Music Review by M
Ok. First a couple of qualifiers:
I am a music geek, I guess, but I am not a music guru. I am not like John Cusack in High Fidelity, though I wish I were. I am not one of the purists who felt betrayed when British director Stephen Frears set the movie in Chicago, rather than London (where Nick Hornsby's novel takes place). With Jack Black I will raise my goblet of rock, but I will not claim to be able to name ten underrated hair metal bands, or ten Beatles B-sides, or ten best prog rock albums. I'm doing good to know what prog rock is. I have a flimsy album collection, mostly because we have no money for such excesses--not because I don't think it's important to own Dylan's Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks.
Kim calls me a music snob, too, and I guess if by that she means I get physically ill when someone begins singing Culture Club's Karma Chameleon, or that I respond with "rage and contempt" (to steal a phrase from poet John Berryman) when someone calls "Sound of Silence" a great song (it's sophomoric) or Dave Matthews Band the best in the world (they're pretentious) or Disturbed really, well, disturbing (shallow emotionalism), then, yeah, I'm guilty as charged.
I'm also an English teacher, which means I'm allowed to write long sentences like that.
I'm a poet, too, so I'll invoke Whitman: I will freely contradict myself. (I like a little cheese now and again. I actually enjoyed Lindsay Lohan's "Confessions of a Broken Heart" the first time I heard it, and I'll go to the mat for Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.)
By way of introduction, here are my ten favorite songs of the moment, in no particular order:
--Time of the Season, Zombies (and not because some chump on American Idol covered it a few weeks ago. I don't watch TV and didn't know anything about it until I searched for the song on YouTube. Now I feel like something's been stolen. And I did watch a bootleg of that version, and while passable, the Idol house band didn't even attempt Rod Argent's insane organ solo)
--Wear Your Love Like Heaven, Donovan
--Your Touch, Black Keys
--Bennie and the Jets, Elton John
--Peace Train, Cat Stevens (as a dad, I happen to know that it's of the more listenable songs on the Little People's album Things That Go--a better cover, for instance, than their rendition of the 5th Dimension's Up, Up and Away, which isn't a good song no matter who sings it)
--Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, Flaming Lips
--Crazy, Gnarls Barkley (though I'll probably get sick of it soon; I don't think it has staying power)
--Wonderous Stories, Yes
--Requiem, Eliza Gilkyson, or maybe Susan Warner's Did Trouble Me
--Spirit in the Sky, Norman Greenbaum (Merry's actually been requesting this as a bedtime song; you have to love lines like "You gotta have a friend in Jesus/So you know that when you die/He's gonna recommend you to spirit in the sky")
I guess that's ten. That's all the review I'll do this week.
Now you out there. You know who you are. Post your top ten of the moment.
