There is much good music out there and I'm very happy about it. I don't know about you but I'm finding this year to be more prolific and fecund than last year. I am currently enjoying the music of Deer Tick. Their album War Elephant is quickly becoming a favorite of mine especially tracks like "Dirty Dishes" and "These Old Shoes." Deer Tick sounds like a functional fusion of indie folk, rock 'n roll a-la-Americana, and a wee bit of grunge. The band's cache mostly resides in its lead singer's raspy voice. At times he sort of reminds me Scott Weiland, the lead singer of the band Stone Temple Pilots. He especially does so when singing "Diamond Rings 2007."
I give this newly discovered band HetPer's thumbs up. War Elephant is quickly becoming a high-frequency album in my playlists and I encourage you to check them out.
The second album I'm checking out currently is the newly released My Maudlin Career by the band Camera Obscura. I have been a fan of this band for a number of years now and I've been looking forward to new music from them since their 2006 album, Let's Get Out Of This Country.
My Maudlin Career is at times sad and, yet, at other other times melancholy. This is not the kind of band who's in the business to simply cheer one up. Their music is honest, intellectual, and careful and that is precisely why I like them.
My favorite track from this new album is "James" and, as I noted to Liam yesterday, it's a kind of track that 'gets' you whether you are listening to it or simply forced to think about it when doing something else. Their music is like a good meal heavily based on protein: it's substantial. It looks like Camera Obscura spent the past three years productively, indeed.
One of the authors I've recently discovered and whose work I'll be reviewing shortly, is featured on a piece on the Times. Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist whose work investigates the role evolution plays in much of our spending behaviors.
A bit says:
"Suppose, during a date, you casually say, “The sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term.” Here’s what you’re signaling, as translated by Dr. Miller:
“My S.A.T. scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my I.Q. is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.”
The piece continues:
"A Harvard diploma might help get you a date or a job interview, but what you say during the date or conversation will make the difference. An elegantly thin Skagen watch might send a signal to a stranger at a cocktail party or in an airport lounge, but even if it were noticed, anyone who talked to you for just a few minutes would get a much better gauge of your intelligence and personality. ... “We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”"
I'm not sure I agree with David Brook's recent NY Times piece, but the following words did ring some measure of truth to me.
However, I'm not so sure why it is that the CEO's claim such epithets as unidimensional and so forth. Being humble, diffident, etc., doesn't necessarily preclude excitement now, does it?
"The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around.
For this reason, people in the literary, academic and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success. That’s because the virtues that writers tend to admire — those involving self-expression and self-exploration — are not the ones that lead to corporate excellence."
Yesterday I was listening to Bob Dylan's track "I Want You" [see video below] from the album Blonde on Blonde, and I found myself struggling over the kinds of contradictory thoughts I was having. "I Want You" has strong, serious lyrics. The melody is inspired. However, Bob Dylan sings it. Or at least, he's trying to. And I know that therein lies his idiosyncratic style. He's no Pavarotti, he never pretended to sing conventionally, and I'm grateful for that. Here are some of the thoughts I had with nigh perturbing synchronicity. 'Ha. He sounds bad but it's the kind of bad I dig.' I suppose, I do say 'dig' for 'like' when I'm thinking. My vernacular is truly authentic in my mind, apparently. I suppose it's because I keep it on a leash quite often.
The thoughts continue. 'Hmm, I like the guitar here.' 'Strong lyrics.' 'Ha, ouch, this is bad.' When Dylan says: "The cracked bells and washed-out horns/Blow into my face with scorn,/But its not that way,/I wasn't born to lose you./I want you, I want you," you're bound to pay attention. This, in my mind, is solid poetry. But then he sings it, you know, in that sort-of-talking-sort-of-reciting sort of way, which, I know, is his shtick. And what a shtick. It's what makes him Dylan, after all. So, the mixed reactions contain much seriousness, respect for the art form you're experiencing, and, well, humor, too.
I mention this to make a point about music and how I view it. To me, music is a kind of umbrella that has room for an array of reactions that reside in the cognitive and the emotional at the same time. And it's in its comprehensive policy wherein its significance lies. Music is so big that it consumes the totality of my attention. In that regard, it eclipses everything and everybody else. Bar none. I've come to accept this as a character trait, actually. I know what my limits are and I most surely know how to frame everything else around it.
Granted, many people like music. Humans, for the most part, respond to it instinctually. Some, however, love it with another degree of intensity. Music-loving is not for the faint of heart.
I was scolded (I'm told in retrospect) a number of times a while back for giving all of my attention to music when engaged in some form of conversation with the other one. The thing is, I've never been able to ignore music. If I was contractually bound to music, I'd never succumb to any other visual temptations, if you catch my drift. I always go back to this awfully long car ride I once experienced and the other person telling me that every time music is in the background, I leave the premisses. I'm in a different realm. 'You're elsewhere whenever there's music around.' said the other party with a good dose of disappointment. I couldn't understand why my unequivocal dedication to music was taken so personally. I've loved music since birth and if I'll be asked to make a choice, well, I've loved music since birth. At the end of the track I said, 'I'm sorry, what was that?'
Music, in other words, is never inconsequential to me. It's not inconsequential in my personal life and it, most certainly, isn't inconsequential in my professional life. Music accompanies all I do and it's, as I often say to many, my mode of journaling my quotidian experience.
In terms of philosophy, I always reference Nietzsche's discussion of the superiority of the 'language' of music in his Birth of Tragedy. The moral of that story is that the blind, dying music-loving Socrates does, after all, privilege music above all. And I concur.
"I'm just like everybody else. I love music. If you ask my wife and kids, they don't necessarily know the guy they see for a half-hour on the nightly news. They know me as a music freak."
Openly embracing one's music-freak is key to acceptance, I find. Yes, I am a practicing music freak.
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