I've Forgotten More Music Than Some of You Own
It's hard to come up with new wrinkles on the "Ten Random Songs" thing, but here's an attempt: Ten songs that I probably don't know anything about.
I've rated a bit less than half of the songs in my iTunes library, because, well, there are 7639 of them at present, and I usually listen to only the most recent acquisitions. Every now and then, though, when I get tired of whatever I've been listening to (Kanye West, in this case), I switch the "Party Shuffle" source over to the "unrated" playlist, and listen to (and rate) some stuff I've forgotten about.
So, rather than taking ten random songs off the four-and-five-star playlist, as I usually do, here are ten that haven't been rated until now.
- "When A Boy Falls In Love," Sam Cooke. Very sweet, slightly dated. The lot of a boy who has fallen in love is not entirely a happy one, but it's Sam Cooke, so it's not that bad. It's the nice Christian boy version of "When a Man Loves a Woman."
- "Weed King," Guided By Voices. Guided by Voices released approximately a million albums, each containing approximately a billion tracks with cryptic titles. This makes it hard to rate them without listening to them. This one's nothing special.
- "Stabbing A Star," Guided By Voices. Again with the GbV. Again, nothing particularly good.
- "Hoover Dam," Sugar. How on Earth have I not rated this? One of my favorite songs off Copper Blue, one of my favorite albums. A great tune.
- "Christmastime In The Mountains," Palace Songs. A little something seasonal from iTunes... Actually, it's not much of a Christmas song (sample lyric: "I'm saving all my rage for you"), though it does contain the words "Christmastime in the mountains," which is a little unusual for Will Oldham (as I understand it, "Palace Songs" is basically one guy with a reedy voice and a bleak outlook).
- "I Cried," Chris Thomas King. Better known as "The black guitar player from O Brother, Where Art Thou." I picked up this CD for a dollar at a Salvation Army store while Kate and I were waiting for a tire to be repaired.It's perfectly reasonable blues-rock stuff.
- "Check," Rustic Overtones. A sort of ska/punk band with hip-hop influences from, of all places, Maine, that have since split up with most of the group becoming Paranoid Social Club. Most of the songs make me think "Summer" and "Frat Boys," and this is no exception. That's not a bad thing, necessarily.
- "Celebration Day," Led Zeppelin. I think I would like Led Zeppelin more if the guy across the hall from me my freshman year hadn't played Led Zeppelin II on auto-repeat for about six months. I still twitch when I hear the signature riff from "Whole Lotta Love." As with the Grateful Dead, they tend to lose me when they try to get Deep, but this isn't too bad.
- "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," Wilco. We saw these guys live in New Haven, and Jeff Tweedy may have been the most stoned human being I have ever laid eyes on. I think he'd been to rehab by the time they did A Ghost is Born, but sometimes I wonder. You've got to sit through four minutes of repetitive synth before you get to the catchy guitar bit, and then there's a bunch of annoying feedback, but it's still better than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
- "Only The Strong," Midnight Oil. Off a live album that I honestly forgot I had. It's, um, loud, and kind of disorted.
Farther down the Party Shuffle, we find excellent tracks by the Flaming Lips ("Do You Realize?"), the Jackson Five ("The Love You Save"), the Magnetic Fields ("All My Little Words"), and Dinosaur Jr. ("Start Choppin'"), but this selection is pretty typical. A few gems here and there, but lots and lots of forgettable (and forgotten) album tracks off discs I bought to get one or two good songs.
I'll probably do another iTunes purchase this weekend, but for the moment, I'll keep going through these. Most of these songs will probably never be heard again, save for those rare times when I shuffle the entire library-- at work, I mostly use the four-and-five-star playlist, and only a few of the songs listed above rate more than three stars (Sam Cooke and Rustic Overtones got four, and Sugar five, the rest three). Every now and then I stumble on something worthwhile, though, so I keep going.
Posted at 7:37 AM | link | follow-ups |