My Magical Music Tour

 

 

Welcome to the Musical of My Life . . .

(Warning! Concise was a word I never learned at school)

 

Welcome to my record collection. Like most people, I couldn't live without my music - especially those particular albums one of my friends described as "soulfood". During terrible times, often enough it was this "soulfood" that pulled me through. So I owe music a lot.

 

By the time I was three, I was allowed to use the record player alone. They were great years, my first favourite album was a yellow Sesame Street record that coming from the mid Seventies that (I realised in hindsight) found most of its inspiration in hallucigens. It was seriously trippy but as a child it helped me create my own special world while I pretended I was in the jungle with Big Bird or, my favourite, finding the giant cookie with Cookie Monster (not that I managed to share any of it). At the same time I was also cultivating a career as Beatles groupie. And so continued this way of things until I was about seven when I started having friends who had older siblings who were into music, so I got introduced to the world of ABBA, KISS, and Iron Maiden. Strangely enough this did not turn me off the Beatles, in fact the dag teasing my best friend gave me only increased my stubborness.

It wasn't until I was nine that very belatedly discovered the perfection that was John Taylor of Duran Duran. That started a one and a half year obssession. It still scares the hell out of me that I would have anything to have been the mother of Simon LeBon's children. AHHHHHHH!!! (Did you SEE him in that concert with Pavarotti for Bosnia?). Fortunately, despite jumping on the DD bandwagon a few years too late, I at least started hearing stuff that was happening at the time, right bang in the middle of the 80s.

I am an eighties child and damn proud of it!

I remember a time when pop was actually cool to people over the age of twelve and trendy was a good word. That ended in 1987 with the Stock Aiken Waterhouse successes (I love you Kylie but you did spell the end). Suddenly, "teenybopper" became a misnomer as the candidates were invariably under thirteen.

At twelve, it was back to the Beatles and I discovered Rhythm and Blues, Aretha, Sam Cooke, Otis, Sam and Dave along with stuff like Carole King, Warren Zevon, Bob Dylan, and the 1950s thing that started a while back when Stand By Me came out (mind you I was also a soft metal fan at the time, I even went to see Bon Jovi and Metallica stood for all that was subversive...).

The most profound change was around turning fourteen when I went back to Hong Kong for a holiday and the nightclubs were playing music that I'd never heard properly before. When I was younger, I knew and loved songs by the Cure, the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order blah blah but the independent snobism wasn't as general. These bands were on the charts, I liked them but I did not differentiate between them and Aha or Mel and Kim. This time I did, and I listened hard. So began my years of being indie queen ending with the mass discovery of grunge c.Nirvarna/Pearl Jam in the early nineties.

It wasn't the huge and sudden idolation of all that gave meaning to my life then (sad but true) that was annoying, it was more people who had only discovered it maybe one year ago (I thought I was new to things but I realised that having liked this stuff before the start of the nineties meant I was way experienced) prancing round treating it as if the thing was their property and belittling others to mask their own insecurities. I remember buying Nevermind cause I found it second hand. I hated Nirvana when Teen Spirit was played to death but I had since rediscovered the genius that was Kurt Cobain ironically enough because it was played to death at the end of high school parties and it made me feel nostalgic. I brought my little bag of used CD purchases to uni and over lunch a girl I knew asked to see them. She took out Nevermind, ignoring the two other obscure early 80s gothic CDs that she clearly knew nothing of, and grimaced without any facetiousness, only saying "As if you would". Realising this was not a rare attitude, I soon hung up my hat as indie (now relagated to) princess and stopped buying CDs for a few years.

That is then. This is now. I have found music again, most of my past loves remain, old ones have developed, and I do now and then come out of my nostalgia closet and like something recent, but I can't say I actively go looking, there's too much out to discover outside chart music or indepedent pop to slowly discover. Like jazz, the variety that is world music, chart music from other countries, even modern classical, and those strange tidbits you find at one am on the radio.

Though a lot of people who are more "discriminating" will find some or more of the stuff I listen to in bad taste (sometimes rightly so, other times not), I think one thing can be said, given my musical history, I do have wide tastes. At ten, my father sat me down and made me listen to snippets from the hundred of records we owned until practically dawn as my "musical education" and while I found a few things embarrassing, I loved most of it (70s Bowie, Lou Reed, Buddy Holly, the Stones and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) though I never admitted it to him then. I just groaned and said Madonna was better. But I never believed in better types of music, sure better bands (Velvet Underground being better than The Wedding Present say, or Leonard Cohen is better than Michael Bolton...) and although I said I hated it (how embarrassing to tell my father he was right!) I loved the fact that it was good and difference dissolves when that's the case.

For me, Sweet Jane is just as beautiful as the Ode to Joy and vice versa. There are a few types of music I cannot tolerate, a lot of hardcore be it metal or techno, but that usually has something to do with having sensitive hearing and a preference rather than not for beat and melody (or at least rhythm that the seemingly just noise of punk bands possess).

Like I said, you might find some of my tastes repulsive but they are wide and I've always been able to introduce people I know to something they've never heard of before and find they like it.

 

So look in the sections you're used to and better still the ones you don't.

Pretend you're on a mystical Sesame Street musical tour and lose yourself.

 

 

"Alternative" Music


What this means anymore I have no idea but at least it provides a guide

 

 

 

The Eighties


Probably my favourite decade because it is the one that I grew up in. It was so nice being able to be "trendy" without being a fashion victim (or least everyone else was so it didn't matter), the 90s are so snobbish comparatively. In a generation where the individual has been stifled everyone wants to believe that they are one. Well, I guess wearing neon spotted (odd coloured) socks you couldn't take yourself so very seriously could you?

Ah such a quaint little decade. . .

I've separated it from "Alternative" Music but at the time I knew of no separation, I would be watching Top of the Pops and I'd hear the Cure/Smiths/Sisters of Mercy and then next they would be playing Bon Jovi or Tiffany.


 

 

Oldies but Goodies


I hate that expression! But, my imagination is running pretty low at this moment.


 

 

The Seventies


Oh wonderful decade where (as the myth goes) anything went.

So it was the selfish generation and the beginning of our moral degeneration (oh sorry, that was the sixties) but you have to admit they sure knew how to write a damn fine dance tune.

 

 

 

Jazz/Blues/Standards


I was not the biggest fan of jazz, sometimes it is a little too cerebral or just downright boring for me anyway. But there are many types of jazz, needless to say I try and stay away from the stuff that's too intellectual, you know poseurs jazz where you wonder how others can appreciate it.

Maybe on heroin or cocaine. . .

I'm getting it though (jazz that is). Maybe it started with a love for that swinging New Orleans street music but it became an interest when my dad brought home the bestest-westest album called Somethin' Else (the sexiest version of Autumn Leaves I have ever heard, and I am talking pure sex) by Cannonball Adderley with Miles Davies, Hank Jones, Sam Jones and Art Blakey - how could you go wrong? Later it become a small passion starting from the Standards and ending, well time will tell. . . I'm still learning so I won't even try to pretend to be an expert

 

 

Classical Music

 

If you needed a reason to listen to it, surely men like this is enough?

Yes, I am joking. Most musicians are prats. I was warned once by a music lecturer, never date musicians - there's only one thing on their minds

. . . their music

Fair enough, if I could play as well as Rostropovich, you wouldn't be able to tear me away from my cello (while now I get quite a lot of help being removed from my piano).

I've never understood people who couldn't listen to popular music, I've been irritated by those who insist that Western classical music is the superior form (culminating in the Symphony), but the strangest fellows I've ever met are those who will not touch classical music. Okay, Symphonies are often pompous and contain tedious space fillers, likewise, most Operas only contain one or two arias worth listening to (if they are lucky), some Classical tunes (Eine Kleine Natch Musik, Fur Elise) have just been played to death or have dubious connections ("oh yes that was on a toilet paper ad" - pure class), but anyone who listens to Gorecki's Third Symphony, the arias of La Boheme, or Massenet's Meditation and still thinks that classical music is boring lacks imagination and any appreciation of subtle beauty. I mean even metal stars are mesmerised by the stuff (ok maybe that's not such a bizarre thought given the Sex Pistols used hyped up Chuck Berry riffs).

I never really learned musical theory, what I picked up was in drips and drabs and usually found myself. In the same way that I learnt Art, if I found something I liked I would chase it up. My CD collection is fairly small, good classical records are invariably full price so I leave them to my father to buy, though I do splurge quite happily on the budget Naxos range. When I was a young child, I was made to go to see every great orchestra, artist that set foot in the Hong Kong Arts Festival including the aforementioned Rostropovich. Not a good experience, I'd get pins and needles and aches in my legs and given the time would also be trying desperately to fall asleep but not being allowed. Consequently, seeing live concerts as such never really interested me, if I can buy the CD instead I will (cultural pagan that I am). Ballet and Opera on the other hand are rather different. I've always loved the ballet as young girls do and have subscribed to the Australian Opera since I was introduced to it at thirteen. Unlike concerts, video does not do it justice and visually it gives you more to do than checking out that flautist with the light brown hair. . . though I have been known to look in the pit now and then to see if there was anyone "interesting". They also place memories and context within the music that cannot be placed by CD alone.

It's hard to talk about classical without sounding like a pretentious prat so I'll quit.

 

 

 

 

World Music


I don't know too much about it but I enjoy what I hear.

There are conficts with this and the next section, I'm trying not to stress about it.

 

 

 

 

Non English Pop Culture


I watched a film called Song of the Siren and Isreali film and one of my favourites -the music in it was brilliant but the credits being in Hebrew were impossible to work out. So my quest for pop songs in other languages started. If you are from a non English country and are into your own country's music, contact me please.

 



Also look out for my essential list of albums,

coming soon to a computer screen in front of you

(the Old Ce De Shop below)






Home Record Collection Ye Olde Ce De Shoppe Cathy's Cool Tapes Mail Me (please)