Music: August 2005 Archives

I can no longer resist the dread high school music meme of death.

• Go to musicoutfitters.com

• Enter the year you graduated from high school in the search function and get the list of 100 most popular songs of that year.

• Bold the songs you like, strike through the ones you hate and underline your favorite. Do nothing to the ones you don't remember (or feel neutrally about.)

1987 was not the best year for music ever. A lot of not very interesting pop, and a lot of boring work by musicians whose best days were behind them. Thank goodness for Prince and the Beastie Boys, though!

1. Walk Like An Egyptian, Bangles (Meh. Just OK. Prefered "Hazy Shade of Winter")
2. Alone, Heart (Don't remember it, but probably wouldn't have liked it. Don't care for Heart after the 1970s)
3. Shake You Down, Gregory Abbott
4. I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me), Whitney Houston
5. Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now, Starship
6. C'est La Vie, Robbie Nevil (Meh. It's O.K.)
7. Here I Go Again, Whitesnake
8. The Way It Is, Bruce Hornsby and the Range (Meh. It's O.K.)
9. Shakedown, Bob Seger
10. Livin' On A Prayer, Bon Jovi (It's so kitchy, I can't decide whether I like it or hate it.)
11. La Bamba, Los Lobos
12. Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung
13. Don't Dream It's Over, Crowded House (This is actually my LEAST favorite Crowded House song. I didn't like it at the time, but then I heard more Crowded House and realized just how brilliant they are)
14. Always, Atlantic Starr
15. With Or Without You, U2 (I didn't really like it, and am not into U2, but it is a good song... they just leave me cold for some reason.)
16. Looking For A New Love, Jody Watley (I am a sucker...)
17. Head To Toe, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (...for cheezy 80s dance pop)
18. I Think We're Alone Now, Tiffany
19. Mony Mony, Billy Idol (meh.)
20. At This Moment, Billy Vera and The Beaters
21. Lady In Red, Chris De Burgh (DIE! DIE! DIE!)
22. Didn't We Almost Have It All, Whitney Houston
23. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, U2 (see comments about U2 above. I love the parody of this that Negativland did around the same time.)
24. I Want Your Sex, George Michael
25. Notorious, Duran Duran
26. Only In My Dreams, Debbie Gibson
27. (I've Had) The Time Of My Life, Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes
28. The Next Time I Fall, Peter Cetera and Amy Grant
29. Lean On Me, Club Nouveau
30. Open Your Heart, Madonna
31. Lost In Emotion, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam
32. (I Just) Died In Your Arms, Cutting Crew
33. Heart And Soul, T'pau
34. You Keep Me Hangin' On, Kim Wilde
35. Keep Your Hands To Yourself, Georgia Satellites
36. I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me), Aretha Franklin and George Michael (Not great)
37. Control, Janet Jackson (great album)
38. Somewhere Out There, Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram
39. U Got The Look, Prince (from one of the best albums EVER and certainly Prince's high point)
40. Land Of Confusion, Genesis (bleh)
41. Jacob's Ladder, Huey Lewis and The News
42. Who's That Girl, Madonna (Just O.K. One of her weaker songs)
43. You Got It All, Jets
44. Touch Me (I Want Your Body), Samantha Fox
45. I Just Can't Stop Loving You, Michael Jackson and Siedah Garrett
46. Causing A Commotion, Madonna
47. In Too Deep, Genesis
48. Let's Wait Awhile, Janet Jackson (I didn't love this song. Too shmaltzy)
49. Hip To Be Square, Huey Lewis and the News
50. Will You Still Love Me?, Chicago
51. Little Lies, Fleetwood Mac
52. Luka, Suzanne Vega
53. I Heard A Rumour, Bananarama
54. Don't Mean Nothing, Richard Marx
55. Songbird, Kenny G
56. Carrie, Europe
57. Don't Disturb This Groove, System
58. La Isla Bonita, Madonna
59. Bad, Michael Jackson (Yes, it was)
60. Sign 'O' The Times, Prince
61. Change Of Heart, Cyndi Lauper
62. Come Go With Me, Expose
63. Can't We Try, Dan Hill
64. To Be A Lover, Billy Idol
65. Mandolin Rain, Bruce Hornsby and the Range
66. Breakout, Swing Out Sister
67. Stand By Me, Ben E. King
68. Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Genesis
69. Someday, Glass Tiger
70. When Smokey Sings, ABC
71. Casanova, Levert
72. Rhythm Is Gonna Get You, Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine
73. Rock Steady, Whispers
74. Wanted Dead Or Alive, Bon Jovi
75. Big Time, Peter Gabriel
76. The Finer Things, Steve Winwood
77. Let Me Be The One, Expose
78. Is This Love, Survivor
79. Diamonds, Herb Alpert
80. Point Of No Return, Expose
81. Big Love, Fleetwood Mac
82. Midnight Blue, Lou Gramm
83. Something So Strong, Crowded House
84. Heat Of The Night, Bryan Adams (haven't heard it, but I can't stand the guy)
85. Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You, Glenn Medeiros
86. Brilliant Disguise, Bruce Springsteen
87. Just To See Her, Smokey Robinson
88. Who Will You Run Too, Heart (don't remember it)
89. Respect Yourself, Bruce Willis (Bruce Willis. 80s music career. NOOOOO!)
90. Cross My Broken Heart, Jets
91. Victory, Kool and The Gang
92. Don't Get Me Wrong, Pretenders
93. Doing It All For My Baby, Huey Lewis and The News
94. Right On Track, Breakfast Club
95. Ballerina Girl, Lionel Richie
96. Meet Me Half Way, Kenny Loggins
97. I've Been In Love Before, Cutting Crew
98. (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right To Party, Beastie Boys
99. Funkytown, Pseudo Echo
100. Love You Down, Ready For The World (I liked Oh Sheila much better)

This article in the New Republic argues that rock snobs are an endangered species.

In some ways... the iPod revolution is a Rock Snob's dream. Now, nearly all rock music is easily and almost instantly attainable, either via our friends' computers or through online file-sharing networks. "Music swapping" on a mass scale allows my music collection to grow larger and faster than I'd ever imagined. And I can now summon any rare track from the online ether.

But there's a dark side to the iPod era. Snobbery subsists on exclusivity. And the ownership of a huge and eclectic music collection has become ordinary. Thanks to the iPod, and digital music generally, anyone can milk various friends, acquaintances, and the Internet to quickly build a glorious 10,000-song collection. Adding insult to injury, this process often comes directly at the Rock Snob's expense. We are suddenly plagued by musical parasites. For instance, a friend of middling taste recently leeched 700 songs from my computer. He offered his own library in return, but it wasn't much. Never mind my vague sense that he should pay me some money. In Rock Snob terms, I was a Boston Brahmin and he was a Beverly Hillbilly--one who certainly hadn't earned that highly obscure album of AC/DC songs performed as tender acoustic ballads but was sure to go bragging to all his friends about it...

I'm not alone in these frustrations. "Even for a recovering Rock Snob, such as myself," Steven Daly told me, "it's a little disturbing to hear a civilian music fan boast that he has the complete set of Trojan reggae box-sets on his iPod sitting alongside 9,000 other tracks that he probably neither needs nor deserves." It's true: Even if music leeches don't fully appreciate, or even listen to, some of the gems they so effortlessly acquire, we resent them anyway. One friend even confessed to me in an e-mail that "I have been known to strip the iTunes song information off mix CDs just to keep the Knowledge secret."

But resistance is futile. Even the Rock Snob's habitat, the record shop, is under siege. Say farewell to places like Championship Vinyl, the archetypal record store featured in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. "The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it's narrow and dingy and overcrowded, partly because that's what I wanted--this is what record shops should look like," explains Hornby's proprietor, Rob. Like great used bookstores, the Championship Vinyls of the world are destinations where the browsing and people-watching is half the fun. (A certain kind of young man will forever cling to the fantasy of meeting his soul mate as they simultaneously reach for the same early-era Superchunk disc.) Equally gratifying is the hunt for elusive albums in a store's musty bins, a quest that demands time, persistence, and cunning, and whose serendipitous payoffs are nearly as rewarding as the music itself. Speaking of book-collecting, the philosopher Walter Benjamin spoke of "the thrill of acquisition." But, when everything's instantly available online, the thrill is gone.

I'm as much of a music snob as anybody, but I can't relate to any of this. Perhaps it's partly because I've always favored more portable music like cassettes over L.P.s. I also just don't get that excited by music stores, because I found they often were out of whatever I was looking for, and in the old days they didn't have listening stations. A bookstore lets you immediately sample the wares, but it Tower, et al a long time to figure out how to reproduce that experience.

 

And I LOVE sharing my discoveries with people. I WANT them to know what I've put on a mix C.D. and who are the artists behind the music. I would LOVE them to get just as excited about my favorites as I do. Isn't that the whole point?

Yes, it's possible to download a lot of music really quickly and easily... but a lot of people just don't bother. Or they don't know how to pick out the good stuff from the dross.

Snobbery is still possible! Keep the faith.

I've been listening to two newish albums a lot lately.

The first one, Siberie m'etait Contee (sorry about the missing accents) is accompanied by an illustrated book, and seems to be largely unavailable here. (I ordered it from someplace in france called alapage.com) It's almost entirely in French, so my comprehension is not as good as it should be (I can get individual phrases but feel like I'm missing the bigger picture.) But I can't stop listening to it. It moves beautifully from a jaunty description of a Parisian neighborhood (Le P'tit Jardin) to shivering in the dead of winter (Siberie Fleuve Amour). For those who have heard his previous albums: it's a different musical style than that of Claudestino, but just as good - like that one, all the songs on this album form a complete, unified work. Individual songs are excellent, and the whole thing at once is even better. It's also less scattered than Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, which had some good songs but didn't tell a coherent "story." This one does. I hope it gets released in the U.S. someday.

The second one I just got today. It's by a pair of musicians that I wasn't previously familiar with, Amadou et Miriam. Their latest album was produced by Chao, and features him on several tracks. They should form some kind of supergroup and keep on working together, as far as I'm concerned; this album is hugely enjoyable and lively. (Interestingly enough, one of the songs, M'bif à ˆ (balafon) has a backing track that's identical to that of Siberie Fleuve Amour. I guess it's O.K. to plagarize from yourself!) If you want to check out Dimanche a Bamako, it's now available on iTunes.