I have a friend who can't stand music. It's such a strange thing...so foreign to me. I have music on all the time. I wake up to a CD (this week it's Candy-O by The Cars) and the music stays on through the shower and then the radio or a CD goes on the minute I'm in the car. Right now I'm still listening to Year Zero by NIN obsessively (I'm waiting for it to pass but so far...) Then when I get into work I immediately put windows media player on shuffle and listen to that all day. It's a rare occasion when music isn't playing. Right now I'm listening to Alice In Chains (we miss you Layne) and lamenting in my head about the lack of good music being produced right now. There are a few bands out there still producing great stuff - Nine Inch Nails and BRMC come to mind and of course my all time favorite Tom Petty is still kickin it out. But other than that good music is scarce and I find that a bit sad. And I swear if I have to look at Britney Spears one more time...well we'll just leave it at that.
Its seems the entertainment world has gone a bit list crazy. Some of these lists are strange. But of course I totally dig the one's that have to do with music. The one I like the best so far is Top 100 One Hit Wonders on VH1. I mean when is the last time you heard Norman Greenbaum's Spirit In The Sky (and did you really need to hear it again)? Not only do you get to hear a snippet of the song but you get a bit of background which I adore. I love trivia about music, both new and old. I have another friend who is as into music as I am and we are always trying to outdo each other with the trivia.
The problem with this is that with the invention of iTunes you can have these songs immediately. Great for me - not so great for my debit card.. iTunes if fabulous but if you aren't careful you'll spend $20-$40 before you know it. They also have this dangerous thing that pops up that basically says "people who bought this also bought..." YIKES!
Here is my iTunes trail from last night.....
"Don't Leave Me This Way" Thelma Houston because it was the first thing on the One Hit Wonders list this led me...
to Bronksi Beat because Jimmy Sommerville who was the lead singer for them later formed a group called The Communards and they did a cover of the Thelma Houston song - anyway I downloaded the song "Why" just because it's a great dance song and its an amazing example of a male falsetto. The next song on the list was "I Don't Want To Fall In Love" by Jane Child. You might remember her as the woman who had a nose ring with a chain attached to her earing. She also had cornrows that were about 4 feet long...an interesting look to say the least. I then remembered I wanted to download some ELO so I brought them up and bought "Do Ya", "Livin Thing", "Don't Bring Me Down", and "Evil Woman". I'm not a huge Jeff Lynne fan but I love these four songs. Queen was on that insidious little "this is what other people bought" tab so I click over to them and discovered that you can only buy albums not individual songs blah!. But while I was there I noticed Queensryche a metal band from the 80's that I loved so I bought "Jet City Woman" LOVE that song. So then I cheated and went to the VH1 website to look at the list to see what else I had to have and decided that I absolutely couldn't live without "The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia" by Vicki Lawrence - probably the geekiest thing right now on my iPod but what can I say? I love that song.
The rest of the downloads looked like this - "Epic" Faith No More - "Cool Like That" Digable Planets - "Pleasure and Pain" The Divinyls - "Turning Japanese" The Vapors - "Unbelievable" EMF- "It Takes Two" Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock - "Let It Ride" Jerry Harrison - "Bust a Move" Young MC - "Feel Like a Stranger" - Grateful Dead. The next day there was some Chris Isaak, Allman Brothers and some others that I can't even remember.....it's all an iTunes fog. Not all of these were on the list, but somewhere in my brain I remember I wanted to buy them.
The good news is I loaded over 1700 songs on my iPod tonight and 10 podcasts of Ask A Ninja.
