Music You Are Embarrassed About Liking

Discussion in 'Movies, TV and Music' started by Caesar, Jul 16, 2010.

  1. Len

    Len Member+

    Club: Dallas Tornado
    Jan 18, 1999
    Everywhere and Nowhere.....I'm the wind, baby.
    Me neither. All the music that's come between my watching the Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show to now - there's no apparent rhyme or reason for what I like or don't like - I just do......or don't.
     
  2. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    Okay, if you saw the Beatles when they played the Ed, you're older than I am.

    I once had a radio DJ tell me that, for a lot of folks, the music they like the most is the music that was hot when they were teens. Makes sense, because it's generally the time when you're having the most fun. My teens ran from mid-70s to early 80s, but I picked up a lotbof faves from the early 70s as well.

    I do dig and will defend to the death 70s music, but there are a few tunes that make me change the station... I love the night life by Alicia Bridges, and You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate come to mind.
     
  3. Len

    Len Member+

    Club: Dallas Tornado
    Jan 18, 1999
    Everywhere and Nowhere.....I'm the wind, baby.
    Yea, in a lot of instances it's the memories more than the music itself. Occasionally I'll hear a song that I haven't heard in a long time; despite having loved it back in the day, now I'm thinking, "That's it?"
     
  4. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    Rodney Crowell; original rhythm guitar and second voice in Emmylou Harris' Hot Band-- which makes him pretty much Gram Parsons' replacement.

    "Bluebird Wine," "Ain't Livin' Long Like This," "Song For The Life," "Leaving Louisiana In the Broad Daylight," "Stars on the Water," "Stuff That Works," and many many more. Among the greatest of American songwriters. Also Rosanne Cash's ex- husband, and close friend of the late Guy Clark.
     
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  5. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    See, I'm kind of the other way. If I like a song a month after I first hear it, I'm gonna like it forever. I don't outgrow the music, because whatever was in me to like it originally is still there.

    I did really like Michael Penn's No Myth, but it lost me after a week. That's rare for me.

    I don't recall all this about him, but I remember that you were the one who hipped me to his original of SOTM.

    I think "greatest" doesba lot of work here. These are not songs I particularly care for, tho I'm willing to admit that they probably do well in their genre.

    As much as I like to talk about music, I really don't go back much further than the 50s or ahead much past the early 90s. And I find most of the 50s pop boring. Even my jazz love is limited to bebop and experimental (Nordic is a word used a lot these days), with a few ballads here/there. I don't get into a lot of big band, western swing, ragtime, or vocal stuff. It's been said of me that I like jazz that makes folks shoot up smack...
     
  6. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    So now. I can't get No Myth out of my head...
     
  7. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    Dixieland rules especially post war dixieland-- Kid Ory, Jimmie McPartland, Turk Murphy, the Firehouse Five...

    Benny Goodman too. And Chico Hamilton when he had John Lloyd, Buddy Colette, Jim Hall, Gabor Szabo. An awful lot of bebop seems to me to be music for math teachers.

    Wait! What is it you teach? Music innit?
     
  8. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    Bebop is for anyone willing to put in the time. I teach history!

    Music lovers have to do the work to get bop. It IS like study. But it's good study, like history or Western Civ. Like eating right. We all need to go beyond the LCD of what makes the hips move and go to what makes the brain analyze and appreciate. Otherwise it degenerates into a feelfest. I know you already do that, so you're kind of in the clear, but I've read the hate from other posters.
     
  9. msilverstein47

    msilverstein47 Member+

    Jan 11, 1999
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
  10. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    Whereas for me it is not about the hips or the brain particularly, but the spirit, the music that charms the snake. Jungean structures, which can be portals to the bedroom, but also the kitchen, the library, the chapel, the conservatory, the hearth, and the bath...

    Hence Grappelli as my GOAT, and the Dead, Brubeck, Monk, Hamilton, Bolling, Miles Davis.

    It isn't the pelvic aspect of the blues that gets me, it is the archetypal aspect-- at its earliest manifestation music was ritual magic, and it retains that charge today, if given a chance. It can be very ornate-- but the thing it evokes is pretty simple, really.
     
  11. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    Your post generated not so much a reply (I don't disagree with anything you've said here), but a sense that I do need to revisit the post that you quoted.

    I don't actually think we ought to abandon all of any of the senses we use to decide what music we like and don't. That sentence was a bit over the top. But it just floors me that there are so many alleged fans of music who treat it as the background of their parties instead of something to get into (thru.. some kind of study, formal or not) and enjoy more because you know WHY you enjoy it, and the sense of accomplishment that comes with learning more about shit you enjoy.

    I was thinking about blues and Negro Spirituals earlier today and it occurred to me that if the experiences of Black people back then (or an average of then and now, FWIW) were to be converted into sound, very little of it would sound attractive or even organized in any way. Maybe that's it. Maybe I think the stuff blues is supposed to be about is too painful for human enjoyment.
     
  12. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    Well, since you put it that way, let me just find my whitesplainin' hat here...

    The blues is an evolution of field hollers-- work songs-- and field hollers existed in tribal cultures long before there was American slavery. In fact there are Australian Aboriginal musics with the same purpose and some of the same characteristics, and any connection to african tribal cultures is buried in the mists and myths of time. They're all sort of black, but the evolution is more parallel than serial. It seems to me that the oddity is more that the European tribal cultures did not produce or preserve much in the way of work songs-- maybe bagpipe music contains it somewhere... or the Basque txistu tradition or panpipe music or some such...

    But anyway, the blues isn't at root about misery-- it is about perserverance and a kind of sardonic triumph in small things-- "I put hair upon your head, and the good lord never give you none!" "Gimme a pig foot and a bottle of beer." "Champaigne when I'm thirsty, reefer when I want to get high." "Goin' up the country, baby don't you wanna go? If you ain't comin' your sister Lucille said she would for sure." "Why don't you eat where you slept last night?" "Listen, I ain't goin' down to no Red Cross store." "I don't bite my tongue. If you wanna be man of mine you got to fetch it with you when you come."

    Townes Van Zant famously commented that there's really only two kinds of music: the blues, and zippety-doo-dah. And every where the blues met up with another sub culture's version of zippity-doo-dah, another genre was born-- zydeco, bluegrass, reggae, funk, doo wop, soul, country.

    Bill Monroe learned half his music backing his highschool janitor's basement blues gigs on mandolin-- and invented bluegrass out of it. Hank Williams as a child played the street corners with Tee Tot (who was kinda dark, they say) and learned to please an audience and brought home a little bit more for his mom than he did shining shoes.

    Jimmie Rodgers learned to yodel from an acquaintance, grafted it onto a country blues song, and country music was born. Hawaiian cowboys, slack key players, came to the mainland and played around the campfires with black cowboys, and western was born too. And mexican cowboys joined in and norteno began to take shape. And congo square mixed blues and regimental brass players, and produced jazz. It all comes out of the blues...

    There's plenty of misery in it-- "there's a cold wind blows up Main Street/ and Main Street's five miles long" "Got a mind to give up living and go shopping instead" "I wish to the Lord I'd never seen your face..." But it isn't a scream; it is a way to breathe, to put one foot in front of another until you reach the end of the row, until you remember all the things wrong with her, until you catch that rabbit...

    "Oh, me, how good I feel/ I have got possession of an automobile/ now I can eat chicken and I don't have to steal/ Things are a comin' my way."

    What it really all comes down to is 1-4-5 and dadadadadada dot dadada. Something in that opens a door to something in the spirit that is stronger than emotion, purer than illness or fatigue, that gives us a slight sense of what is really behind it all, that tolerance is not a form of resignation or acceptance. That we're on a slow boat to something better.
     
  13. msilverstein47

    msilverstein47 Member+

    Jan 11, 1999
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
  14. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    I like Hall & Oates. I respect them massively for She's Gone and Sara Smile. I respect them a lot for Adult Education.

    But this song I just never took seriously. Ever. I still don't. It would come on the radio and I'd just start doing something else for that 3:54 or whatever. I didn't hate it or anything, it just did not hold my interest. But it came on TV in a commercial last week and I like it now. I'll call it my guilty pleasure tune.

     
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  15. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    #315 Auriaprottu, Nov 25, 2021
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2021
    There was nothing embarrassing about liking Susanna Hoffs back in the day..

    EDIT: Just Image Googled. Still not embarrassing, and she's now 62.
     
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  16. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    "All Over the Place" was my album of the year in 1984. And it was a strong year.

    "Dover Beach" is one of my favorite songs ever.
     
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  17. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    I just Googled- it WAS a strong year. Purple Rain, Diamond Life, Born In The USA, Make It Big, Grace Under Pressure, Who's Afraid Of The Art of Noise... but I'm-a go with Unforgettable Fire as my AOTY.

    And I think 1999 aged better than Purple Rain did, even with the year as the title.
     
  18. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    Also Los Lobos "How Will The Wolf Survive," Dwight Yoakam "Guitars. Cadillacs, Etc Etc," Nanci Griffith "Once In A Very Blue Moon," Ferron "Shadows On A Dime..."
     
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  19. Kazuma

    Kazuma Member+

    Chelsea
    Jul 30, 2007
    Detroit
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Sign O The Times >>> Purple Rain >>> 1999.
     
  20. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    This is the post of a young man, no doubt. Hell, I put Controversy ahead of SOTT, and on par with PR. You clearly listened to him after I moved on.

    For me, 1999 was big during undergrad school, and it was the first Prince album I ever bought. I saw and see PR as being a bit too much pop, even tho it was one of 1984's best. I bought it second.
     
  21. msilverstein47

    msilverstein47 Member+

    Jan 11, 1999
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Lee Rocker...a Stray Cat:
     
  22. Len

    Len Member+

    Club: Dallas Tornado
    Jan 18, 1999
    Everywhere and Nowhere.....I'm the wind, baby.
    Not really embarrassed, but seemed a good thread to post; heard this in the grocery store, yesterday.

     
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  23. msilverstein47

    msilverstein47 Member+

    Jan 11, 1999
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
  24. taosjohn

    taosjohn Member+

    Dec 23, 2004
    taos,nm
    nothing embarrassing about Beau and Sammy that I know.

    But I'm pretty biased. I may have been the first non-hometown dj to play them nationwide...
     
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  25. Auriaprottu

    Auriaprottu Member+

    Atlanta Damn United
    Apr 1, 2002
    The back of the bus
    Club:
    Atlanta
    Nat'l Team:
    --other--
    Not so much embarrassment as fatigue


    For some reason I do this thing in my head every few weeks/days whatever, where I ask myself to name my favorite 3/4/5 tunes from this or that artist. The Spinners popped into my head and I had a brain fart of sorts, coming up with only three songs all told. So I Googled "Spinners Greatest Hits" and found out that my all time favorite Spinners tune -- It's A Shame -- isn't even one of their biggest hits! I guess I thought it was bigger than that. I have the 45 from somewhere.

    Anyhow, looking at the hits brought this one back. It's been in my head for a week now and I want to be rid of it. Maybe posting it here...
     
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