Sooner or Later It All Gets Real

My name is Ed, and I am addicted to music.

(You can do the whole “Hi Ed” thing if you happen to think alcoholism is funny. It certainly wasn’t funny for my uncle. But fine. I’ll wait …)

OK, thanks.

I am a voracious consumer of many things (pancake batter in spray form, for example) – but in particular, of music. I have more than 1,100 CDs and around 23,000 songs on an oversized hard drive at home; it’s simply too much to fit on any of Apple’s various iPods, because most of Steve Job’s target market isn’t clinically insane.

My appetite for music (and Cheetos and excessive self-doubt) has defined me since my teens. You know when you ask someone who doesn’t really like music what kind of music they like, and they say, “Oh, I listen to everything?” I truly believed that I was the exception. I really do like everyting.

(Sure, I tend to gravitate toward the jangly, guitar-driven rock of the Beatles, Byrds, R.E.M., Wilco, etc. The common denominator? Catchy, jangly music by white people, for white people.)

But … I do have a lot of jazz and enjoy the Parliament-Funkadelic (I saw P-Funk in 1999 and left after three hours; as far as I know, George Clinton is still on the Roxy stage a decade hence doing another encore) and James Brown. I like some hip-hop (although I admit my frame of reference is pretty much 1986-1991), classic and alt-country … everything except opera and … well, opera.

So a real-world, hardware challenge ultimately forced me into an existential argument — one that questioned most of my suppositions.

With so much music, I really struggle with how to rotate songs onto the limited space on my iPhone. I wanted to make a “Top 20” list of my “go-to” that I would always have handy on the iPhone. The criteria for selection was relatively short: the song had to be awesome, and yes, it had to pass my pretentious “inner-aging-hipster’s limitless desire for acceptance by some vague group of like-minded aging hipsters ‘street cred’ test.” (By the way, no one does that better than Greg Kot and Jim DeRegattis, whom I often daydream are my best friends, over at PRI’s “Sound Opinions” ).)

So after some false starts and an initial Top 20 list that featured 130 songs, I finalized my list.

And it goes a little something like this, hit it!

(Author’s note: that introduction will be the funkiest part of this list)

“Alternative Ulster,” Stiff Little Fingers
“Autumn Sweater,” Yo La Tengo
“Blue Train,” John Coltrane (1)
“Can’t Truss It,” Public Enemy (2)
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke (3)
“Cold Sweat, Pts. 1 & 2,” James Brown (4)
“The Concept,” Teenage Fanclub
“Dancing Queen,” Abba
“Here Comes Your Man,” The Pixies
“Higher Ground,” The Feelies (5)
“In My Life,” The Beatles
“Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
“My Life Is Right,” Big Star
“Nightshift,” The Commodores (6)
“Pot Kettle Black,” Wilco
“Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan
“Teenage Kicks,” The Undertones
“To Love Somebody,” Bee Gees
“Train In Vain (Stand By Me),” The Clash
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” The Byrds
“4th of July,” X

Footnoes:
(1)OK, I admit. I added this song to add some stylistic and well, racial diversity. Ultimately, I had to be true to myself and remove it. When I called myself on it.
(2)Hip-hop!
(3)Sam Cooke was black. Just sayin’.
(4)James Brown, also black.
(5)This is the song that replaced “Blue Train.” The Feelies are, well, white and jangly.
(6)The Commodores were black, though.

I was very proud of my list. Since no one else really cares, I had an internal dialogue with what I thought was my inner hipster but ended up being a more cynical part of my subconscious. I took the liberty of transcribing the conversation (as my subconscious is quite litigious):

Me: “Wow, what a cool list. So eclectic.”
Subconscious: “Eclectic? Seriously?”
Me: “Come on. I like everything. Right?”

(Taking the liberty to personify my subconscious for the purpose of completing this blog entry, its look of mild bemusement led me to believe that it was not buying it.)

So I made an effort to put my 20 into buckets on the spot. Ideally I’d have 20 songs, 20 buckets.

Ultimately, I fell a little short.

Me: “OK, Yo La Tengo. Hmm, jangly alterna-hipster. Teenage Fanclub … OK, well, that’s the same. The Byrds … ok, jangly. X … guitar-driven, hooky, OK, pretty similar. Pixies … hmm, it’s different but the same. Stiff Little Fingers and Undertones are … OK, thematically simlar to everything else but stylistically … slightly different.. OK, wait, Abba is disco! That’s different! So are the Bee Gees!”
Subconscious: “Bee Gees and Abba are in the same bucket.”
Me: “No! This is the pre-disco, chamber-pop Bee Gees of the late 1960’s. Which puts them in the same bucket as The Beatles, well and ultimately Dylan.”
Me: “Also, as you can tell by my carefully-crafted footnotes, Subconscious,  Sam Cooke, James Brown, The Commodores and Public Enemy are black!”
Subconscious: “You’ve been wearing a v-neck sweater backwards for the last two hours.”

Stopping to remove my sweater and turn it around (it did seem awfully revealing on my back), I stepped back for an assessment. My subconscious was calling me out on something I had never had to defend (the music, not the sweater, which was indefensible), mostly because I surrounded myself with like-minded musical hipster wannabes who speciously claimed eclecticism.

My musical house of cards was collapsing and there was nothing I could do to effectively argue my case to myself. I really was my own worst critic.

By the end of the argument I was a quivering mass that ultimately using affirmative action to promote the diversity in my musical tastes. Sam Cooke became the Jackie Robinson of my Top 20. If I had a black woman in there (or, for that matter, any woman), she would be the Rosa Parks (or, um, Geraldine Ferraro?).

So, in the weeks hence, four things have happened:

1. I’ve ultimately accepted that I like vast quantities of ultimately similar-sounding music. And I’m OK with that.
2. That said, I’ve tried to push myself to expand my musical boundaries.
3. I put sticky notes with “front” on my sweaters when they come back from the cleaners.
4. I really hate my subconscious.

I am reminded of a PSA I saw when I was a kid in which a martian who eats only candy bars suddenly tries Earth fruit. He finds it “yummy and not bad,” and exclaims that “by only eating candy bars, I don’t know what I’ve missed.” In this case, the jangle-pop of R.E.M. and the Feelies are the candy bars, and some recent additions to my collection (Lady Gaga, Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astake (admittedly driven by a positive review in Pitchfork) and a Hank William Sr. retrospective) are my Earth fruit.

(Full disclosure: I have listened to Ms. Gaga’s The Fame Monster a lot the last few days. Usually after I finish it, I immediately throw on something like R.E.M.’s Murmur or an old Elvis Costello album just in case the street cred police are nearby. I’m making progress, but very, very slowly).

Greetings from the Sunshine State … written in the Bay State

A few rambling thoughts from my time in Central Florida:

• The Magic Kingdom is not so magical for a constipated 5-year old.
• I love my wife's cynicism; it's actually rather endearing and edgy. But it is much easier to suspend my sense of irony and disillusionment at a theme park when she's not there.
• Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Sunday, the day of our return trip home, Jacob used the term "not fair" — or something similar regarding the relative fairness of whatever activity (major or minor) I was prohibiting — 17 times.
• Did you know that "It's a Small World" was originally commissioned for the 1964 World's Fair in New York? Evidently, the world was too small then to include Jews or to delve into anything deeper than ethnic stereotypes (Hawaiians surf! Australian aborigines use boomerangs!). That said, it is a retro-quirky ride — as is the Carousel of Progress, which we unfortunately missed, and the boys really liked it. And the song has been stuck in my head for 4 days.
• According to the Frommer's guide I was reading, WDW's "Tomorrowland" went from futuristic to retro-futuristic in around 1994 or so. I'm a big fan of "the future that never was."
• Evidently WDW has a exclusive deal with Coca Cola. I'm a bigger fan of the Pepsi family of products, and figured once I hit the Hess that was outside the boundaries of the Magic Kingdom on the parkway out to the Interstate, I'd be OK. No such luck.
• If you're in a car with 3 adults, a 5-year old and a toddler, and if the car is a traditional 5-passenger car, and if the drive is > 1 hour, volunteer to drive. You won't have to entertain the kids if you're sitting in back, and you won't have to help the person sitting in back if you're sitting in the passenger seat. No charge for that tip.
• Leading up to the trip, my greatest anxiety was the air travel with two kids (one squirmy one on my lap). The trip down was fine; Jacob watched TV (God bless JetBlue) and Colin slept and mostly looked at his brother looking at TV. Going home was more difficult–beginning with Colin's bloody nose at the airport, which happened when he fell off the ledge he was standing on when he was watching planes from the window at our gate (Honestly, I thought he had better balance). Then he basically squirmed and cried the bulk of our 3 hour trip home. Luckily, any into or out of Orlando will feature at least 50 percent families with children. I feel for any business travelers heading in or out of MCO. But I survived (Go! Walk out the door!), hey hey, I survived.
• Other than pre-1994 (when the Starbucks chain expanded into Washington, D.C.) and perhaps the last year I went to Lake Oquaga without my espresso maker, this trip may have been my longest stint sans espresso-based drinks in 15 years (I did sneak off to a Starbucks on Thursday as I was making my trip to CVS for anti-constipation supplies for the boy).
• I really enjoyed the ribs at Sonny's.

Cmnctng in sht fm (Social Media Content Creation Overload Blues)

So basically I’ve decided to re-embrace Twitter, “a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (or ‘tweets’; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) … via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.” The upside? You can hear about all sorts of minutia in my life AS IT HAPPENS. It also allows me to follow others’ Twitters; no one else I know is really doing it religiously. (Perhaps I will do it religiously by Twittering from Easter Mass next Sunday, continuing a decades-long C/E attendance streak.)

The downside? It’s tapping my desire to continue longer-form updates onto the Harrison3 blog; I also can’t figure out who really cares about my thoughts in 140-character chunks (or longer ones, for that matter); Keith openly mocks me for Twittering; and finally, it’s yet another Social Media site to which I am dumping content (this blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.).

Facebook is good because it bundles a lot of these together; unfortunately, not all my friends are on Facebook. I’m also trying FriendFeed as a means to offer up a complete “Feed” of all the crap content I am loading onto various sites.

If you’ve read this far … congratulations and Hi Dad! You can follow my Twittering on the Harrison3 blog (over to the upper right) … and on Facebook. And you can even talk to me, although I rarely pick up the phone any more.

Weird dream at the nexus of sports and work

In this dream, I was doing PR for Major League Baseball. And I had a hot scoop that I wanted to share with an important reporter — we were going to pre-brief everyone but were offering up the news to 1 or 2 key writers first. I insisted we go with Hall of Famer Peter Gammons, but my colleagues outvoted me. Then later I was walking down the hall at my office and I saw Peter Gammons, and he was royally pissed at me. I told him, "Mr. Gammons, it wasn’t my idea, I swear. I am a huge fan," and he just looked at me and said, "How could you do this to me?" Those words have haunted me throughout the morning. Clearly some work-related anxiety, as I have a busy January ahead, as well as my attempt to deal with my unresolved feelings toward Mr. Gammons.

My Top 5 Top Five Lists

The other night, watching the ALCS following the Bruins game at the Garden, one of my favorite topics of discussion came into play … the "Top 5 Albums of All Time" list. Actually, while I love this question (mostly to hear other people’s list) it causes me some consternation … Can I really only name 5? Am I going to name albums for their rock snob street cred quotient, or because I like them? Can I even tell the difference any more?

So, to be fair, I stand behind The Beatles "Rubber Soul," Wilco’s "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" and R.E.M.’s "Automatic for the People" (although I could have just as easily said "Murmur" or "Life’s Rich Pagaent," but I like the melancholy vibe of "Automatic"; for some reason, for the past few years, this early-mid-October time leaves me very melancholy, even if it is the gateway to my favorite time of year). I hereby admit that The Rolling Stones "Exile on Main Street" was probably named as much for rock snob street cred as anything else (although I forced myself to listen to it yesterday as penance, and it really is excellent). I forget what my fifth one was, but I do know I left off The Clash’s "London Calling" and Bob Dylan’s "Blonde on Blonde" and "Highway 61 Revisited," each of which is inexcusable. I’d also like to add The Shods’ "Stop Crying." Maybe some Byrds or Husker Du? Great, my list couldn’t be any more lily white. Some James Brown then? But wait, is that because I love James Brown or because I’m trying to make some sort of quota?

Crap, my Top 5 list is like 40 albums and riddled with anxiety.

One thing I stand behind, Betty Goo — while both are excellent, I think "Nevermind" is superior to "Appetite for Destruction," and nothing is going to change that. For better or worse, "Nevermind" changed mainstream radio (admittedly, it changed back since then) and as everyone knows, popular music peaked between 1991 and 1992. Period.