Kedvesem and her LPUC scale
 

I sometimes wonder if I belong on this forum. I came here originally because I forum-stalk my Sir. But I love music, as deeply as anyone I know, Sir included. I just do not have the broad tastes or the knowledge that he does.

So I doubt that I will write in this journal everyday. But when I have something to say, I will.

One unusual aspect about the way I listen to music, unusual for someone who loves music anyway, is that I rarely get to choose what music I listen to. I spend my mornings either teaching school--which entails no music as it is distracting--or else editing. When I am editing, the children choose the music.

When Sir comes home, we usually continue with his album progress, continuing the alphabetical path.

Pretty much the only time I choose the music is when I am going somewhere by train and take my headphones.

This is part of why I won't be posting every day, for sometimes what I listen to, I will comment on in Sir's thread, in response to what he's said on the album, and sometimes, when the children have chosen the same album for the tenth day in a row, I just have nothing to say. So, with that introduction out of the way, here is what I listened to yesterday.

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As it happens, I love Marina and the Diamonds. There is something about Marina's cynicism that appeals to me. I am not often that into girl singers, but sometimes there is a female artist who sings about something I can relate to. Most of them sing about relationships, and that is fine. Humans are relational beings, and therefore relationships are a universal topic for us. But I don't want to hear about a break-up, make-up series or about how she "really likes" a guy or wants to "see his peacock".

Marina does none of those things. There is a richness to her voice and a darkness to her lyrics that combine to really do it for me. I never object when her music is put on. In fact, she rates an L on the LPUC scale.

For those who missed the scale on Sir's journal, here it is:

Music I Love
Music that is Pleasant
Music that is Unobjectionable
Music that is Crap I hate

An excellent first post! I'm looking forward to seeing how you share in this journal. You have a brilliant mind.

Tonight my darling Sir set aside his music just so I could choose what I wanted to listen to, and I did not even have to think about it.

I chose to listen to Angus and Julia Stone. We listened to three of their albums in a row.

These albums were: Angus and Julia Stone

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A Book Like This

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Down the Way

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Now, obviously since I used the chance to choose the music for the evening on listening these albums, they definitely rate an L on the LPUC scale.

Why?

Because of songs like For You and Heart Beats Slow.

Because their understated, folky sound carries their melodies as the wind carries the clouds.

When I listen to Angus and Julia Stone sing, I hear descriptions of love and passion such as I can recognize for truth.

When Julia is singing in For You about the feeling of a woman who wants her man to be the star of her universe, who wants to keep him there in disregard for all the world, I can understand her, and she clearly understands what she is singing.

When they are both singing in Heart Beats Slow about the way one lover looks at another and knows the crushing humility of love, knows that there is no way to deserve the peerless beloved and yet no way not to desire the beloved--the truth of what they sing can take my breath and bring tears to my eyes--and I never cry at media, whether music or movies or books.

When I hear them singing in Don't Take My Word For It, I hear the love that is more than romantic love, the love that is more than purely Eros, singing proudly. The love that is close as blood--or closer--and yet one of desire. And my heart leaps up in response, for this, this is something I know.

I do not depend on any other artist to express my own heart's fullness. I will do that myself, thank you very much. But when I hear something that I know and hear it so perfectly expressed, it brings me a unique joy.

So one of the great pleasures of my life is listening to Angus and Julia Stone singing of love and friendship and kinship.

I enjoy Angus and Julia, too, but I think you like them more. Bella is by far my favorite song of theirs. Beautifully understated, like a stream flowing by, peaceful but promising something more down the way. :)

Yes, I clearly do. They make my top five list. Bella is indeed lovely, a song defined as strongly by its silence and restraint as by its melody.

And it always reminds me of Peter Ibbetson...

Top notch journal. Will be following.

Well, I feel like I'm spam posting almost! I posted yesterday, and I'm posting today?

But tonight, Sir took a detour from his alphabetical progression to drink a beer and listen to some Sturgill Simpson--because I mentioned Sturgill Simpson today on Sir's journal!

So I am posting about the two albums we listened to:

First was High Top Mountain.

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Followed by Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.

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I enjoy some country music. I love the Celtic influence in the violins and the simple melodies. Guitars are also a plus. (Love that phallic imagery!)

However, most pop country music lacks what I enjoy about country music without providing anything I could enjoy about pop music, and the older country music, though good, is often referencing not only a way of life I have never lived, but one that has been lost longer than I have been alive.

So of more contemporary country music, I find I prefer Hank Williams III and Sturgill Simpson. Sir tells me they are both part of the "Outlaw Country" genre. I am not really sure what that means, but I know that when I want something more chill, I prefer Sturgill. When I want more energy, I prefer Hank III.

But there is something further there. Hank III is a definite Reb, full of Rebel pride. I am myself sprung of Southern stock, so I am familiar with the concept and understand where that Rebel pride originates. I can appreciate his defiance and his clinging to his "country and outlaw" ways. But I do not know that lifestyle. I have not lived in the United States at all for any length of time since I was quite a small child. All my knowledge of it is external.

Sturgill's songs are more universal, more generally applicable, so I can relate to them more. In particular, some of his songs--the cynical ones--particularly resonate with me.

"Life ain't fair," he sings, "and the world is mean."

"Everyone says they'll be there for you, but in the end you all know they won't."

"They call me King Turd up here on **** Mountain, if you want it you can have the crown."

Bitter? Yes. Accurate? Also yes.

Sturgill's smooth and genuine voice carries his lyrics, giving them a believability that one rarely hears. In fact, I would go so far as to say he has it in almost the quantity of Johnny Cash, who could make you believe he meant anything and everything he said.

Sturgill Simpson is a definite L.

(Pro-tip: Listen to him with spiced rum and Coke. It's a much better fit for the music than cassis-orange cocktails.)

So many of Simpson's songs speak to me. You've mentioned some of them, but I'd like to mention "Voices", too.

I like how he reworks the two cliches into something meaningful. And the musical phrasing is classic country goodness.

I'd also like to mention "Turtles All the Way Down".

I can relate to this. So many drugs, so many good times. Right, ked? But at the end of the day, all they did was alter our perceptions. Love is what changed us, transformed us. And look at us now!

Yes, "Voices" is definitely a purely country feeling, and it is good. Very Good.

"Turtles All the Way Down" is probably my favourite of his songs, both for its personal connections--the fun times you mention--and for its accurate appraisal of those psychedelic drugs.

And when I look at us now, I can hardly speak--or write--for the sheer wonderment of it, Sir. :love:

Im feeling it...go go girl.

For me, Sturgill Simpson is, I think, awesome. 'Voices' is one of my favourites by him.

I am beginning to think my Sir is purposely doing this so that I will post things in this journal! :)

Tonight we listened to two Mumford and Sons albums:

Sigh No More
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and

Babel
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These two albums are two of my favourite albums in existence. They rate an L on the LPUC scale, without question. If they never made another album, for the sake of these two, I would always love them. In fact, their Wilder Mind album I don't even like. But yet I love Mumford and Sons because of these two albums.

Now, for why.

In one of the tracks on Sigh No More (itself a reference to a line from Much Ado About Nothing, which for a Shakespeare buff like me would be enough to draw my ear), there are two lines which go:

"In these bodies we will live; in these bodies we will die.
Where you invest your love, you invest your life."

Those two lines encapsulate the message of both these albums, and yes, there is indeed a message. It is one of the things I find most arresting about these albums, about the band itself, even.

It is as though Marcus Mumford is standing there saying, "This is my ass. This is a hole in the ground. They are not the same." He is making this statement very clearly and unequivocally.

Now, I am a sucker for an unequivocal statement. I love Rush and their A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres, and that despite the fact I find them terminally naive. They are making a statement and throwing all their philosophical weight behind it.

Mumford and Sons do the same thing. They have a clearly defined worldview, and they are not shy about putting it into their music. Add to this manly courage (I swoon over manliness.), a haunting Celtic cry, as in "White Blank Page" or a mournful violin and a pulsing banjo as in "Lover of the Light", and you have a recipe for the most perfectly appointed band for my ears.

Let me put it another way. I have been to fewer concerts than I have fingers. Rare is the time when I have actually been to see an artist live. For Mumford and Sons, I was willing to take time off work and travel just to see them. (As it happened, they ended up having a closer concert than Fuji Rock, but I was going to go to Fuji Rock just for them.)

There are other albums I love as much as these, but none I love more. A coherent philosophy, eloquently expounded, with Celtic wails and a sincerity that makes even Johnny Cash sound artificial?

Yes. Oh very yes.

I've read all over the internet how reviled Mumford & Sons are, and how if you want to listen to them, you should listen to The Frames or Of Monsters and Men instead. I don't get that. I don't understand the hatred so many people have for this band. I listen to them, and I also listen to The Frames and Of Monsters and Men. :) I love them all!

i don't hate mumford and sons but i am not a fan either. they just don't do anything for me.

But ... neither The Frames nor Of Monsters and Men--and Of Monsters and Men is one of my favourite bands of ever--sound remotely like Mumford and Sons.

This has to do with those stupid genre labels, doesn't it? I bet they all share some stupid, meaningless genre label! :mad:

Oh **** you both. They are dull indie pop garbage with banjos.

Mumford & Sons = REM + banjos

EDIT: I've been beat to it

But ... I like REM. And banjos.

I definitely like banjos.

That's bull****. REM are good indie pop. Mumford and Sons wish they could be REM with banjos.

Pretty sure Winston said he was sick to death of the banjo, though. ;)

You keep telling yourself that.

Why do you do that? You have this streak where you hate on underground groups that become popular over time. e.g. REM, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, J.S. Bach etc etc. Do you look to see how many people like a band before you can extrapolate for yourself whether or not you will like them?

I always thought that REM during the IRS years were cool.

Probably because that's the only thing they had going for them, and he was sick of being a one-trick pony. Well congratulations, now he will have no tricks and be a useless **** who will fall by the musical wayside and die in a ditch.

**** you and your stupid bull**** you're a ****ing **** who can't see past his hipster mustache to know the glory that is everything beyond the known of that which is.

Oh, I found a piece of ham that fell off my pizza!

I only do that when I don't like the band. REM is the only one that you listed that I don't like. They just bore me.

The great underground indie band Johann Sebastian Bach.

He really blew up when they started selling his shirts at Hot Topic.

One of my three prime interests.

They made him as big as Misfits and Nirvana. Those bands that no one's ever heard the music of but have shirts every where.

J.S. Bach was considered an excellent organist by the public, but that was about it. He wasn't considered a legend when he died. It was the few composers who were particularly fans of his that kept interest in his music going, and his notoriety slowly build off of that.

:clap:

Now I know that Sir is doing this on purpose. His knowing laugh when I said so was confirmation enough, but then he chose Pink Floyd for our Saturday evening music? I warned him, though, that if he is burning through the L ranking, soon my journal will end. After all, the LPUC scale is very, very bottom-heavy. Each layer is smaller than the layer below.

But back to Pink Floyd.

We listened to my two favourite Pink Floyd albums:

Animals

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And Wish You Were Here
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Now, there are several reasons I love Pink Floyd, but Animals clearly illustrates two of the primary ones. First, there are the guitars. Oh, those guitars. Pink Floyd embraces the phallic aspect of the guitar, of course, but they do more. The guitars of Pink Floyd are vocalists, too. The guitars sing. There is even a spot on Animals where the guitars actually cackle. When a guitar can sing and speak, it becomes a separate entity in the band, and I appreciate its contribution.

Another thing I appreciate about Pink Floyd is their astuteness. One of the main points I take away from Animals is that, whether the dogs are in charge or whether the sheep have risen up and overthrown their dog overlords--the pigs remain the same. The pigs are the societal constant.

It's a brilliant observation, and I appreciate the intelligence that makes it.

Wish You Were Here is, for me, simply more of what I love about Pink Floyd, their singing guitars and the strong statements, eloquently made, in their songs. The poetry of "So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell" is astonishing and beautiful, and the musical expression of it soars with their guitars.

Hence the L.

I shouldn't have listened to this album on threshold LSD with my friends. Too much mind reading ended our friendship.

Pretty sure even African pygmies living deep in the Congo have heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

The friendship wasn't worth the preserving. But listening to the conclusion of the album while playing on the kitchen floor with the kittens? Yes, please. No one reads my mind unless I choose.

Oops, made the reference wrong. That would be ol' Ludwig Van.

And now I'm back.

Oh boy.

Tonight my darling Sir and I listened to Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage.

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Now, this was not our usual musical fare, and, furthermore, it was my first introduction to Frank Zappa. I had heard precisely none of his music before this, and the sum total of my knowledge of him was that he named his children "Dweezil" and "Moon Unit".

Additionally, we listened to this album--which I was surprised to learn was a rock opera--because a friend of Sir's and mine mentioned that this album had changed his life, helping him to make sense of things that had never made sense before.

So I went into this looking at it through the lens of my friend's worldview.

First of all, I was surprised by the overwhelming sexuality of the piece. Don't get me wrong. This was a pleasant surprise, and I enjoyed it greatly. But given my friend's personality it surprised me--until I realized that the "Central Scrutinizer" was also, doubtless, part of what my friend identified with. He has mentioned his difficulty in shutting off his "inner monologue" long enough to enjoy something, and since this rock opera has an "inner monologue" already built in, I suspect that that was part of what enabled him to enjoy the album.

Secondly, I knew that I would not be able to dislike the album when "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?" came on. That song was pure win, and I love it.

Thirdly, my 15-year-old, my 6-year-old, and my 1-year-old all started dancing at any point when they passed through the room while this album was playing. My 15-year-old actually said, "How can you not dance to this?"

So, this hodge-podge of a review actually suits what it is a hodge-podge of an album. Nearly every song was a different genre, with a completely different sound. These individual pieces, each good but having no bearing on the pieces on either side of it, were strung together by the "Central Scrutinizer", whose commentary was the only unifying factor.

This, too, struck me particularly because our friend has mental health issues. For him, too, reality is apparently disjointed, dissonant set pieces, connected by the single thread of his own "Central Scrutinizer". This added a poignancy to the album for me personally that, I think, is actually absent from the musical artifact itself. And at the end, Joe realizes he is mad--which would parallel for my friend his diagnosis with mental illness--but where Joe chooses to forgo his imaginary music in favour of getting an ordinary job that crushes all his creativity and musical genius, my friend refused to conform. This would grant my friend a sense of superiority. Recognizing his own "madness" for lack of a better word, he embraces it because the alternative is stultifying conformity.

It gave my friend a way to cope.

In and of itself, I found Joe's Garage to be pretentious. Any musical piece that focuses on the "persecution of music" has a tendency to be pretentious. I dislike pretension, and that was a turn-off overall. Music being illegal? Ha. Never. It's too useful as a tool for propaganda to be criminalized. However, any album that describes prison rape as sensually as this does is a stroke of genius, and the "imaginary guitar solo" was brilliant.

I rated this album a solid P, which was far higher than I thought it might rate on the LPUC scale.

Excellent thoughts on this most excellent album. I had a lot of fun (and we had a lot of laughs) listening to this, and I especially liked our 15-year-old constantly interjecting with "what the frak?" But it was the imaginary guitar solo that really got me; it was serenity after the mayhem. There was no laughing then.

So there are other people who use "frak" out loud? Oh god.

She's watched BSG through about three times now.