Playlist

So – I've covered the many and various (alcoholic) beverages consumed whilst rattling out these Blogs, on my ever-vigilant campaign to keep an eagle eye on all things absurd. And, of course, to alert YOU to these selfsame absurdities.

Because I share the love. I'm like that.

Now I reckon it's about time I share another love – my soundtrack. My 'jam', as they say now.

This is the ever-changing and wildly eclectic (some would say eccentric) playlist of music I have at hand at all times ... thanks of course to the astounding technology that's available to us these days.

I'm up to the point now where I'm immersed in a total sharing system (hmm, maybe I should have titled this one "Sharing"!) involving digital music and all my Apple gear, including iTunes, and numerous devices (as the new way of calling gizmos goes) to play the music on/with.

This includes an iPhone with built-in juke box, a Macbook Pro, an iPad, a desktop iMac, and the

The magic portal – a
net-surfing computer
and juke box in your pocket!

AppleTV doo-hicky that links any music, movies or TVs I have on my (many) hard drives to my home theatre system. (That's Panasonic).  My "ultimate lazy bastid" goal has been achieved: there is some sort of gizmo in every room, and one in my pocket, with which to access the net, hear music, and watch videos. Best of all ... it's all WIRELESS.

As comic Louis CK said not so long ago: "I don't know why people in first-world countries whine about anything. Everything is AMAZING!" Here's Louis on Conan explaining. (It gets specific at about 2:15).

And he's right ... what we have available at our fingertips right now, today, is simply astounding. A device as small as a cell phone can also contain a large amount of music (not to mention a wireless internet connection to allow you to connect to streaming apps like Spotify and Rdio to listen to whatever you want "on demand", for FREE). Not to mention, it's essentially a computer. In your pants.

Sadly yet inexplicably, Canadians can't
get Spotify, while the rest of the
world can. WTF, eh? 

Oh, commiserations to my Canadian compadrés – for some bizarre reason, you can't get Spotify yet ... what did you do to piss them off, anyway?

When I put it in Louis CK's perspective, and think about how astounding this all is, it sometimes makes me think back to the myriad ways I've listened to music in my life. (Anyone born into an existing technology doesn't fully appreciate how absolutely mu-phukkin' AWESOME this all is today, when you come from the cro-magnon era of music storage media from days of yore ...

Music has always been a key element of my existence. From the moment my simple toddler ears tuned in to some '50s pop my mom liked to play on a console-style record player (Marty Robbins, Dean Martin et al), I was hooked.

Dean Martin was one suave mo-fo. Plus
he drank like a thirsty trout.

Not long after that, I started listening to AM Radio on a crappy little portable. I had a paper route then, and they had a contest for us paperboys to win stuff ... when I accumulated enough points to pick a prize from the catalogue, I chose a nifty thing that I could affix to my bike handlebars. It had an AM radio and a light on it! It was the size of a really BIG soup can, and weighed about twice as much with the 4 D batteries needed to power it. If I didn't centre it precisely on the handlebars, the bike had a noticable list to one side when riding it ...

And now in amazed retrospect .... that's when I preceded the "portable music device" trend of the Walkman! (a device I snagged soon after they appeared on the market ... and of course when they showed up, I graduated to a DiscMan too).

Yep. Have money, will spend. 

Right about then, I suddenly realised I was firmly in the grip of the genetic phenomenon: "Must ALWAYS have the BEST thing!" (thanks for that gene, dad ...)

At some point in my mid-teens (the early to mid '70s) I started spending every last cent I made on proper home stereo gear ... and upgraded whenever my bank account allowed for it. I took over a small space in our basement next to the huge oil-burning furnace (it was a bloodless coup) and turned it into what I dubbed "The Garden", where my mates and I

For those born after the cassette era – here's one.
On a 90-minute tape, you could fit
an average album on each side. 

would 'veg out' (catch-phrase of the day) and 'catch tunes'. I had a standard set-up by pro standards, but it was powerful and "kicked ass" – all that was required (for high-school kids) in those days. It involved an analogue amp (powerful), tuner (for those rare FM broadcasts on the CBC that would occasionally crop up), turntable (decent quality), speakers (BIG-ASS ones, of course) and a dual cassette deck. With Dolby!

Albums (LPs) and cassettes became my primary media, and remained so, until the advent of CDs years later. Cassettes were really my forté in those days, as I had a rudimentary 'file sharing' system going with three other mates – we'd go record shopping once a month or so, and we'd all buy different albums.

I hammered out those file pages on this
beast – it was my mom's, and that's
how I learned to type. Consequently the
keys on the first electric one I tried
took a serious beating ...

It was a great arrangement ... for spending $XX each, we all obtained three times the value in amassed music, because we swapped all the albums between us, to tape on cassette. I had respectable album collection, but I had a massive number of cassettes.

I had them in a cool interlocking cassette-shelving system I affixed to the wall of The Garden. Kind of like a Lego cassette rack.

I even spent an inordinate amount of time creating a catalogue for it all – typed out on my mom's manual Olivetti (the machine was circa 1875 I think), with the paper hole-punched, and sorted in a binder. Oh yeah. Nerd city. 

As you had to really slam the keys on a manual typewriter, the same force deployed on my first electric machine did some serious damage to the keyboard. Imagine the whacking I gave my first computer keyboard.

The physical size of the 12" LP also leant itself to other functions ... primarily, the ease of rolling a doobie with said album perched on your lap. Double albums worked best of course, as they were firmer ...  this could be one of the main reasons why the double live Frampton Comes Alive! album sold so well.  Two hit songs, double-album firmness, and that 12" platform for spliff rolling ... marketing magic!

I'm certain there were more spliffs rolled on Frampton's face
than any other album, ever. Although the first couple of Yes
albums may have been
up there ... and perhaps even
Deep Purple's Machine Head ... or Led Zep I ... or early
Genesis albums ...

Switching to CDs (officially) for me coincided with a move from Toronto to Vancouver in '86, when CDs also happened to become plentiful and less expensive in the early 90s.

At some point during the late 90s – early 'Naughties, when blank CDs got really cheap (and CD burners started to come standard in computers), I returned to the process of copying music CDs, in the same manner that I recorded LPs to cassettes – lo those many years previous.

I was also nuturing a developed pattern of boosting music and copying it, in lieu of actually paying for it ... nasty pirate that I am. Yarr-dee-harr-harr.

And now,  for the past 7-8 years, I've faithfully adhered to Apple's edict (because it makes so much sense), and I've trotted along with them obediently: CDs are cumbersome and occupy a lot of space on racks and shelves, and, take ages to burn – where digital music can be stored quickly and conveniently on a hard drive.  (Yarrrr! Avast, matey!) So the CD is now as archaic as that silly tiny floppy disc became after Apple ditched it in the late 90s (yet Windows soldiered on with it ...)

Now music (or any kind of files) can be copied over to said hard drive quickly (1/100th of the time it takes to burn a CD), and your playlist is instantly searchable. No more getting up and casting thine weary eyes across racks or shelves of CDs (or cassettes) looking for an album title ... or in the case of a few of my really slack friends, who never labelled their cassette or CD cases – the agonisingly long process of trying to randomly find a certain CD with no labels to go by. Yep, they had to play each one until they found it ...

So this is the new method – digital. It's searching, playing, copying ... instantly. And literally thousands of albums fit on a single hard drive that takes up no more space than a reasonably sized book ... and the hard drive can easily be unplugged and moved to a different location in seconds, if you're re-decorating.

It certainly was an epiphany for me: one small external hard drive of respectable storage size could hold everything you own or want! 

At this writing, I have a 4 TB drive – that's "Terabyte" – as the main drive, containing the epicentre of all my music, movie, TV shows and photographic entertainment. (There are a few other drives containing backups). I can play anything from this one drive through iTunes on my main desktop iMac, which automatically outputs to any of my devices I choose – iPhone, Macbook Pro, iPad, or most often, through AppleTV and out through my home theatre system ... which of course, sounds great, can be turned up loud, looks monumentally awesome, and KICKS ASS! (Yep, we're back to that high school rating!)

I have a certain number of albums and mixed playlists on my iPhone, which I can easily swap around for new material any time I want ... and I transport selected albums to my work iMac to play while I merrily toil away on work-type things.

And all these transfers and processes happen wirelessly. More wizardry! Pure MAGIC!

So – that's how I store all my tunes, and, how I listen to them. But what's on there? What's on my playlist? You knew I'd eventually get here ... took the long way around, but what the hell.

Here's the rumpus.

Pretty much almost everyone stops listening to/looking for  'new' music around the time they either graduate from University or College – or high school, if a trade came along and derailed you from proceeding to post-secondary education.

Classic 70s rock is a great thing – but it's not the only thing.

This is why "Classic Rock" and oldies radio stations are so popular. Music appreciation dies a sad and lonely death at this time of most peoples' lives. They establish an anchor at a young age, and cling to it for life.

Most people I went through school with, who graduated high school in the late '70s (and then Uni or College in the early to mid 80s) continue to primarily listen to music from the 70s and 80s. The unbridled lust for finding new music from those halcyon high-school days fades fast when pesky things like marriage, careers, buying a house/car/boat and popping out sprogs suddenly (and inexplicably) becomes much more important ... in MOST people's lives.

I'm an exception (as are a few other folks I know).  My unbridled lust for new music/music styles continues to this day. My disdain for doing what is socially expected of me (all that other boring stuff) was entrenched back then ... and grew as well. It continues to this day. No, seriously. It does! Ask anyone. Ha.

Sure, I still love the music of my formative years. The hard rock of the '70s forms the cornerstone of my tastes ... but as time marched on, I discovered I liked learning about where that rock n' roll came from, and then, where it progressed to.

Early rock – like the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who and the Stones – grew on me fast, and then the source material for THAT music – early blues – became a favourite and permanent entry on my life's playlist around about the mid to late 80s.

Of course I was weaned on the pop of AM radio, and before that, classic 50s pop like Dean Martin – who became 'hip to like' in later years. And why not? He was great! A soulful crooner, well-dressed, with a whisky glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a twinkle in his eye ...

That bled over into the phenomenon of 80s pop. And to this day, if you're putting together a playlist for a house party, it'd better be heavily laden with 80s pop ... unless you want to spend the entire party being yelled at to "Ooo, can you change the music to ...."

Yep, '80s pop is the one singular music style that will keep 98% of people somewhere on the "this is OK" to "Oh this is FANTASTIC" music spectrum at a party. Any guy* who might prefer harder rock, punk, alternative, or jazz will put up with '80s pop IF there are single girls at the party.

*This rule of course totally falls apart, if the party consists of nothing but guys. Then it's a struggle to see what metal band gets played ... but then – what the

Sausage party? How about ... NO, you crazy Dutch bastard?!

hell are you doing at a sausage party like that, anyway? Get the hell out of there and go to a bar, where there's women!

As my ear matured (along with the rest of me getting gamier) I twigged to jazz in the early 90s – the jazz reflected in the playing of legends like Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt, Ornette Coleman, Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane ... the list is endless. I found a particular taste for the tenor sax, and never lost it.

Paul Simon merged American style folk/rock with African
beats and rhythms with amazing results.

Then I discovered music from other nations – "World Beat" stuff. Intriguing and infectious music, foreign and new, but still with soul ... laced with the traditional beats and rhythms of the respective cultures (eg: the African music of Ali Farka Touré). Certain respected musicians cottoned on to this as well (like Paul Simon) when he infused his later music with African rhythms (Rhythm of the Saints).

Ry Cooder suddenly embarked on a world-wide mission to find excellent musicians to play with everywhere, and expose/promote them to the 'first world' –  and he did so with many, including the most famous sets with the Cuban Buena Vista Social Club.

One of the finest examples of fusion music, featuring American
rock and American Zydeco from an entrenched USA culture.

Then along came an era when American musicians like John Mellencamp looked inward to certain types of cultural but lost American music – that was a beat to dance  to for certain American people – with the heavy Cajun/Zydeco influence he peppered his magnificent Lonesome Jubilee album with.

Now, well into my 30s, I began to love this mix/infusion style of music, from any artist willing to give it a go – as well as the pure, unfiltered material from the cultures making the original music.

So now here I am with a massive butt-load of music sitting on my hard drive (and of course backed up on a 2nd hard drive ... safety first!) – music from pretty much every genre going.

The common denominator of it all is SOUL. There has to be heart, a pounding rhythm, a driving beat, but at the centre of any kind of music I like, there has to be soul. There has to be the musicians' total love and respect for the music.

Sometimes when asked what kind of music I like, I find it easier to list what I don't like.

Hip-hop/rap never ever appealed. It's thin, repetitive, one-note stuff, sexist and homophobic, violent, and usually featuring one guy rabbiting on a-tonally, in iambic pentameter (remember learning about that in English class?), while a chorus of yo' homies dance about nearby, baseball caps askew, pants half-dragging on the ground to display most of their underwear, yelling affirmations to the "singer" ... while "musicians" in the vicinity thump on large tubs and throw metal trash-cans down long flights of stairs (to paraphrase PJ O'Rourke).

Really hurtin' C&W is something I can't take either. Nor does "new country" interest me. ("It's just pop music with violins", said some wag – exactly who, I cannot quite remember now).

Bog-standard, over-produced teeny pop (featuring auto-tune to cover for lack of actual singing talent) is horrendous as well. There is such a thing as GOOD pop. (See: Cheap Trick, Squeeze/Paul Carrack, Bruno Mars, et al ).

However I have grown to appreciate a few bands who throw more soul into a branch of the C&W genre ...

A sense of humour with some soul and talent ... good
honky-tonk can be quite fun.

... Honky-Tonk music. Dwight Yoakam's first album is a prime example, as is a current group centred around the lead guitar player for Foo Fighters (Chris Shiflett & the Dead Peasants). You just have to like a band with a sense of humour finely tuned enough to call an album All Hat and No Cattle.

The no-talent wanking of "death metal" is nowhere to be found on my playlists, either. Give me a solid punk band like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, the Stooges, Sonic Youth, the Clash, and most lately The Dropkick Murphys ... any day. They (mostly) have SOUL at the root of their thrashing. They also blow the other noisy pretenders right off the stage.

So yep – my music taste is vastly eccentric. At work with headphones on, I am either tuned into the wildly eccentric net radio station radioparadise.com, or I've got one of my zany mixed playlists on.

Those playlists contain anything from 40s – 50s jazz, 60s rock, 70s hard rock, funk (loves me some funk!) pop from the 60s – 90s, world-beat, honky-tonk, R&B, psychedelic rock, some folk, reggae, ska, or anything that might be un-classifiable due to it's originality (but of course, it has soul).

My only complaint now is, finding the time to really listen to music. Yeah, yeah ... white-people problems.

I have set aside a few hours every Saturday/Sunday morning to play whatever new music I've acquired, or to travel back in time to a mix of a certain band or style I really like, and haven't heard in ages.

It's like reading actual books for me now. Thanks to the shiny new toy of being able to find and watch ANYTHING video-related (movies and TV shows) on the net ... and, surfing the net itself ... the simple things I used to do as a kid (like putting a record on the turntable, or a cassette into the machine, or a CD into the player, or picking up a printed book – and just sitting there for hours, enjoying) have long-since fallen by the wayside.

I'm forever racing through a music-listening session while surfing the net or IM-chatting with mates over the net ... to get to a few hours of watching new eps of TV shows, or new movies.

Then of course the ultimate distraction – going outside and having fun with friends, in bars – has a heavy hand in waylaying me, too. This growing up business can be rough ... but THIS part of it is certainly fun!

But hey. That's all fantastic, astounding stuff we have at our disposal. The trick is to filter it and pick a good mix of stuff to get knee-deep in.

Louis CK sure nailed it.

Life these days IS pretty damn amazing.

Until next time, I'll continue being

in absurditum maximus!