Pop Culture Petri Dish

I've tried to avert the climes of sadness a lot lately. The surging and chaotic tumult of life brings scary alien bouts of change; and those surges of unrest alternately hurt, terrify, and exhilarate. But plumbing deep into sadness--looking squarely into it--is a whole lot harder. That's why when you hear music that truly taps into it, it can almost be too much to listen to. For some reason, a cloak of sadness has been hanging over me pretty persistently today. Part of the credit's due to some exotic strain of something that's been hanging on far, far too long. And when your body doesn't feel well, the mind makes that same stretch easily. So when I got home from a co-worker's farewell party, I threw on Nick Drake's Pink Moon . Nick Drake , in case you didn't know, was an English folk singer whose haunting, airy voice and sophisticated acoustic guitar playing wrought a massive influence on a lot of musicians. If you're a fan of the emotionall...

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. And listen to James Brown's "Sex Machine."

So what do I listen to when I'm angry? Well, why am I angry? And what am I hoping to accomplish in listening to music? Well, I'll tackle a couple of these possibilities. What the hell, it's only sleep. Maybe I'm just flat-out pissed at someone or something and need something loud and cathartic. If that's the catalyst, then I pick "Jake Leg," a track by Baroness, an amazing metal band that flat out blew the top of my head off at Bumbershoot 2010 . It's loud enough to satisfy the head-banging, but brimming with hooks--like Zeppelin and Dick Dale in a caravan, on amphetamines, with a pack of marauding cossacks hot at their heels. Bonus points to the guy who put this video together with clips from War of the Gargantuas and Frankenstein meets the Space Monster . Am I looking at submerging into something immersive and escapist that's gonna whisk me away from anger-inducing/mundane reality? Then I'd program in the first three tracks from The D...

I already put my favorite song by Love on Day 1; and that band's Forever Changes is (pretty much) my favorite album ever. So I'm gonna fudge and put down a song from one of my (other) favorite albums ever. On certain days, it is my favorite album ever. The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle came out in 1968; and in one of those glorious ironies of fate, it became a sizeable hit over a year after the band broke up. It is, I think, a perfect album--full of faultlessly-realized songwriting, a production that's as layered as it is crystalline, and exquisite singing by Colin Blunstone, a man gifted with the most hauntingly-beautiful set of pipes ever granted to a pop singer. The big hit from the record was the dusky "Time of the Season." It's still one of the most headily sensual rock songs ever recorded, and it's lost none of its power despite over forty years and use in umpteen commercials. But the rest of the album glitters like a chest of jewels exposed to...

As was addressed before, I'm not much for traditional radio. But if I did listen to it, I'd love to hear this song by Texas psychedelic shamans The Black Angels on it. I'm pretty much in love with the Angel's third platter, Phosphene Dream. It's a sublime trip record, and this song, "Telephone", sounds like some great lost track by The Zombies. Enjoy.

A song I hear often on the radio. The radio? Does anyone listen to The Radio anymore? With the myriad listening options feeding the earbuds of the world nowadays, radio in its traditional form seems like a quaint, wheezing memory. That said, every now and then a modern song becomes such a part of the pop-culture firmament that you can't escape it. And I'd hazard a guess that that means it also got played a lot on the radio. So here goes. If Your Obscurity-Huffing Geezer Truly has heard it, then that means it's REALLY become pervasive. Hey, I kinda like it, too. That Euro-trash barebones synth is in the pocket, methinks. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, hipsters.

Wow, this shoulda gone up last night; but a date with The Residents kept me up til the wee hours. And a guy's gotta sleep sometime, y'know. Music-wise, I'm not one to discard beloved songs like used Kleenex. But every now and then, a song can get overplayed to death (by you as well as the whole of the media universe). And it can wear out its welcome. I used to be a pretty big Police fan in my halcyon days of youth, but the massive oversaturation of their last proper album (Synchronicity) and its first hit single ("Every Breath You Take"), coupled with Sting's precipitous descent over the years into tiresome old-gasbagginess, eroded a lot of that fondness. For about six months after it first came out, I thought "Every Breath You Take" was the greatest pop song ever. 'Hate' would be too strong a word for how I feel about the tune today, but listening to it again left me pretty cold, and had me scratching my head as to why I adored it so,...