Today I made myself a CD mix for the commute to and from work that was so satisfying I was almost weeping in the car.
...I have pretty cheezy taste in music, I'll admit. Altho I like to think I have a fairly diversified knowledge of musical genres, in my heart's soundtrack I am a sucker for major key melodies, suspended chords, 1-4-5 bubblegum poppy epiphany. Like, anything from Van Halen to Roxette to the Carpenters to gooey Asian pop can get me on a regular basis. While I appreciate the subtleties of more sophisticated music, sometimes the melody line of a Stevie Wonder ballad is just too interesting to really get under my skin. And I'm not much into those minor-key hooks that have infected the world in a thousand recent compulsively-listenable dance-pop songs, "Can't Get You Outta My Head" ad nauseum. They are catchy to other people in a way that I don't get.
...Anyway, I was thinking about this as I was nearly-teary over my new mix and realized that I had put 4 or 5 songs in a row with highly similar, tastelessly simple, pop-rock choruses. "Yellow", T'pau's "Heart and Soul," some unforgivably corny Counting Crows song...anyway, a sequence that almost certainly makes the mix unlistenable to most normal humans, even those that would like hearing one of those songs at a time. But that's OK because I wouldn't want a lot of other people to have my taste in music, lest we all die of diabetic shock. And plus, as I've blogged before, it's My Car and in its lonely confines I can listen to Any Damn Thing I Want.
...It's a sad and pathetic thing to realize, but those popular, formulaic, ditzy songs indulge my delusion that I'm part of some greater heroic narrative in the course of my day-to-day getting by in Los Angeles, and that my long-suffering struggle against Whatever is always approaching its climactic moment (to occur roughly halfway through the guitar solo).
2 comments:
i hear ya. "yellow" and that "t'pau" song are on almost every playlist i make.
i think i once got in a conversation with an ex-boyfriend about how we were convinced liz phair was heavily influenced on the "guyville" cd by that "t'pau" song. sorry for the bad run-on sentence there. but, you know, how she layers the vocal tracks in that song "flower," or some such thing.
yeah i guess those songs are kind of similar in that respect. but it's hard for me to see a case for a strong influence considering I've only heard that one t'pau song, and have no basis for knowing what their other music, if it exists, sounds like. in the sense that that t'pau song is sung by a woman, unintelligibly, and has a big guitar-y chorus, yes, it is like every song on that liz phair album.
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