of you may be aware of.  Stuff good enough to make me wander into traffic.

Musicography: To Those We Left Behind

There were over 500 albums released in 2012.  Stretch that out over however many songs per album for each of the other 44 years on this list, and it’s not surprising that there’s a vast swath of songs and artists who got left on the outside looking in when all was said and done.  Some bands missed the cut because their songs kept running into more worthy conclusions, others because, by the time they became relevant to me, they were long past their prime and I was loath to include a weaker album just to get them on the list.  The cuts were deep, the decisions difficult. But I don’t want to let consign them to also-ran status.  So here’s a quick rundown of some of the bands and songs that could have made the list had things gone just a bit differently.

ABBA:  I mentioned them briefly in the 1981 entry as my first musical fascination, and they had multiple songs in contention.  ”Dancing Queen” probably had the best chance, but I just had to get “Year of the Cat” on the list. “Knowing Me, Knowing You” lost out in order to get disco represented with “If I Can’t Have You,” and “The Winner Takes It All” had to stand aside in favor of getting some classic era Queen taken care of.  ABBA just had the misfortune of having their biggest hits in years that were already spoken for, but as the first band I was really into, they remain a prime musical touchstone for me, and their music is as insanely listenable now as it was then.

The Rolling Stones:  Yeah, this one hurt.  But again, it was a question of timing.  I really didn’t get into the Stones until Tattoo You in 1981, which the Police had locked down right from the get-go with “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.”  I agonized over pushing the Police back to 1983 and choosing something from Synchronicity, but that would have tumbled too many dominoes in an already difficult decade to winnow down.  And really, anything after Tattoo You is a pale shadow of what the Stones once were (Steel Wheels was the closest they came to getting on the list after that).  And as with ABBA, songs from their earlier albums kept running into other must-haves.  Still, they have the honor of the best concert I’ve ever seen, so at least they’re on one list.

John Lennon:  Another hard one, but “Instant Karma” would have bumped “Layla,” and “Imagine” would have knocked out “Baba O’Reilly,” and those two songs were too huge to ignore.  And once again Queen is a culprit, as their last truly classic album hit in 1980, keeping anything from Double Fantasy from getting in.  Leaving off “Watching the Wheels” was especially tough though; that song was a bit of a touchstone for me for the longest time.

John Williams:  This was a more deliberate omission, as I was trying to avoid soundtracks, a genre I could easily use to fill multiple years.  And I could use Williams for every year from 1976 through 1984 without even breaking a sweat:  Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, 1941, Empire, Raiders, E.T., Jedi, and Temple of Doom.  Star Wars and Empire had the best chances of inclusion, and I still hold Empire as one of the best films scores ever written.  But as I said when I omitted Star Wars, I’ve written enough about it on this blog, so it was time to let some other folks have the spotlight.

Van Halen:  They had a good number of songs I thought about but couldn’t quite pull the trigger on, especially from their earlier albums.  ”Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” was probably the strongest contender, but 1978 was my best chance to get Blondie on the list.  Surprisingly, “Jump” and “Panama” from  1984 were never really in the running, because “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was always going to have that year.  And as we all know, Van Halen ceased to exist after that album.  No.  No, I don’t want to hear it.

“Oliver’s Army,” Elvis Costello:  I squeezed in some Costello in 1989, but this was the one I really wanted.  But then I would have lost The Wall, my last chance for any classic Pink Floyd, and I knew I could always turn to Spike down the road a bit.  This is such a great song though.  I really wish I could have managed to place it.

“Cars,” Gary Numan:  Hearing this song for the first time was like a light bulb going on.  It was completely different from anything else I’d ever heard, and in my mind, is always the start of the New Wave 80s.  But, like “Oliver’s Army,” it had to contend with the last gasp of 70s rock in The Wall, and as much as I love this song, a hard choice had to be made.

Those are the big omissions that come to mind.  Given the time — and the inclination — I could probably do another 45-song list that would look completely different from this one and still have as much meaning to me.  But the list I ended up with is probably the truest, since it’s got more of a gut instinct behind it.  There were a lot of tough choices, but ultimately, a lot of the songs really did demand to be chosen.  It was what I had to leave out that produced the most anguish, not what I chose to put in.

Musicography: 2012

2012:  ”Gangnam Style” (PSY, PSY 6 (Six Rules), Part 1)

When I started this series, the idea was to finish it by my birthday in 2012, at which point it would have been too soon to put a cap on that year musically.  And so the “A life in 44 movements” subtitle.  Well, that idea went out the window, and I’ve bled into 2013, and so I’ve added a 45th movement, a none so subtle reminder of the significant birthday I have coming up this year.  No one to blame but myself, I guess.  So it seems appropriate to wrap up this unexpectedly extended list with an unexpectedly popular yet ultimately bizarre song that not only represents the odd year that just passed, but which also recalls the musical weirdness that informed much of the early part of this list, and therefore the early part of my life.

Because “Gangnam Style” reminds me of nothing so much as it does those briefly popular but ultimately forgettable novelty songs of the 70s.  Songs like “Convoy” and “Disco Duck” and “The Streak,” that burned bright for a time before everyone snapped back to their senses and agreed not to talk about them anymore.  It’s a bit of personality-infused insanity that was a welcome — if at time annoying — tonic to the lifeless, generic pop being churned out lately.  By the end of this year, there are going to be a lot of people who come across “Gangnam Style” in their music collections and say, “Really?”  But songs like this aren’t about longevity.  They’re about the crest of the wave they ride, that moment of pop culture zeitgeist they represent.  They’re not built to last in the slightest.  They’re there to be disposably enjoyed, then reminisced over years later when we can’t believe we listened to them.

So why immortalize it on this list — if anything on this blog could be said to be immortal — if its most remarkable attribute is its sheer ephemerality?  Because 2012 was a year that taught me that those moments that make you happy, that put a smile on your face or a laugh in your belly, are just as fleeting.  Not that there will never be more of them, but you never know just how long those moments will last.  So enjoy them with all the abandon of a nebbishy South Korean pop star cavorting around like he’s riding a horse.  Embrace every last giddy, stupid, silly minute of it, and let the memory of that ride carry you on until the next one comes along.  Some might be more lasting than others, but they’re all worth celebrating, Gangnam Style.

And with that, Musicography comes to end.  Almost.  I’m planning one final entry, running down some of the artists and songs who didn’t make the cut, but who deserve a mention.  But the main list is complete, a soundtrack to the last four and a half decades that both help remind me and help me forget.  Of all the things that add color to our lives, music has a way of being the most enduring, the most evocative, the most adaptable.  It can mean different things to different people, depending on when and how they first heard it.  It’s no accident that so many of our milestones involve it:  singing a song on our birthdays, going to dances in school, having a first dance at our weddings, playing a song at our funerals.  Music is there every step of the way, and makes those steps that much easier, even when the path doesn’t go where we’d wish it to.

It’s a friend.  And I’m glad it’s been around these past 44 years.

Musicography: 2011

2011: “Rolling in the Deep” (Adele, 21)

I gave the first round to Duffy for 2009, but Adele absolutely cleans her clock in the battle of sophomore albums.  A howl to the heavens over every man who ever did her wrong, 21 pretty much cleaned everybody’s clocks in 2011. The album went to #1 and stayed there, the singles went to #1 and stayed there, and it seemed like they invented a couple of new Grammy categories just so they could give Adele a few more of them.  21 became one of those albums like Rumours or Thriller (at least as far as impact if not artistic achievement), a permanent fixture in the pop culture, something that defined the year in which is was released.

Which, unfortunately, hits a little too close to home for me.  Because 21 was also the soundtrack  to the end of my marriage.

It’s not like there was a direct song-by-song correlation, but this album seemed to be constantly in the background. Playing on her laptop while we sat in silence on opposite sides of the living room.  Coming on in the car during awkward drives.  And even before I knew the path we were going down, this album was prevalent.  Maybe I should have taken it as a sign, an indication she was feeling a lot of the same things Adele was.  But I had no reason to think anything was wrong, so it remained simply an album she liked.  Not that I disliked it — Adele puts on a vocal performance for the ages on it — but it always seemed like “her” album.  And maybe that delineation was part of the problem.

So as much as I like Adele, and this song in particular, it’s all still a little hard to listen to.  It’s not easy thinking of Adele’s anger being her anger, Adele’s heartbreak being her heartbreak.  But that’s one of the main things music does.  It’s a shorthand to a time and place, and to a set of feelings.  Which has been the whole point of this exercise, really.  It’s just not a set of feelings that’s easy to go back to.

Musicography: 2010

“Coming Back Around” (John Powell, How to Train Your Dragon: Music from the Motion Picture)

I could have easily filled up half this list with tracks from film scores.  The first albums I ever owned were movie soundtracks (Star Wars and Superman, to be precise), and for a good while they were all I listened to.  At first it was just a way to keep going back to movies I liked before VHS, but after a while, I started crafting my own movies in my head as the music played through the headphones.  I had to figure out how to match the images to the beats of the music, and to wrap the whole thing up before the track ended.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was teaching myself pacing and tone, and I’d like to think those musical flights of fancy played a role in how I write today. Soundtracks eventually led to classical music — it was like soundtracks before they had movies — and the same thing would happen.  I put Tchaikovsky and Rossini through some pretty ridiculous scenarios.  So it was about time a soundtrack made the list.  I almost did it with Star Wars for 1977, and The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001.  But with 2010 being sort of a meh year for me as far as mainstream music went, it was a no-brainer to welcome John Powell into the fold.

Powell first came to my attention through his partnership with Harry Gregson-Williams on the score for Chicken Run, as dead-on a nod to classic war film scores like The Great Escape and The Guns of Navarone as you’re likely to hear.  The duo collaborated again on the score for Shrek.  While most people remember the music from that film as that damn Smash Mouth song, the real MVP for me was the relatively straightforward orchestral soundtrack, that ignored most of the silliness and modern pop culture references and acted like we were watching a straight-up fairy tale.  They were working firmly in the John Williams/James Horner vein, which was like catnip to me.  And while Powell kind of fell off my radar with some of his career choices after Chicken Run and Shrek, I still played the ever-loving crap out of those CDs.

And then I saw How to Train Your Dragon and got smacked in the face with one of the best scores of the last ten years.  There are two or three other tracks that could have easily ended up here instead of “Coming Back Around” — the propulsive “Test Drive,” the soaring “Romantic Flight,” the sprightly “Forbidden Friendship” — but this, which plays over the final scenes of the film, blends all those themes together into an absolutely breathtaking conclusion. It’s a grand curtain call, both for the film (which for my money is still better than that year’s major animated competition, Toy Story 3) and the score.  It’s filled with such a sense of hope and promise, of victory and elation.  It’s the kind of track that, when it comes on while I’m listening to it on one of my walks, makes me pick up my pace and forget how tired I may be.

And yes, there’s a story I’ve crafted to go along with it.

Musicography: 2009

2009: “Dog Days Are Over” (Florence and the Machine, Lungs)

This one is a bit of a chronological mess.  The song itself was released as a single in 2008.  The album containing it came out in 2009.  And the music video that introduced the song to me followed along in 2010.  But I decided to go with the year the album came out because, well, it’s my damn list.

It was that surreal whirl of a music video that really got my attention though.  It references everything from Princess Mononoke to the B-52s to the Bible in this Technicolor mélange of face paint and robes and beehive hairdos.  It really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the lyrics, but it really doesn’t matter.  It fits the mood of the song, simultaneously uplifting and exuberant as Florence Welsh just belts to the rafters, but with a darker undertone that matches the lyrics as her cohorts explode in flashes as the song ends.  For all its church revival energy, the lyrics hint at no small amount of trepidation; happiness hits “like a bullet in the back,” and love has to be left behind “if you want to survive.”  It seems less about celebrating the end of bad times and more about having gotten so used to the bad times that she’s not really sure how to handle the good ones.

Getting back to Welsh, it’s appropriate that the album is called Lungs, because boy does she have a set.  And she’s not just blaring at the top of her range the whole time.  She’ll bring things down to a falsetto that makes the moments she does go full throat all the more powerful.  And are they powerful; even with pounding keyboard chords and thumping drums competing for attention, she’s front and center and absolutely mesmerizing.  You want to leap up and join her.

So maybe I was doubly late to the party on this one — along with plenty of other people, because the song was everywhere in 2010 — but I got there eventually.

Musicography: 2008

2008: “Mercy” (Duffy, Rockferry)

They must have been putting something in the water over in England back in 2008, because we got not one but two albums from female singers that hearkened back to the days of Dusty Springfield and swinging London.  The two albums came out a little over a month apart, and while seemingly almost everybody else was jumping on the Adele train that would culminate in her pretty much ruling the world the last two years, I of course ended up backing the other horse in the race.

Both Adele and Duffy have distinctive voices, but for some reason, it was the husky sound of Duffy that hooked me right off the bat.  Adele can belt with the best of them, but Duffy has that one more drink at last call in a smoky bar sultriness to her voice that’s a much more subtle earworm.  And while Adele can make you feel her pain, Duffy convinces you she’s going to get even with whoever caused hers.  Maybe it’s that more assertive tone that drew me to her in the first place.  That, and the fact that “Mercy” sounds like it could have been buried in a time capsule from the 1960s.  It’s got that snaky keyboard line, those girly “yeah yeah yeahs,” that vividly call to mind a time I never really experienced, but feel like I know from constant evocations and recreations.  It’s as if a double-decker bus full of mod girls in miniskirts is going to drive by.

But “Mercy,” and all of Rockferry, have a more personal connection.  The album came out the year my good friend Nick passed away, and one of our last conversations was him asking if there was any good new music out. Knowing he was older than me and would probably appreciate the connection more than I did, I told him to check out Duffy.  The next time we met, the first thing he said was, “That Duffy album?  Winner.”  Not that I needed his validation, but I got a kick out of the fact that my recommendation had hit home.  He was gone not long after, but at least I’d helped add one more enjoyable thing to his life before he left.

Duffy would battle Adele again two years later, and again with albums a mere month apart, but Duffy’s Endlessly would eventually get buried by the monster that was 21.  But I still stand by my choice from 2008.  Even if she didn’t get to sing a Bond song.

Musicography: 2007

2007: “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” (Bruce Springsteen, Magic)

Since I’ve already broken one promise I made for this series by not wrapping it up by my birthday, I figured I might as well break another one by repeating an artist.  The main reason being that 2007 was a pretty damn bleak year when I went and looked back at it.  I was struggling between “Grace Kelly” by Mika and “Love Song” by Sarah Bareilles, for crying out loud, both of which are perfectly fun little songs in their own right, but hardly worth immortalizing on this list.  Then I remembered this was the year Bruce Springsteen released Magic, and the events surrounding my purchasing of that album, and figured that if anyone deserves to barge onto here breaking rules, it’s the Boss.

I’d already heard “Radio Nowhere,” the first single from Magic, and that, along with some sterling early reviews, had me pretty pumped to get the album.  So much so that I left straight from work to head to Super Target and pick up the CD the day it came out.  I’d enjoyed The Rising and Devils & Dust and The Seeger Sessions just fine, but word was Magic was a return to that old Springsteen feeling, and I absolutely could not wait.  But I would have to, because a school bus smacked into me on the way to the store.

Okay, that makes it seem far worse than it was.  I had a green light to go forward, and this school bus tried to sneak through the left turn signal and missed.  Well, the turn anyway, not me.  He wasn’t going very fast, I had just started accelerating from the light, so the crash wasn’t at a speed to do more than crumple bumpers and scare the ever-loving crap out of me.  And fortunately, there were no kids on the bus.  The driver even got out of a ticket because, ahem, apparently the lights weren’t synchronized properly, leading his yellow light to bleed a little into my green.  Or so they said.  Regardless, my car was driveable, but for little more than getting back home, and certainly not for something as frivolous as buying a CD.  So, after the trooper and the statements and all that fun, I turned my car towards home, scraping my bumper along the road the whole way.

And then…  This is kind of tough to recall, because it was one of my favorite things that ever happened in the course of our relationship.  But when I got home, Hannah took me to Target to buy the CD.  She knew how much I wanted it, and she wasn’t going to let me sit around moping about my car.  It might seem like a small thing, but I was — and remain — so grateful for it.

So this album had a hell of a lot to live up to, and boy did it deliver.  It’s nothing than Springsteen the home run hitter finding that tape measure swing one last time, recalling all that made him the Boss in the first place back in the 70s.  It’s like the great lost album Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, with a little bit of The River‘s polish to it.  There’s longing and bitterness and hope and regret and all the emotions that Springsteen can wield like paint on canvas, and “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” is easily the stand-out track for me.  There are echoes of “Hungry Heart” in it, as if it’s the same guy, still searching, but now older and wondering if he’s ever going to find it, and looking back on those days when it seemed it would be so easy.  It’s plaintive and wistful and just beautiful, a real gem on an album full of them.

But it’s the circumstances of owning the album that stick with me.  In a way, it was almost a Springsteen-ian tale, in which life gets sidetracked out of nowhere, and yet there’s still a shred of hope even as you survey the wreckage. And where, even after things go bad, the memories of the good still remain, sometimes filling you with regret, sometimes filling you with hope, but always part of the road you find yourself traveling down.

Musicography: 2006

2006: “Through the Fire and the Flames” (DragonForce, Inhuman Rampage)

I have a confession to make:  I’m a bit of a closet metal head.  But not just any kind of metal.  Not the kind where the singers sound like grumpy relatives of Cookie Monster.  Not the kind where the songs chug along to the sound of fuzzy guitars and muddy bass.  No, we’re talking about good old-fashioned throw the horns heavy metal.  Long hair, soaring vocals, twin guitars screaming away melodically as fast as they can.  Throw in some supernatural references or bad fantasy novel tropes and it’s all the better.  Your Iron Maidens.  Your Judas Priests.  Your Quiet Riots.  Your Dios.  All the bands whose logos the kids in school used to draw on their notebooks.  They weren’t necessarily making art, but there was such an unleashed enthusiasm to it, you couldn’t help but bang your head a little bit.

But then we got into the 90s and beyond and metal started getting a lot grimmer and a lot more serious and self-absorbed.  Some of it was seriously unpleasant, drenched in grotesquery and grime, while much of the rest of it was just trying to sound like Metallica.  The chords were there, the unrelenting thrum was there, but gone was the awareness that the whole thing was just a little bit silly that made the previous generation so much fun.

Which is the big reason why I don’t really care if seemingly every DragonForce song seems to involve swords, riding, battle and fire.  I first came across them thanks to some people trying to figure out if these guys were being ironic.  It came down about 50-50, with some of the more positive opinions being along the lines of, “Who cares if they are, just listen to it!”  So I did, and as I heard the machine-gun drums and drag racing guitars of “Through the Fire and the Flames” do their thing, the biggest dumbest smile came over me.  These guys got it.

There’s just something about a full-speed melodic guitar solo that gets me where I live.  Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” is in no way a classic song, but when that solo kicks in, it’s the greatest thing in the world.  It flies and screams and just moves.  And “Through the Fire and the Flames” is practically all solo, and from two guitars no less.  There’s been plenty of debate about whether the playing is natural or studio enhanced — and some of the live videos out there lend some credence to the latter — but who cares?  It makes me want to slam the pedal to the floor and drive into the sunset until I’m out of gas.  The lyrics are rife with silliness about “fighting on for the steel” and “the blackest plains in Hell’s domain,” but that’s part of the charm, and really, the words are just there to be yelled as loud as possible by a velvet lunged lead singer.  He might as well be another instrument.

Maybe they sound like an old 16-bit Nintendo soundtrack on speed.  Maybe they’re more about being fast than being good.  Maybe they’re lost in a world of Dungeons and Dragons covers and direct-to-video sword and sorcery films. But that’s the kind of metal I grew up on.  Chalk it up to nostalgia, but I’d rather listen to this than endure some guy who sounds like he swallowed a mouthful of gravel growl over sludgy guitars.  And the swords and dragons don’t hurt either.