I picked this up from this guy, who acquired it from that guy… and so on. And I (block)quote:

1. If you’d like to play along, reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I’m doing here, you’ll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

I was given… “H”. And since I can do this, I’m embedding tracks in WordPress. Hah!

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  Home By The Sea / Second Home By The Sea (Genesis) – I love this piece. I just plain love it. Especially the various live renditions with the dual drummers. This sort of thing is what I love about Genesis.

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  Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie w/ Pet Shop Boys) – Two great tastes that go great together.

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  Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Daft Punk) – Let’s be honest: They’re probably never going to top this.

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  Hyperactive (Thomas Dolby) – This is one of those love-it-or-hate-it songs from Mr. Dolby, and I happen to love it. I can see why some people don’t enjoy it as much, though.

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  Heat (Jethro Tull) – Speaking of love-or-hate, this is from the Tull album which is the most “electronic” they ever released, and it drove the die-hard fans batty. One of the things I like about it is that nearly the entire album could be used as the soundtrack to a cheesy 80′s spy caper flick… especially this track.

And there you go. Anybody want a letter of their own to run with?

I bumped into this one during some random websurfing today and realized that even though it’s been around for years I never got around to actually posting it. Odd, considering it’s a silly random music meme. I’m all about that, right?

Anyway. Without further ado, blah blah blah:

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing (feel free to annotate, since snarky commentary is half the fun)
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend that you’re cool…

(I’m fudging on Rule #6 in my usual way: If it’s a foreign-language track or an instrumental, I will use my discretion. If you don’t like it, too bad. My journal, my meme post.)

Opening credits: “Beastie,” Jethro Tull – Ominous. And yet, the opening lines do describe the arc of one’s life, after a fashion… “From early days of infancy, through trembling years of youth, long murky middle-age and final hours long in the tooth…”

Waking up: “Hallo Spaceboy,” Pet Shop Boys w/ David Bowie – “Do you like girls or boys” is not what I’m thinking first thing in the morning, for the record.

First day of school: “Amlapura,” Tin Machine – Er. Never mind the back-to-back Bowie, this just makes no sense whatsoever here. “Never saw in all my life a more shining jewel,” indeed.

Falling in love: “Back to Back,” Tony Banks – This song has precisely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Love scene: “Hollowman,” Econoline Crush – If I’m making love while angsty, shouty alterna-rock plays on a nearby sound system, somebody please slap me.

Breaking up: “Airhead,” Thomas Dolby – “You ask me, do I love you, does the Pope live in the woods? Quad Erat Demonstrandum, baby (‘Ooo, you speak French!’)” Apparently in this movie version of my life I broke up with someone for being a ditz? Huh.

Life is good: “Easy Lover,” Philip Bailey w/ Phil Collins – I… don’t know what to say to this except to question on which level of life things are good. Below the waistline, sunshine? (Name that tune. Hah!)

Mental Breakdown: “Anything,” The Damned – We finally have something that fits the slot to a T. “Anything, anything, anything… is better than THIS!”

Driving: “Be With Me,” VAST – Wouldn’t this have made more sense earlier on? Could we swap this with the Econoline Crush track? Please?

Flashback: “Lean To The Inside,” Electronic – A vocals-free track that… actually kind of works. I think. In my warped little brain, anyway. The Tony Banks track earlier in the list would be better, though.

Getting back together: “Here,” VAST – “Hold me now, you know I am so afraid to love… at all.” Okay, though that’s not really what the song is about as far as I can tell…

Wedding: “Army of Me,” Bjork – Well, that’s a bit surreal.

Birth of Child: “Dreaming,” BT – “Walk with me, the future’s at hand, here with us, here where we stand.” Again, not a perfect fit but not completely amiss either… huh.

Final Battle: “Lament,” KOTOKO – I can think of worse tracks for this slot. (I tend to put the darker, techno-industrial KOTOKO tracks on my music player rather than the bouncey pop fluff.) I approve, though one of the Econoline Crush tracks could be swapped into this slot and work out better than where they ended up…

Death Scene: “General Crossing,” Jethro Tull – Well, it is all about going over to the other side. In the Cold War, though. Whoops.

Funeral song: “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” The Police – No, I don’t think so. Couldn’t we have had Clint Mansell’s “Death Is The Road To Awe” in this slot instead? Bah.

End Credits: “Burnt,” Econoline Crush – It’s… a song, I guess. Once again, Econoline Crush jumps into a slot that it doesn’t quite fit, though. Maybe bring KOTOKO’s “Lament” down here? Hmm.

And there you have it, such as it is. I hope you were as amused by reading as I was by annotating!

The purists (if such a word applies here, especially considering how many variants I ran into while coming up with this rendition) who’ve done this one before will note that I’ve left out the “Prom” selection. I doubt that anyone I know will complain.

Also, these results come from the subset of my library which lives on the portable player. I figured it’d help confine the track selection to things some people might have actually heard of. Stranger things have happened, right…?

Here are the answers from last week’s meme post, and the Excel spreadsheet you’ve all been waiting for. First, the songs: Read the rest of this entry »

As we’ve learned, over and over again, my musical tastes are unlike those of most people. They’re similar, mind you, but just a bit off-kilter. It’s as if you took a normal person’s tastes and rotated them about five degrees from reality. Oh well. I got a kick out of the meme (I found here) so you’re stuck with it anyway. Unless you choose to stop reading at this point, of course. Read the rest of this entry »

Since it seems to be the thing to do, today:

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

I really don’t photograph well, do I…?

The guy who draws Dork Tower posted a silly meme a few days ago, and I decided to hop on board. (Hey, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I think I’m allowed.) Mind you, I don’t use iTunes (no Ogg Vorbis support) so all I can do is make Winamp jump through the hoops. Luckily I’m already in the habit of using the Media Library…

So here goes:

How many songs total: 5,028
How many hours or days of music: 15 days, 2 hours, 37 minutes
Most recently played: Dodo/Lurker by Genesis
Most played: Integral by Pet Shop Boys (10 times) *
Most recently added: “Version 2.0″ (album) by Garbage **

Sort by song title:
First Song: #1 Crush by Garbage
Last Song: Zoot Suit Riot by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies

Sort by time:
Shortest Song: Vitamin C by Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop OST #2 “No Disk,” 0:06) ***
Longest Song: Sasha’s Voyage of Ima by BT (“Ima” CD#2, 42:45) ****

Sort by album:
First album: “10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1″ by Midnight Oil
Last album: “Zone Of The Enders OST” *****

First song that comes up on Shuffle: I’m With Stupid by Pet Shop Boys

Search the following and state how many songs come up: ******

• Death – 9
• Life – 71
• Love – 190
• Hate – 31
• You – 377
• Sex – 9

Most Represented Artist: Genesis (233 tracks) *******

Footnotes:

* I’ve only recently gotten into the habit of using the Media Library. Otherwise there’d be songs with much higher play counts.

** I had to find this the old-fashioned way: Doing a date search in the file directory. Winamp seems not to track my “recently added” very well for some reason.

*** I’d have found the shortest “proper” song in the list, but I ran out of time this morning. The first dozen entries were “non-songs” of one sort or another. So I gave up.

**** Which beat out Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready,” the previous (three) contender(s) (original and two live renditions), by almost twenty minutes!

***** Last studio album, not a single, by a proper band: Worldillia by Porno Graffitti

****** In Winamp, file path and album are included in all searches. These numbers are therefore inflated a little bit. Yes, this annoys me but there seems to be no way to search only in the title of a song. (Argh.)

******* By no means is all of my Genesis music ripped to MP3 or Ogg. The same is true for most of my other favorite artists, actually. That first number (~5000 tracks) would be much, much higher if I really wanted to go crazy with the digital music library…