">'); win.document.writeln(''); win.document.writeln(''); }
 

The Indefinite Article.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

The popular musics of the day.

I've known Amber for over ten years, yet her taste in music remains a mystery. A couple of days ago, while I visited Austin (and managed not to get a contact high from all of the clearly very high drivers there), she mentioned liking the Polyphonic Spree. I remember in high school she liked the Violent Femmes a lot. And she's been to a couple of Ben Folds shows with me. Other than this, I'm in the dark. Though, to her credit, she's pretty much up for trying anything, as evidenced by the many bad Houston bands she's willingly seen with me.

Adolph I've known for less time. Two and a half years about. All I can discern about his taste in music is this: he'll rip anything you give him onto his ipod. And when he plays stuff from his ipod for mood music, most of it really doesn't sound much like music at all, rather more like scientific experiments of what music could be if all of the human emotion was kicked out of it. (Love you, man.)

So, longtime friends of Adolph (LFoA), I ask you: what is it that Adolph likes? Adolph himself can answer, but I'm just wondering if it's as much a mystery to anyone else as it is to me. Amber mentioned that they don't talk about music, so I wondered if his tastes are a very private thing or if he just doesn't think about music enough to talk about it.

Discuss!

posted by Sara C. at 11:29 AM

4 Comments:

  • Remember the Time Magazine with Eddie Vedder.
    The name scrawled across the Vedder's forearm was Fugazi. I cannot speak for Adolph, however I can attempt to empathize.
    Most of us have a band that is the bed rock of our post puberty childhood. I used to say that the Beatles were my favorite band. I cannot speak in such concrete terms now but they are a part of my rearing.
    Adolph likes Fugazi.

    By Blogger taggart, at 9:11 PM  

  • adolph likes music that sounds like technical raindrops - sometimes stormy, sometimes not

    By Blogger CarolinaDivina, at 10:31 AM  

  • Thanks for remembering that for me Taggart. Sometimes I almost forget. In some ways it is good to almost forget stuff so that you can be reminded and rediscover the thought and feeling with a different perspective. In the early nineties I was a late-teen GI in El Paso. It was a time in which I was peering out from the shadow of my father's intellectual influence. I had a Time magazine because that was the weekly reader my dad prescribed to all (or gave me a subscription to). There on the page one day was a single word written in block letters on the arm of the leading member of a band that lead many people out of the desert of classic rock. It was a link to a whole new world if you were curious enough to find out what Fugazi was. I don't know what I did back in those pre-internet days but I found the album 13 Songs some weeks later in a downtown El Paso record store. One of the notable things about it was that it was $9 post-paid from Washington DC. It was $9 in the store too, unlike every other album out there. It was an album/object that pointed to its economic role as explicitly as its aesthetic role. It rocked out on every song. Track seven was not much better than all the other songs. It had two different lead vocalists so it wasn't a cult of a singular voice. It had lyrics which didn't speak directly to anything so much as vaguely alluded. Its songs seemed to not follow any formula. I keep a VCR for the sole purpose of occasionally watching the Fugazi documentary, Instrument. I can't be described as a particular fan of punk rock, which is a classification that some people put Fugazi in.

    I'm not certain that there is a script out there that can count how many tracks you have by "Artist," but I think that if I had all the bootleg live tracks from the Napster days properly labeled the list of my library would probably go Fugazi, Harry Potter audiobooks, Kronos Quartet, Radiohead, and Jimi Hendrix. I have all my CD's in a box in the attic and don't listen to anything but digitized music.

    By Blogger Adolph, at 12:18 PM  

  • Jimi Hendrix... interesting. The first movie Adolph ever went to was a Jimi Hendrix documentary. I think he was perhaps 4 months old and was well-behaved as usual. Slept through most of it, so I guess it's the subliminal influencing of the still-forming brain. Does Hendrix put you to sleep now?
    Adolph's mom

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:09 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home