Lyrics That Rocked My World |
To me, a song is not just a song, it's a portal in time. There are countless thousands of songs that can instantly bring me back in time to the moment I first heard them. Doesn't everybody have at least a few songs that can do that for them? Songs are souvenirs of places and times that will never come again. Every song represents a memory. I hope I never forget the time when I offered a lyric change to Luke, the singer from Stroke-9, and then later I happened to be watching them perform the song at the Paradise Lounge in S.F. and he looked right at me and used the lyric. (Not to brag there, Luke and John and Greg and Eric did the hard work of actually reworking the entire song, I just offered them a suggestion as friend to friends. The lyric that was changed is not on this website, that's just our little bonding moment.) I deeply regret forgetting to bring my camera to that night at the
hostel "X-Base," on Magnetic Island, Queensland, Australia,
where I met a whole bunch of very cool travellers and ocean ecologists...
but I do have two albums by Pachooka,
the really excellent band who was playing at the time, which I hope
will help me remember. Here's a warning, though: The pages discussing individual groups have at least one music clip on them. The file size of the music clip is usually about 500k (half a Megabyte). This may make them load very slow, if your Internet connection is slow. A telephone Internet connection might take 5 full minutes to load the 500k clip. Don't panic. But be ready to download some large files. To hear the music clips, you may have to jump through certain hoops. You might get a bar across the top of your browser that says Internet Explorer has "blocked certain active content" in case it's harmful. You can click on the bar and "Allow Active Content" -- I promise you it's safe, unless somebody has hacked my website. You might have to "Download New Plug-Ins to Display All the Media on This Page." In most, but not all, browsers, you should be able to see your media player so that you can pause or adjust the volume. The clip is supposed to repeat, but if it doesn't, you might need to hit your "Refresh" button. Afterwards, you might want to use your "Disk Cleanup" utility (under "Properties" of your main drive) because you will have accumulated several megs of Temporary Internet Files. Start with the musical graph below. I created a radial
navigation system where several basic categories are at the center of
the circle, and the individual music groups that fall into those categories
spill out from the center, or in some cases straddle the lines of categories.
Because that's how music is, to me. You can't get a good sense of it
from a simple square chart or table.
Please don't gripe to me about how inaccurate the following classification graph is. I know. It's only there for convenience of navigation. The graphings and locations are a bit contrived in a few places. For instance, should Golden Bough really be located right next to King Missile? Does Stroke-9 actually belong right next to the Dead Kennedys? And the system leaves off Classical music entirely, and Electronica/Trance, because I am focusing on lyrics here. Yeah, yeah, I know. This is a clumsy approximation. Take it with a grain of salt. (I used to have an even more extensive system of music classification and navigation on my website. I may bring it back someday. Until then, use this one, which is a bit more simplified.) Hey guess what! As I was writing these pages, Pearl Jam once again decided to demonstrate why they're among my favorite bands of my life thus far. They let anyone download an MP3 of the single from their upcoming album for free. (UPDATE 5-2-06: Now that the album has come out, you apparently can't download the song anymore.) If you're a MySpace user you can stream it and also see the lyrics here. (You can also stream a video of a great song from the new album here.) This is not a throwaway song -- it's a darn good song and the MP3 is high quality. Ya know, back when Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster, people actually argued, "Well if they're so concerned about Ticketmaster overcharging, why doesn't Pearl Jam give away music for free?" Even at the time, it was a silly argument, because only a few months before, they had allowed radio stations to broadcast their entire second album (...and that didn't seem to hurt their sales any), and also a four-hour concert from Atlanta, Georgia (which they later sold as an album). Of course I taped both of those broadcasts, and then later went out and bought the CDs so that I'd have better quality. Pearl Jam just goes to show, in my opinion: that Capitalism doesn't have all the answers, especially when it comes to art or music. If you're a good enough musician, you can give away your music for free and still make lots of money... So next time somebody argues that without Intellectual Property laws, all the artists and writers and computer programmers would go bankrupt, just ask 'em: "You mean the way Pearl Jam did?"
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