Burlap to Cashmere! You’re back! And you brought inscrutable time signatures with you! And you’ve been listening to Cat Stevens!
Burlap to Cashmere! You’re back! And you brought inscrutable time signatures with you! And you’ve been listening to Cat Stevens!
The trick to singing praise songs whose lyrics purport to tell God why you’re there (e.g., “Here I Am To Worship,” “Here For You” ) is to sing them with reference not only to why you’re singing, but also to why you *exist.*
If you’d like a color other than Blue in your starter jazz collection.
(Source: Spotify)
Here’s one piece of evidence that revelation to Biblical writers was sometimes incomplete, even as they wrote the Scriptures: David wrote, “I hate [those who hate Yahweh] with the utmost hatred; they have become my enemies” (Psalm 139:22). Understanding this important to “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).
Having asserted in a previous post that talking about one’s aesthetic tastes is irresistible, below you’ll find a list of a bunch of my favorite albums from AcclaimedMusic.net’s list of the the greatest 500 albums of all time, with links to listen (on Spotify, Grooveshark, or iTunes) whenever possible. I share them in hopes that you, too, find some music you’ve never heard before that you really, really like:
Favorite album overall: The Beatles (14) by The Beatles. Sprawling, flawed, and very diverse, the White Album was my favorite album before and after listening through this greatest 500 list. It helps that my dad listened to it a lot while working on his log cabin when he and my mom were first separated.
Honorable mention: Moondance (94) by Van Morrison.
Favorite album of the ‘50s: Here’s Little Richard (407) by Little Richard. Jimi Hendrix apparently said in 1966, “I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice.” That’s reason enough to give this a spin.
Honorable mention: The “Chirping” Crickets (363) by Buddy Holly & The Crickets. Really, though, I’ve got to mention Kind of Blue (39) by Miles Davis, even though I’m not officially covering jazz albums here. It’s hackneyed but true: If you own just one jazz album, make it that one.
I recently finished listening chronologically through the five hundred — OK, four hundred eighty-four; explanation below — greatest albums of all time as aggregated from everybody else’s lists by Swedish statistician Henrik Franzon at AcclaimedMusic.net. Inspired by the possibilities presented by the “listen-to-any-song-once-all-the-way-through” part of the business model of the defunct Lala.com (sigh), I started in early 2010 with Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (currently no. 534) and finished last month with xx by The xx (437), released in 2009, hearing mostly rock & roll, soul, rock (in its myriad subgenres), reggae, singer-songwriter, punk, New Wave, electronic, and hip-hop along the way.
I skipped the jazz on Franzon’s list, not because I don’t like it—I daresay that no one who has heard Kind of Blue (27) can say they don’t like any jazz—but because I found that jazz, or more precisely, bop, the subgenre to which at least half of the jazz albums on the list belong, sets my family on edge.
I’m not kidding: It took just two evening listens to bop albums, The Birth of the Cool (527) and especially Genius of Modern Music Volume 1 (283), to determine that bop prevents my kids from going to sleep easily at night. Moreover, the combination of bop’s often unintuitive meter & harmonics and our kids’ noisiness around the house, both of which are aurally demanding by themselves, nettled my wife and me. It’s just as well: Bop and avant-garde jazz are so musically different from all the other essentially pop genres comprising the Acclaimed Music list that they merit their own, separate listening plan, which I hope to embark on soon.
Anyway, in an attempt to extract something from this series of listens beyond its intrinsic pleasures, I wanted to share the experience by writing about it. In this, my first of two posts, I offer some general reflections, for what they’re worth, presented as a disjointed list (because making lists trims the protracted and painful time it takes for me to write well-connected, well-sequenced prose):
My children must have read some Atwood along the way.
If you want a simple, gentle and, like all Studio Ghibli films, exquisitely colorful cinematic children’s story that never once directly asks adults to like it.
If a superpowered songwriter summoning swarms of synthesized, sometimes syncopated sonics and straight-faced choristers to prophesy and sorrow strained romance in a schizophrenic-sounding song cycle sounds satisfying.
If you want proof that tenors <cough, Chris Martin, cough> haven’t yet cornered the market on thickly produced, anthemic middle-class pathos.
If you’ve been a Christian a long time and feel yourself starting to take Jesus for granted, or if you find yourself lacking sympathy for people enslaved by sin, read Psalm 124. It’ll remind you (metaphorically) of what could’ve been.
My inner Calvin and inner Hobbes often have conversations like this one.
