Music, Encore une Fois

Attributes of Music - Anne Vallayer-Coster
(Source)

Over the more than five years that I've been doing this blogging thing, I've posted a number of times about music. Searching for "music" on The Chant will yield numerous hits, even a couple from Tuna and Juvat. The idea of writing about music (as opposed to writing music) tickled my fancy so...

What's that? How does one search on The Chant? Well, one method is at the top of the blog, the other at the bottom, they don't show up on smart phones unless one goes to  web view, but they look like this on a standard computer -

Top left of the blog...

and bottom right of the blog.

You type in the word(s) you wish to search for and voilà old posts are presented which contain some mention of the search term entered. Most of the time. In olden times, like last year and earlier, every now and again Blogger would suffer some form of issue in its search algorithm and spit out complete nonsense. I haven't seen that in a while so maybe they fixed that. (Though I have to mention that, for some reason, Blogger will occasionally eat comments, Andrew's comments, Paul's comments, Skip's comments, occasionally even my comments. So Blogger's state of "mental" health is always somewhat suspect.)

But I digress.

I was going to throw up a couple of links...

What? No, I didn't eat the links and then vomit them up, perhaps "provide" is a better term than "throw up". I mean in context it's all the same but...

Yeah, the English language is funny. More funny "strange" than funny "ha ha," but again, I digress.

Where was I? Oh yeah, music. I like music. Not all music, though "most" music is close to the truth. I don't normally like all of the music from one particular composer/band/orchestra, some produce more favorites than others. As my tastes are somewhat eclectic, I listen to a broad range of music. I like whatever strikes my fancy or my mood at any particular time. But there are musical forms that I don't care for at all, in general, though there may be a piece or two from a particular (otherwise despised) genre that I do like. Rare, but it happens. (For some reason M&M springs to mind. The rapper, not the candy.)

Country music. Now that's a pretty broad category, one with which I am not conversant with all of the various styles, nuances, and subcategories. While I used to watch Hee-Haw back in the day, I have no desire to visit Nashville for the music. (For the food yes, but we're not talking about food today. Now I'm hungry, damn it. Ha, just kidding.) It's not that I don't like country and western and it's various forms, it's just not my favorite. There are individual songs that I like very much. Just not all of 'em.

Rock and roll is the same. While I enjoyed a number of the late Tom Petty's songs, I never owned one of his albums. (That's what we called the medium upon which our music was delivered back in the Pleistocene Epoch.) The albums I spent my own hard cash for were The Beatles and Jethro Tull. Of those two bands I owned, at one time or another, all of their albums, at least those published up to about 1980. Once I became a (somewhat) respected husband and father I no longer had the time nor the money for that sort of thing. I also lacked the stereophonic equipment to listen to those albums.

(When he was a toddler The Naviguesser found it très amusant to break the stylus off of my fairly expensive turntable. Made it hard to listen to the music and scratched the Hell out of the vinyl. As he was nobbut a wee thing, I didn't really punish him for that. But having to put the turntable "away" and bring it out to use it became tiresome. So it all went into storage and was eventually donated to someone without children. Sigh.)

These days, through the magic of YouTube, I can listen to just about anything I want. Well, except The Beatles, their originals, like the American bison (buffalo if you will) were once numerous throughout the Tube o' You. Now all that's left are "covers" of their music. Seems that the surviving Beatles have some very good lawyers. Even Google fears them (and Google fears almost nothing). While I'm not really sure of what happened to all of the original Beatles tunes on YouTube I'm pretty sure it had something to do with copyrights. I know a thing or two about those. (DAMHIK)

Anyhoo. I like a rousing tune now and again. Perks me up.

I had thought about bitching about Columbus Day. Then thought better of it, I have no dog in that hunt, my company doesn't get that off on the day itself but later between Christmas and New Year's. (There are five Federal holidays we defer until Christmas. Or "End of the Year" as the PC crowd puts it.)

Besides which, someone else did it far better than I could. (Address Columbus Day that is.)

My solution to the perceived problem of the Columbus Day holiday? Call it Explorers' Day, celebrate all those guys: Magellan, Vespucci. De Gama, Columbus, Leif Erikson, etc. Heck, to make it fair, include the first hardy band who crossed the Bering Land Bridge to North America. After all, the so-called indigenous peoples didn't originate here (so they're not indigenous after all) but came here from somewhere else, just like the rest of the continent.

They just got here first.

Hhmm, almost forgot, a post about music with no video?

I better rectify that.

Don't wanna be ironic...