The first time I listed to Sufjan Stevens's cover of The Innocence Mission's "The Lakes of Canada," it didn't exactly grab me, but this song has been creeping up on me ever since.
I can't put my finger on why I find it so appealing--when I can parse the lyrics, they're not usually blowing my socks off. Maybe I've embarked on a love affair with the banjo.
(I am also fond of the Charles Boyer-esque French accent on the guy talking to Sufjan Stevens at the beginning of this particular video.)
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Friday, June 04, 2010
Tigermilk
I can't stop listening to Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk lately. I've long since known every song on it, but I hadn't listened to the album as a whole until very recently, and it's so, so lovely.
It's a14-year-old album now (!), but I wasn't clued in to Belle and Sebastian until about three albums later (Fold Your Hands, Child...). Books and music were a totally different story in the pre-internet days**, for rural kids like me. I had to trust Spin magazine and the one alternative radio station out of Windsor-Detroit (89X) to point me in the direction of music I might like, and neither would have covered music from an album with such a limited initial release (1000 albums).
**Actually, I know the internet existed in 1996, but I also remember that circa 1993-94, my high school only had 2-3 computers capable of hooking up to the internet. IF my home had internet in 1996, it was most definitely a dial-up connection, which meant we couldn't be tying the phone line up for hours. And I feel 90% sure that my parents didn't get an internet connection until a year or two after that. In fact, the longer I think about it, the less sure I am that my parents had replaced the Commodore 64 (seriously) until after I moved away for school. For assignments, I used an electric typewriter from my last year of high school until midway through my third year of university (although that was unusual, at the time).
So, yeah, Tigermilk. The best song is the first song:
But I love 3-4 other songs almost as much, and the only one that's a bit of a dud is "Electronic Renaissance."
It's a14-year-old album now (!), but I wasn't clued in to Belle and Sebastian until about three albums later (Fold Your Hands, Child...). Books and music were a totally different story in the pre-internet days**, for rural kids like me. I had to trust Spin magazine and the one alternative radio station out of Windsor-Detroit (89X) to point me in the direction of music I might like, and neither would have covered music from an album with such a limited initial release (1000 albums).
**Actually, I know the internet existed in 1996, but I also remember that circa 1993-94, my high school only had 2-3 computers capable of hooking up to the internet. IF my home had internet in 1996, it was most definitely a dial-up connection, which meant we couldn't be tying the phone line up for hours. And I feel 90% sure that my parents didn't get an internet connection until a year or two after that. In fact, the longer I think about it, the less sure I am that my parents had replaced the Commodore 64 (seriously) until after I moved away for school. For assignments, I used an electric typewriter from my last year of high school until midway through my third year of university (although that was unusual, at the time).
So, yeah, Tigermilk. The best song is the first song:
But I love 3-4 other songs almost as much, and the only one that's a bit of a dud is "Electronic Renaissance."
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
"Poison"
I'm still not back to actual books yet, despite the title of this blog. To be fair, I'm doing a lot of reading, but it doesn't lend itself to blurby little summaries, so I'm staying way off topic.
So, as a child, if I read about or heard a reference to something I didn't quite understand, I was often wary of asking an adult for clarification. By the time I was nine or ten, I'd definitely figured out that most of the stuff that was going over my head had something to do with sex, and was generally content to wait it out, confident that the joke or word would make sense to me eventually.
For example, the first time I read Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't, I had no idea why Tony was carrying around books and raincoats to "hide" something about his body. I don't remember when I twigged to the fact that the Tony's euphemisms were about erections, but I was always aware that the euphemisms were euphemisms.
When it comes to music, however, even the euphemisms often escaped my notice. I was cheerfully oblivious to implications, and often still am. At seven, I was a fan of Madonna's Like A Virgin album, but I was really, really missing the implications in that title. (Oddly, I think that I never worried over what the title meant because I was raised Catholic; when "the Virgin Mary" is a standard turn of phrase in your daily life, you stop paying much attention to that phrases's component parts.)
So, lately, I was thinking about the Bell Biv Devoe song, "Poison," which was a big hit on the radio stations I listened to obsessively back in 1990. I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and while I liked the song, I don't recall thinking it was risque or scandalous or something that would bother my parents.
Listening to it twenty years later was startling. "What did he just say about 'hos'?" "'Never trust a big butt and a smile'?" (Admittedly, that one was startling because it was also part of the title of an academic essay about African American dialogism I read not too long ago, which is an unexpected connection.) "'Me and the crew used to do her'?"
How did I miss these, and yet was mildly scandalized by Young and the Restless's choice to rhyme the name "Judy" with "booty" in "Poison Ivy"?
So, as a child, if I read about or heard a reference to something I didn't quite understand, I was often wary of asking an adult for clarification. By the time I was nine or ten, I'd definitely figured out that most of the stuff that was going over my head had something to do with sex, and was generally content to wait it out, confident that the joke or word would make sense to me eventually.
For example, the first time I read Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't, I had no idea why Tony was carrying around books and raincoats to "hide" something about his body. I don't remember when I twigged to the fact that the Tony's euphemisms were about erections, but I was always aware that the euphemisms were euphemisms.
When it comes to music, however, even the euphemisms often escaped my notice. I was cheerfully oblivious to implications, and often still am. At seven, I was a fan of Madonna's Like A Virgin album, but I was really, really missing the implications in that title. (Oddly, I think that I never worried over what the title meant because I was raised Catholic; when "the Virgin Mary" is a standard turn of phrase in your daily life, you stop paying much attention to that phrases's component parts.)
So, lately, I was thinking about the Bell Biv Devoe song, "Poison," which was a big hit on the radio stations I listened to obsessively back in 1990. I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and while I liked the song, I don't recall thinking it was risque or scandalous or something that would bother my parents.
Listening to it twenty years later was startling. "What did he just say about 'hos'?" "'Never trust a big butt and a smile'?" (Admittedly, that one was startling because it was also part of the title of an academic essay about African American dialogism I read not too long ago, which is an unexpected connection.) "'Me and the crew used to do her'?"
How did I miss these, and yet was mildly scandalized by Young and the Restless's choice to rhyme the name "Judy" with "booty" in "Poison Ivy"?
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