2 October 2001:

Last year: But I know Matt would laugh at me for that.

In case you missed it, last week I complained about K.T. having included the song Achy Breaky Heart in the collection of MP3s she made for me recently.

In case you haven't been paying attention - I was mostly joking. That is, Achy Breaky Heart does drive me a little crazy, but I wasn't actually mad at K.T. for including it. I wasn't even upset. I was surprised, because I wouldn't have ever guessed that she liked the song enough to have a copy of it. That evening, I chatted with her long enough to make sure she understood that the journal entry was meant to be humorous.

She did, however, ask if I would post a guest entry from her, on the subject. I happily agreed, and here it is, completely unchanged except for fixing some typos and spelling errors:

Guilty Pleasures
by K.T. Hicks

When I was in high school, I met a man who probably influenced my life (for the better!) more than anyone else. And, not surprising, really, he was a teacher. (Teachers luck out sometimes that way... on the other hand, I still remember Mrs. Black as being the biggest all time annoying BITCH of the universe, and she wasn't even ever my teacher, so... I guess it swings both ways) My junior and senior years of English, as well as Creative Writing were all taught by him. (Just as a complete side note, Creative Writing was anything but Creative... the class should have been called Essay Writing with some Other Stuff for College. We were allowed to write two pieces that weren't Compare and Contrast Socialism to Capitalism, and those had to be true stories from our lives. I might further add that Mr. B. complained that my stories were boring. I curtly informed him that my life was boring, and of those few things in my life that were NOT boring, I considered them to be, quite honestly, none of his fucking business.) In any case, my grumbles with the Creative Writing class aside, he was a good teacher, and a pretty good person.

Mr. B understood... he remembered what it was like to be a kid, to be a teenager, and to be a son or daughter of parents that you just can't seem to please, no matter what. He gave me a piece of advice one time - stop carrying your mom around in your backpack with your pencils. Good advice. Took me years to actually be able to accomplish it. (That's the thing about good advice... you can usually manage to deliver it in a couple of snappy, smooth sounding lines, but all the grand delivery and slick words don't help you figure out how to accomplish said advice.)

In any case, one of the exercises we did in his class - and off the top of my head, I'd say it was Creative Writing, but honestly, I'm not sure - was to find a song that we liked that made absolutely no sense. We would then write down the lyrics and read them in class. Two rules, relatively straight forward. Songs we liked. I knew lots of those. Made no sense. That took some thinking. In the end, I selected Paul Simon's All Around the World (or the Myth of Fingerprints) from the Graceland album, which I had recently obtained (ok ok, so I snitched it out of my mom's tape box... she never noticed).

Over the mountain
Down in the valley
Lives a former talk-show host
Everybody knows his name
He says there's no doubt about it
It was the myth of fingerprints
I've seen them all and man
They're all the same
Well, the sun gets weary
And the sun goes down
Ever since the watermelon
And the lights come up
On the black pit town
Somebody says what's a better thing to do
Well, it's not just me
And it's not just you
This is all around the world
 
Out in the Indian Ocean somewhere
There's a former army post
Abandoned now just like the war
And there's no doubt about it
It was the myth of fingerprints
That's what that old army post was for
 
Well, the sun gets bloody
And the sun goes down
Ever since the watermelon
And the lights come up
On the black pit town
Somebody says what's a better thing to do
Well, it's not just me
And it's not just you
This is all around the world
 
Over the mountain
Down in the valley
Lives the former talk-show host
Far and wide his name was known
He said there's no doubt about it
It was the myth of fingerprints
That's why we must learn to live alone

We learned a lot of stuff from that exercise... one of them was that just because you don't understand a song doesn't mean someone else doesn't. Someone brought in She Bop by Cindi Lauper. Hehe... remember, we're all around sixteen or seventeen years old... trying to watch a sixteen year old girl explain to the class that She Bop is about masturbation with a bunch of sixteen year old guys sniggering... heh. Or Glass Onion, by the Beatles. If you know nothing about the Beatles, yeah, the song makes no sense, but if you've heard much about them, then it makes perfect sense. Glass Onion is sort of a lyrical sum-up of the Beatles career to that point, mentioning several songs they had done and events in their lives.

We also learned that the people in our class had some strange musical tastes. Especially for an area where things were very very... I don't want to say strict exactly, but it was like... in order to have friends, there seemed to be this little formula to follow. Wear this type of clothing (this year only, heaven forefend that you should show up in September wearing last year's fashions!) and listen to that sort of music, and like these types of foods, and go to these sorts of events. Even the people who didn't fit in (can we say square pegs? Yeah... I knew you could) tended to pretend like they could fit in. Except for a handful of complete misfits, such as myself. Which meant you heard very little variety in music, since everyone owned the same six dozen tapes - big hair bands were in while I was in high school, and I don't know a single person who didn't have a copy of Hysteria by Def Lepard (yeah, including me).

I'm not sure why the class didn't end up with six people having copies of Armegeddon It and the other twelve having copies of Bohemian Rhapsody. (Yeah, Queen was pretty popular in my high school, which may be one of the reasons it took me so long to get into them) But there it was... eighteen people, all who tend to act like each other most of the time, with eighteen completely different pieces of music, spanning over thirty years and covering most of the basic musical genres (except country... ever notice that? Country music always makes sense and you almost never have any Stevie Nicks syndrome - what did she say? - with them.) I discovered a lot of interesting music that way...

Part of the point of the exercise was to show us that things (poetry) didn't have to make sense to be enjoyable. Also, that things didn't necessarily have to be perfect to be good. For the rest of that week, we listening to musical selections that we prepared for the class... songs we liked, songs we didn't like. Mr. B played Paradise by the Dashboard Lights for us. First time I ever heard that song, and I think it was new music to most of us. I brought in my ABBA tape and someone else brought in some early fifties do-wop music. We listened to selections from Waylon Jennings and pieces of classical music. I think it was the first time I'd ever heard the 1812 Overture, which is one of my favorite pieces of music. We listened to jazz and blues, country and western, rock and pop, and rap and soul. We had long voracious arguments about whether or not The Electric Slide was the start of a whole new phenomena (it was... line dancing... we'll talk about whether or not this was a good thing or not later... much much later) or complete garbage. We speculated on whether or not some mother in the late 1790's had fussed at her son for wanting to go to a Beethoven concert. We tried to figure out what music would stay with us, to be remembered fondly, later in life. And which music we would say "Oh, man, I can't believe that was ever popular!"

We ended up making a mixed tape as part of that project and we all took copies of it home. And somehow, in that simple week of sharing music, the eighteen of us became friends in a strange and special sort of way. People I'd dismissed as being stupid or snotty or just not interesting had changed my life in some profound and yet unremarkable way. It didn't stretch outside of class - to the rest of the school, I was still a band-fag and not to be associated with - but in class, we had all found somewhere to belonged. I wore out that tape, you know... I can still remember all the songs on it. I even know what order they were in, and even now, when I hear Midnight Blue on the radio, or through my MP3 player, I always always expect Pancho and Lefty to come right after it. (just as a side note, I have all of the songs on my MP3 player...)

A few weeks ago, Liz asked me to make selections from my huge collection of MP3s and put them on some CDs for her. (Ok, at last count I have 2,413 MP3s or 9.1 GIGs of music) This took me a lot of time. I was trying to pick things I knew she probably didn't have and things she'd never heard, as well as songs I knew she'd like but didn't know if she had or not. Sorting through that much music is a very time consuming process. Very. Except for the Irish Music folder, which I just put the whole thing in there (over 400 minutes of songs) I carefully went through every folder I have, picking which songs to put in there. If nothing else, I'm known to my friends as being the biggest music buff in the group - I know songs, I know lyrics, I know songwriters, I know dates and factoids. And I've frequently said that a lot of my friends are in dire need of some musical education. This was my chance.

So, I did... culled through 2,413 songs and picked enough music to fit on three cds (in MP3 form so I could pack a lot more music on there). I did pick some things just for fun... the Techno Hamster Dance comes to mind as a selection that was done just because. It's a very stupid song... in a completely ridiculous, funny, and mildly got stuck in my head sort of annoying way. I tried to cover a lot of fads and fashions, as well as picking things that were small bands or b-side songs. I picked about half a dozen country songs and stuck them on there as well... including, perhaps without thinking about it, the Achy Breaky Heart song. Ok... well, for one thing, I happen to like that song. It's silly and cheerful and bouncy and stupid. Fluff. I like fluff, sometimes. (On the other hand, I eat banana and Miracle Whip sandwiches, so my taste is not always to be relied upon) Also, much like I put some Cindi Lauper and Madonna in the Pop selections, I put Billy Ray in the country selections because he was very popular. Very popular.

Ah well...

You can torture me
With Donny and Marie
You can play some Barry Manilow
Or you can play some schlock
Like New Kids On The Block
Or any Village People song you know
Or play Vanilla Ice BR> Hey, you can play him twice
And you can play the Bee Gees any day
But Mr. DJ, please
I'm beggin' on my knees
I just can't take no more of Billy Ray
 
Don't play that song
That "Achy Breaky" song
The most annoying song I know
And if you play that song
That "Achy Breaky" song
I might blow up my radio, ooo...
 
You can clear the room
By playing Debbie Boone
Or crank your Abba records until dawn
Oh, I could even hear Slim Whitman or Zamfir
Don't mind a Yoko Ono marathon
Or play some Tiffany
On 8-track or CD
Or scrape your fingernails across the board
Or tie me to a chair
And kick me down the stairs
Just please don't play that stupid song no more
 
Don't play that song
That "Achy Breaky" song
You know I hate that song a bunch
And if you play that song
That nauseating song
It might just make me lose my lunch, ooo...
 
Don't play that song
That "Achy Breaky" song
I think it's driving me insane
Oh, please don't play that song
That irritating song
I'd rather have a pitchfork in my brain
 
Don't play that song
That "Achy Breaky" song
The most annoying song I know
And if you play that song
That "Achy Breaky" song
I might blow up my radio, ooo-woo
 
- Achy Breaky Song, "Weird Al" Yankovic

Liz again. It's my journal; I'm allowed to get the last word in.

Point 1: I perfectly understand enjoying fluff. I have a handful of Britney Spears songs in my collection, okay? I agree they're awful, but they make me want to dance. And just lately I've been collecting the cheesy 80s music that I loved in high school. So I can hardly cast aspersions on anyone else for enjoying any kind of fluff without getting into a serious case of pot - calling - kettle.

Point 2: Confession of the day - I don't actually dislike the Achy Breaky Heart song. My problem with it isn't the song itself, but the fact that it's got one of those tunes that gets stuck in your head at the drop of a hat, like Yellow Submarine or It's A Small World. It's annoying when the chorus gets stuck in the back of your head on continuous repeat.

Point 3: When K.T. says she gave me a half-dozen country songs...? It's more like three dozen. And I actually enjoyed most of it. So there.

Point 4: She gave me the "Weird Al" song, too.

Point 5: Most of what K.T. gave me is really good stuff. And I'm only halfway through it. (Heck, I still don't have the third CD!) I don't love everything, but I didn't expect to, and neither did she. The point of the exercise was so I could be exposed to some new stuff I hadn't heard before. Ashby loaned me some CDs over the summer, and out of the ten of them, there were several I chucked behind the sofa until it was time to give them back. And there were a couple of bands I'd never even heard of that I loved so much I demanded more. (Savage Garden and KMFDM, if you're curious - and how's that for extremes?)

That was the point - to try some new stuff. K.T. has an enormous collection of music, and blank CDs only cost about fifty cents each. I've already made notes of a couple of things I'm going to add to my wishlist.

Point 6: I just want to state publicly that when Matt e-mailed K.T. a copy of Sesame Street's Boogie Woogie Sheep song, it was not in retaliation for her giving me Achy Breaky Heart. At least, not at my direction. Really. I'm not that cruel.

--Liz

Word of the Day:
obtuse - 1: not pointed or sharp; exceeding 90 degrees but less than 180 degrees; 2: not quick or keen of understanding or feeling; 3: difficult to comprehend
 
Song of the Day:
Silent All These Years (Tori Amos)
 
Current Projects:
- drawing
- Hall stuff
- garden