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| (Greatest Hits? Is that an oxymoron?) |
I had an epiphany while driving to work this morning with
the radio on full blare: Steve Miller
music only sounds good to people who smoke weed. No, truly.
"Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin' …. Fly like and eagle … time keeps on slippin'
slippin' slippin' …. Doot doo dootdootdoot doodoo…" It's the same thing, the same tune, the same
four notes over and over and over and over and over again. Maybe it's for people with short attention
spans: "When have I heard that
ditty? Oh yeah, a chorus ago. Oh, when I have I heard that song
before? Oh yeah, a chorus ago. Hey, that sounds familiar. Oh yeah, that's the ditty again. I heard it just a chorus ago." Really, Millerites, smoke another fatty and
get the needle to move off that skip. Go
ahead and challenge me -- "Living in the USA" is maybe six notes,
heavy on the same three. "Rock 'N'
Me" is about five notes and heavy on two.
This can only sound creative with some medicinal marijuana. He and his band totally suck. (But they're still better than I'll ever be.)
Then I got to thinking about the headphone experience, and
there are some great tunes to pick from for that ear-to-ear-inside-the-whole-cranium
experience, but I want to offer up my top few choices. The most obvious choice is Led Zeppelin's
"Whole Lotta Love" because it makes your brain feel like it's
actually unmoored from your skull and pinging back and forth from one side to
the other like some kind of musical Phineas Gage experience. The weird noises combined with Plant's
breathy yet screaming voice make it a little unnerving to one's sanity.
If you really want to push your sanity over the edge with a
pair of ear buds in, I have two great tunes to suggest. The first is the entire (and I do mean start
to finish) version of ELO's "Fire on High." It even includes a clip from Handel's
"Hallelujah Chorus." For the
laymen amongst you, it's the ESPN theme song, or was for a long time … without
the beginning. It requires head bobbing
- Don't worry; it'll happen naturally, even if you attempt to stop it. Nice try, but you'll be unsuccessful. The other one to test your brain waves would
be "Procession" from the Moody Blues' album Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. It's a four-minute strange ride
through the brief musical reprise of humanity/society (or a seriously bad acid
trip gone horribly awry) that precedes and is often connected to "Story in
Your Eyes." The first time I heard
it, I was fifteen and can remember exactly where I was. I'd never heard anything like it before, and
it kind of scared the crap out of me (since it was the middle of the night and
we had all been watching horror movies and discussing The Exorcist).
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| (The Best of ... What if I only want The Worst of?) |
I want to throw a few strange ones out there as a song
surprised me this afternoon while driving.
I have a love-hate relationship with the band Sweet, though I am
particularly fond of "Ballroom Blitz" (everyone should be) and "I
Want to Be Committed" (which smacks of The
Rocky Horror Picture Show in my mind).
"Little Willy," though, needs to take its own advice and just
go home. But I heard "Love is Like
Oxygen" today on the radio, and for some reason, it sounded totally dope
on my car stereo (which is nothing to write papers about, believe me). The music, especially through the middle of
the song and again at the end, was bouncing back and forth from speaker to
speaker and melding with a stomach-dropping blam in the middle. I thought, "Hmmmm, I always thought this
song was kind of silly, but the engineering on this is really kind of
innovative." Go ahead - Put it on
your computer screen and listen to your speakers. I guarantee the sound is actually coming
straight out of your own nose and slamming back into your frontal lobe.
Last but not least, I'd be remiss in my duty as a musical
child of the seventies if I didn't mention Pink Floyd. But oh, ye uninitiated and novice listeners
will go right to the album Dark Side of
the Moon, and rightfully so. With or
without the Wizard, it's a hell of an engineering marvel (bless you, Alan
Parsons, you genius). But Floyd's best
album by far will always be Animals. First of all, it's a terrific capitalist take
on the socialist novel Animal Farm,
but the engineered animal sounds and the synthesized voice-to-noise and
noise-to-voice progressions are astounding when plugged directly into the ear
cavities. I used to play
"Dogs" for my poor mutt, who would wag his tail and run from speaker
to speaker wondering where his friends were.
It was truly a hideous trick, but I loved to pull it on him, and he fell
for it every time, god bless him.
Oh sure, there are other songs worthy of the headphone
experience. These are just a few to get
your brain primed and your musical chops honed.
It also prompted me to send my brother the video of a Greg Lake drum
solo from ELP's version of Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common
Man." It is also the challenge that
pits me against my friend's husband, a gentleman whom I've never actually met
face to face, when we get into occasional weekend musical wars via the
Internet. (His music trivia knowledge is
astounding.) But if it gets you all into
a relaxed state today and prompts you to turn on some nostalgic music (Live at Budokan? Anyone?), then I've done my job.
Keep on rocking … me … baby … but please, with more than six
notes. That's just frigging lame.
