White Music

The question I set out to answer nearly a month ago was, essentially, “Why would listening to 'Hazard' by Richard Marx now be a pleasurable experience?” After two posts I hadn’t quite reached the answer, so I began drafting up my next installment, but things went a bit haywire.

You might be able to guess why when reading my unfinished playlist and my parenthetical comments:

Six “Old” Songs I Remember Hearing When I Didn’t Like Old Music

* ‘Good Vibrations’ – Beach Boys (my dad and his brother made a dubbed cassette of the Beach Boys… at one point I could hear them arguing between tracks).

* ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ – The Beatles (my dad’s most prized album, as I remember it, was a copy of The White Album he acquired whilst working for E.M.I. on his O.E. in London¹; it was a very special occasion when he placed one of these hallowed LPs on the turntable—all the more shocking when Paul McCartney starts singing about copulating on a highway)

* ‘White Room’ – Cream (I remember a lot of rock trivia my father told me, most of them seemed to involve Eric Clapton. Nickname: Slowhand. Stole George Harrison’s wife. Was in a band with Jimmy Page… Dad: Jimi Hendrix was the best left handed guitar player ever. Me: who was the best right handed? Dad: Eric Clapton. My dad had an Eric Carmen jacket; for a long time I thought the printer had just misspelled Eric Clapton)

* ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ – Procol Harum (I still get the Moody Blues and Procul Harem mixed up, I think because of 'Knights in White Satin'. When I was 15 and 16 I used to spend an hour most weekend flicking through the bargain CD shelves of my local Warehouse; one of my last memories of my father is him asking me if I saw a Best Of collection for Procol Harem that I should get it for him; a copy of Procol Harem’s Greatest Hits surfaced at the Warehouse two months too late)

* ‘…

Clearly, my dad had a big role in my musical tastes, though these tastes didn’t show through until he was no longer there to influence me.

But someone does not need to be physically present to be a presence in your life. In fact, it feels as if things are only free to influence you when they’ve been put to bed. When the film is over, the book returned to the shelf (inevitably the shelf of a library in my case), the teacher left with younger students…

Which means that things aren’t really influencing you, but your memory of things.

I wonder, sometimes, if I would share as much of my father’s musical taste if he was still around…

Something like this happened the last time I tried to write this post. It seems unwilling or unable to remain in the concrete world. Who cares if it’s the memory or the actual thing that’s influencing you? What does it matter?

I would like to tie this back to writing, to how the idea of books, both before and after reading them, is what comes through most in your own writing. I think this would make an interesting post, one which people might leave comments on, perhaps even link to. But I don’t have it in me.

I don’t really want anyone to read this post. I’m coming down with a cold.

My friend, Abby, told me about this site. Go there. Leave me to my lemon and honey drink, I have a novel to write.

¹ Puts my boring bank job to shame… but then I don’t think he wrote 6,000,000 words (and counting) in a year.

Rock'n'Roll Rebellion

Yesterday I listed six songs that were big amongst my circle(s) of friends back when I was eleven and twelve. The list is, however, slightly misrepresentative. I wasn’t just into rap. I was, like almost everyone else at Ross Intermediate, impressed by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’, Mariah Carey’s ‘One Sweet Day’ and Montell Jordan’s ‘This Is How We Do It’.

There is still a gulf between these artists and the ones I listen to now (according to my LastFM profile, the top five from the last six months are The Kinks, Warren Zevon, The Tragically Hip, The National, and Shearwater; that is, melodic, thoughtful, rock music).

The first reason for the differing taste is quite obvious. The National and Shearwater weren't around last century. Of the three artist above that were, I had only heard the Kinks when I was twelve, and that wasn’t on 2XS, the station that me and my peers listened to, but 2ZA (“the hits of the sixties, seventies, eighties and today”). The Kinks were for people of my parent’s generation, or older! Eleven and twelve is an impressionable age, and you can only like what you’ve heard. If I was hearing Dr Dre and Bone Thugs and The Puppies, and that’s what my peers were hearing and talking about, it’s no wonder it seemed important.

But even then, when I didn’t really know why I liked what I liked, I was being exposed to the music I would shortly adopt as my own. And it is these minor flashes of rock’n’roll amid my r’n’b years that stand out now when I look back with a nostalgic agenda:

* watching Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York during lunchtime in room 12, aged 11. I don’t remember why or even how this came to be, just watching Kurt Cobain looking miserable and hurt and the opposite of bling (though we didn’t know that word back then)

* my dad turning off the radio halfway through The Smashing Pumpkin’s ‘Disarm’ because he couldn’t stand Billy Corgan’s voice (aged 12)

* buying Pearl Jam’s Ten on cassette for one dollar from friend who won it on a radio competition (aged 12)

I would not listen to Pearl Jam or Nirvana or, to a lesser extent, The Smashing Pumpkins in earnest until I began high school, but the seeds were there before this change in scenery.

Of course, the change in scenery should not be understated. I moved from a medium-to-low decile co-ed intermediate school that had hoodies as part of the school uniform to a much stricter single sex high school where classes were streamed according to academic performance. As a result, my social circle took a jump up the socio-economic ladder, for better or worse. Suddenly, my friends were into Jean Claude Van Damme movies and The Stone Temple Pilots.

I can’t say for sure, but if you took schools and friends out of the equation, I think I would still have gravitated to grunge and post-grunge music at the age of thirteen. I was after that vein of rebellion that has run through rock since the fifties, and I got it in grunge. The rebellion was not political, but generational. Rap and R’n’B at the time was a more aspirational (I want a lot of cash and bitches) or looking down from the top (I got a lot of cash and bitches) or rebellious in that kind of racial / political way that I couldn’t relate to. But a song like Lithium, or Unglued, or Creep (by Radiohead or STP but not TLC) sounded like I felt, or how I thought I should have felt. It said: the world is shit but I have no answers. Most of these songs didn’t even acknowledge a world outside your bedroom door.

My entrée into rock coincided with my first CD player (a gift for my thirteenth birthday) and therefore my first CD purchases. This coincidence has a lot to do with why my iPod has virtually no hip hop music, and why I can feel more nostalgic about Richard Marx and Savage Garden (i.e. the most watered down decedants of Van Halen or The Beatles) than Snoop Dogg and Warren G.

Six Songs From My Early Days of Rock Appreciation

* Interstate Love Song – Stone Temple Pilots (my first CD was STP’s Tiny Music… My second was the Space Jam soundtrack. When I got around to buying Purple, I knew my loyalties were here rather than with R. Kelly or Busta Rhymes)

* This Is A Call – Foo Fighters (a noisy, nonsensical gem)

* Fell on Black Days – Soundgarden (probably still in my top ten songs of all time, even though the lyrical content no longer speaks to me as it did when I was a shoe-gazing fourteen year old)

* Grind – Alice in Chains (dirty, dirty music that can’t resist a Staley/Cantrell harmony in the chorus – the genius of AiC)

* Black – The song that, when I came around to playing my one dollar Pearl Jam cassette, stuck me as both sad and angry, but still beautiful)

* Talkshow Host – Radiohead (“I want to be someone else or I’ll explode”, nuff said)

A lot of the YouTube videos I’ve linked to above are for acoustic versions of the songs rather than the original. Partly because these are quite well known songs and I wanted to mix things up, but also because I really like these versions. This speaks to the next development in my musical tastes: the move away from loud, angry, (commercially successful) alternative music to something more nuanced...

Which sounds like a dissection (and playlist) for another day…

My Hip Hop Heritage

I’m not sure how it came up* but last night Marisa sung these lines:

We used to walk down by the river
She used to watch the sun go down

Then said, “What song is that?”

I said, “It sounds like Richard Marx.”

She gave me a blank look. Names and music don’t go together for a large proportion of the population.

Anyway, I summoned up Richard Marx’s ‘Hazard’ on my computer thanks to the wonder of YouTube:

I've never thought Richard Marx was cool. He’s always been slightly above Michael Bolton on the ladder of M.O.R. adult contemporary acts. (The top of this ladder begins at ground level and descends into a deep crevasse.) ‘Hazard’ is admittedly his least cloying hit ballad (refer to ‘Right Here Waiting’, ‘Now and Forever’…) and listening to it again after howeverlong it’s been was the kind of nostalgic delight I am experiencing often in my serious twenties for my silly pre-teens.

But when the song ended, I thought about it a little more. When Richard Marx was big (1989-1994) I wasn’t into M.O.R. adult contemporary, of course, but neither was I into rock, or folk, or indie, or anything which resembles my mature music tastes. I was into hip hop.

Six Of The Best From My Hip Hop Period

* ‘Regulate’ – Warren G and Nate Dogg

* ‘Gin and Juice’ – Snoop Dogg

* ‘Gansta Lean’ – D.R.S.

* 'Tha Crossroads' – Bone Thugs-n-Harmony

* ‘California love’ – 2Pac and Dr Dre

* ‘Fantastic Voyage’ – Coolio (the only song in this list I regularly earworm these days; maybe because the original song by Lakeside was so catchy)

These were the songs that loomed large in my life as an eleven and twelve year old.

These are the songs that are attached to actual memories (going round to the house of someone I wasn’t really friends with just to listen to his copy of Doggystyle; ringing up 2XS every night for a week to try and win E 1999 Eternal).

These are the songs from the Richard Marx era I should be nostalgic about.

But for some reason, I don’t own any of the above artists albums and only have one of those songs (‘California Love’) on my iPod.

Why is this?

I’ll look at that tomorrow.

* I lied.** I actually asked, “Have you ever thought about what songs you’d like played at your funeral?” which eventually lead to Richard Marx rendition.

** For the purposes of expedience rather than deception. I’m happy to admit that I ask questions like, “Have you ever thought about what songs you’d like played at your funeral?” from time to time. So what? And yes, I’ve thought about it myself. Perennially at the top of the list: ‘Desperadoes Under The Eaves’, just so that I could look down on the congregation (if that’s what you call a collection of mixed- and non-denominational mourners a congregation) singing:

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went mm mm mm
Mm mm mm mm
[etc.]

Why It's Okay To Take Pictures Of The Summer

After yesterday's post, I feel I should probably come to the defence of photography. After all, my brother is a photographer and I have taken in excess of 4,500 photos this year.

God, that many? Yup. I just counted on Picasa.

Sometimes photography gets a bad rap. A common claim is that it's less artistic than painting or sculpture. Any discussion of 'artistry' is a slippery slope and, in order to prove their point, people often get carried away.

Like: I remember the title character in John Fowles’ The Collector was into photography. He was also into pinning up dead butterflies and incarcerating young women in his basement. The novel was not shy about drawing parallels between the three.

[Aside/Minor Coincidence: The author of Speak, Memory (a book I read too young and is partly responsible for my obsession with memory) also liked to pin up dead butterflies. He also wrote books where not very nice things happened to young females… Unfortunately I do not know his opinion of photography.]

And I agree with one aspect of The Kinks' 'People Take Pictures of Each Other': the pursuit of the perfect photo in order to preserve a moment forever is quixotic (especially for amateur photographers) and means the photographer is partially absent from the scene itself. The photo that results does not stand in for a memory, but a remembered fiction.

Sometimes I worry that the pictures I take on my travels may be taking me out of very experience I've travelled all this way for. And worse, that they may distort my memory so that in a few years a trip to Turkey will consist of river cruises and staring up at mosaics, and I will lose the unphotographable: the taste of simit, the time I got to use Yavaşça yavaşça with our hopped-up taxi driver, or simply what it felt like to be in that place with four of my closest friends.

In some ways, writing can achieve what photography can't. It can record the internal and anecdotal – though committing these things to paper merely presents a post-factum snapshot of your already skewing memory.

But photos are useful (ah! the defence at last). Aside from something for show and tell with the whanau back home, I want a stash of photos (along with my written thoughts and the input of those that experienced X with me when we come to reminisce) because I know not to trust my own memory. I know how reckless and random it can be.

Smell may be the ultimate memory prompter (a post for a different time, perhaps), but an image runs a close second. I don’t expect my photos to prove or preserve my love for anyone or anything (and, unlike Ray Davies circa 1968, I don't begrudge photos this shortcoming) - - I don’t even set the bar that high for my writing. Yet.