One of my musical pet peeves is songs about current events, particularly protest songs. Even worse are songs that name-drop political figures.
A classic example, in an otherwise good song, is this verse from Sting’s ‘They Dance Alone’:
Hey Sting… spare me.
There was a time, prior to 1964, when ‘My Girl’ didn’t exist. That collection of notes, arranged in that order… it hadn’t been thought of yet. Or if it had, it hadn’t been recorded either on paper or tape. And then Smokey Robinson sat down and pieced it all together into the song we all know and love.
I’m often baffled by the thought that there must be a finite set of melodies out there, and it seems to me that the world’s songwriters should have used them up by now. I mean, how many notes are there in the scale? 12? And how many different ways can they be arranged to form a melody? OK, that’s a huge number. But how many of those sound like something other than noise? Probably a much smaller number.
It’s funny how you become a fan.
Often you just know… you know 30 seconds into the first song you hear by a new artist that they own you. I felt that way about Ben Folds, Elvis Costello, Tift Merritt, Josh Rouse, Belle and Sebastian and many others.
Other times you miss the boat completely and then circle back to catch up later. My favorite example is Lucinda Williams, whom I heard and shrugged off before revisiting her months later and falling hard. Another is Beck, whose Odelay initially went over my head. I rediscovered him through the laid-back Mutations and now I love it all.
I think the real measure of a movie’s effectiveness is how it makes you feel months or years later when you think about it. I have films on my top ten lists — like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004), to pick one at random — that impressed me at the time but fail to move me at all as I think back on them.
But Ratatouille, one of Pixar’s finest achievements (which is saying a lot), never fails to stir me. Just looking at the large version of the image to the right when saving it for this entry, I was filled with the urge to pop the DVD in the machine and soak in the beautiful sights and sounds of this wonderful film.
I like the idea of second careers in show business. I don’t mean second acts, like the one Mickey Rourke is entering, or the one Pulp Fiction gave to John Travolta, but entire second careers in a field or medium different from the one in which somebody originally found fame.
An obvious example would be someone like child actor turned Oscar-winning director Ron Howard, who went from Opie to Richie to helming Apollo 13. Then there’s Mark McGrath, who first found fame as the lead singer of pop group Sugar Ray before becoming a full-time anchor on TV’s Extra. Henry Rollins went from a frightening hard rock band leader to a frightening host of a film-focused talk show on IFC.
