Category: Music

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I am going through songs that I like and trying to understand my taste. Depeche Mode keeps coming up for me as a top group and one of my favorite songs of their’s is “You Should be Higher.” It remains true to the original album version while also being better. For me, very rarely is the live version better than the album and this is one of those times. Dave Gahan is a remarkable performer, easily dancing across the stage while also singing up a storm. He is both entertaining and thoughtful.

I even liked the light show which I usually find distracting but found this one supports the song and is interesting to watch while not overwhelming the band’s performance.

The lyrics are mix of cynicism and wistful longing for something better. I particularly like the phrase “your lies are more attractive than the truth.” Truer words, given the present world situation, have never been spoken and perhaps the root of our problems.

Give it a listen.

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When it comes to music, what catches my attention are the lyrics. One of my favorite songs, based on mostly on the lyrics, is “A Pain That I am Used to” by Depeche Mode. I prefer the Jacques Lu Cont remix to the Depeche Mode’s own version. The Lu Cont version has a bit more energy and the opening bit is much more listenable than Depeche Mode’s original version which I found grating.

But what really attracted me to the song was the line: “Give me a pain that I am used to.” This short sentence, more than any other, better expresses what modern life is all about for me. Everything we are grabbing for ultimately brings pain. All we are doing is exchanging one pain for another one so if pain is the result — just give me one that I am used to and be done with it.

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OK I am going to admit something about myself that I really really find embarrassing. The problem is it is what was rumbling through my head when I heard Peter Frampton’s Show Me The Way the other night. So, here goes, I can be a bit of a snob sometimes particularly about popular culture. To give you a good example of how this snobbery sometimes makes me behave, I have never seen the first three Star War movies. That is correct. I haven’t seen the Star War movies that almost everyone agrees are the best ones because someone had the audacity to recommend this popular entertainment to me. TO ME. That last vestige of advant-garde art and foreign films, depressing movies, John Cassavetes movies, that’s the movies I watch, not this nonsense that the hoi polloi watches. The nerve.

Which somehow brings me to Peter Frampton’s Show Me The Way. It is one of my guilty pleasures. I have to be in a mood before I deign listen to it but it generally does the trick for me. I particularly enjoy the live version which I linked to above. And I do not have a reasonable explanation for it. Frampton is a good guitarist who sings well and with a lot of energy but the song has pretty trite lyrics accompanied by pretty pedestrian music. So pretty much like most of the entertainment I encounter.

The lesson for me here is that is all I really should expect. A bit of pleasure. And if later I decide that it was a groundbreaking, earth shattering, inspiring piece of art all the better.

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“Architect” from Frighten Rabbit and Manchester Orchestra is my favorite depressing song right now. You know the song. The one you play when you are feeling blue and listening to this song connects somehow with your sadness and maybe if you play it, your sadness will quickly be purged and you get back to normal. And it usually does the trick better than a therapy session with a psychiatrist. You know the song. Well, this is my quick fix depressing song right now.

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Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife was my parent’s favorite song. I have heard this from both of them at one time or another. Although my mother was more emphatic about it, it didn’t take much thinking on my father’s part to agree.

This makes me laugh every time I hear Mack the Knife. The song is about a paid killer dispatching his victim’s body into the river. No two hearts beating as one or you light up my life or any such romantic nonsense for my Mom and Dad. No, my parents hearts went all squishing when hearing about a murder victim bleeding to death in an alley.

So, if you are ever wondering why I turned out this way, this might be your first clue. This should tell you a lot about my upbringing.

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I tried to write about music and I have published a few (Sunset pigs, Peggy Lee and Marie) but I sometimes think I sound like a really bad Rolling Stone album review. “Great guitar playing.” Like I know anything about guitar playing. Seriously. I haven’t a clue about the difference between good and mediocre guitar playing.

All I really wanted to do was pass on music that I liked and a very brief explanation on what I liked. It might just be a line or two but then this is a blog and it is meant to be brief and to the point. And you can also see why it takes me so long to publish anything. I have a tendency to overthink.

This means I am giving up on deep thoughtful reviews and just going to muse hence the title Musical Musings. Snazsy name, right. about music. So get ready, I am about to unload about music.

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I have already expressed my shock in seeing Kanye West’s wife near naked body at the Grammys. The bigger problem with Bianca Censori’s display of flesh is the attention it is grabbing from a compliant press. Since people are shocked, they are talking about it. I, writing about it now, am part of the problem. I apologize. It is just too big of a juicy target to ignore and I can’t help myself which is also part of the problem.

It is a self-replicating problem. Famous people know that they will get press if they do something shocking. The papers, because they think people will read it, publish the scandalous story. I, because it is a scandalous story, read it. Once the scandal has drained every bit of media attention, a new attention seeking celebrity enters the fray.

First, and most importantly, it is about absolutely nothing other than Kanye West’s need for publicity. He knows how to create controversy and he did it. But what now, other than a few more days of Kanye making the headlines, is this about?

This trivial event, also, reveals how sadly out of touch Hollywood and the Media is with the rest of the country. It’s both titillating and boring. Kanye has become so lame, so desperate for attention that he will ask his wife to expose herself in front of millions. The media will roll out all the really important people to talk about the controversy. Opinions will churn for days to come but nobody outside the environs of Hollywood much cares.

But West, Hollywood and the Media think we do. This has long been an explanation for the sensationalist press. It isn’t our fault. We are giving the public what they want. They want to see people behaving badly so we, wishing we could report on the serious issues of the day but also needing to make money, will report about it. We aren’t the villain here, the public is.

I am not sure what to do here. I understand. If perusing the headlines and you give me a choice about reading about the problems in the Middle East or a naked celebrity, I’m afraid I am going to choose the naked celebrity every single time. Between my need to be entertained and the media’s need to make money, I am stumped on how to proceed.

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When I listen to a song, I create a movie about the song. The song creates images when I listen to it and these images carry on through out the song. Once I have these images, my tendency is to have the same images the next time I listen to the song. Different images may evolve over the years if I listen to a song for a long time but usually fixed images based on my first listening take over and see the same images.

Recently this has become a problem as I am learning that my understanding of words can be wrong. Last year I learned that I misunderstood a line from Joni Mitchell’s song California. I thought Sunset Pig was an animal unique to California. She is actually using a term that people in the 1960’s used when referring to cops.

For almost 40 years, I took a different meaning from the song which is OK. I mean it is the audience’s song once the singer stops singing. But learning this changed the meaning of the song for me and I can’t get back my original understanding. It is a less sweet image. Thinking about Joni trying to kiss a cute little pig who is trying to wiggle free of her embrace is kind of sweet while thinking of a policeman on Sunset Boulevard that she derogatorily calls a policeman isn’t. It doesn’t amuse me any longer. It changed my experience with the song.

This brings me to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale. “ The song is an enigma and people debate what it actually means and often are wrong. Keith Reid, the writer of the song, wasn’t referring to Chaucer when he wrote the line about the Miller telling his tale even though most critics think that is what he is referring to. So trying to understand what the song actually means is probably a losing battle. It isn’t meant to be understood in a straight forward manner in the first place. Still, one line now bothers me because I realized something about the song writer. The line is:

And would not let her be/One of sixteen vestal virgins/Who were leaving for the coast

I have assumed for years that the coast meant California until I realized that Reid was British. Does “the coast” mean something different for somebody from Britain. I could only find definitions that meant California although one person defined “the coast” as the whole American Pacific Coast. But mostly when people use the phrase “the coast,” they meant California.

As far as I could learn, British people mean California as well. But it has begun to bother me because why would a British person getting on a plane and saying they were leaving for “the coast” mean California. California is pretty far away and “the coast” is pretty vague. I would think any British person leaving for California would actually say California.

But I do think it would be important to know what Reid actually means here because it changes my understanding of the song. If a British person is taking a plane to Blackpool instead of to California “the coast” means something different. For the time being, I am sticking with California unless someone can give me a reason to think differently. Let me know.

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Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, just gave a master class on why diversity is important. He is hawking his book on the Masters of Rock and Roll — all who happen to be white men. Wenner, also, happens to be a white man and claims that Blacks and women don’t “articulate” at the same level. What this means, I haven’t the foggiest. But I am betting it is that he feels comfortable talking to them, they speak a common vernacular which he easily understands and thus is able to flesh out these ideas better when he writes. He also admits that perhaps he shouldn’t have used the word master because it sounds like he is limiting the illustrious designation of master to white men which wasn’t his intention. But he did, after all, choose the title and he now rightfully is defending the absence of a more diverse group of master musicians.

This is why diversity matters. People’s opinions about the world are influenced by where they live and who surrounds them. Since Blacks and women might articulate in a different way, people, like Jann Wenner, may not be as comfortable with their experience and what they are saying. In order to understand their experience and their influence on music, it might be helpful to sit down and have a chat with them in order to understand the music world. Wenner clearly has no interest in doing this and that is a big problem.

What is more alarming is that nobody tried to persuade him that excluding women and Blacks might be a bad idea. I am wondering who he worked with on this book and am surprised that nobody brought this omission to his attention. How could this book gone all the way to production and distribution without someone bringing this up is shocking to me. Maybe if someone would have brought this to his attention sooner, he might have had a better explanation ready when questioned about it. He is welcome to his opinion, but then so am I. As it is, he sounds like a racist sexist idiot. I hope I articulated that in a way that could be understood.

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When I am looking for new music, I have gotten into the habit of checking other people’s favorite lists. This is how I discovered Peggy Lee’s version of “Fever” . Since I saw it on several lists, I gave it a listen and was pleasantly surprised at how unique a song it was especially for the time in which Lee sang.

The song came out in the staid 1950’s and it is anything but staid. Lee is clearly singing about sex and not love. She uses the word fever for sex but any adult would know what she is actually talking about and it isn’t love. Her yearning for sex is blatant. She doesn’t hide her desire with sweet talk or some notion of a higher love. She wants to get laid and she is unafraid to say it.

She also takes an inventive approach to the accompanying music. There is only a bass player and a drummer. It is sparse group with the more modest instruments of the band during a time where most songs had a full orchestra. The smaller group gives a quieter tone to the song so that when Lee adds her snapping fingers to the mix, you feel very much like your in Lee’s head as she is pondering the fun she is going to have with her man.

It is lovely way go.