SHAME WEEK! Salubrious Saturday: “Je t’aimais, je t’aime, et je t’aimerai,” Francis Cabrel

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High school.  High school, high school, high school.  Wow.

Okay.  Before we jump into the backstory here, let me just say that I am forced to post this song today because I am going to a very good friend’s wedding and therefore it has to be a love song.  This week being Shame Week, I had no choice.  And all men are Socrates.  Okay.  Moving on.

I really do love this song.  It’s beautiful.  But it’s like eating Frosted Flakes with maple syrup.  It’s way, way, way too cloying and sweet and over the top.  You know what time in your life is made for things that are over the top?  Say it with me now: high school!  Hooray!  Sometimes in French class our teacher would play us French pop songs and we would have to transcribe the lyrics.  It was a genius way of teaching French and it also gave high schoolers the greatest gift of all: ways to look effete and worldly at 15 years old.  I thought I was soooo sophisticated for loving – and being able to sing along to – Francis Cabrel.  Until I went to France on an orchestra exchange and my host family asked me what music I liked and I said, “oh, moi j’adore Francis Cabrel,” and they were like, “…vraiment?”  And I was all like, “…merde.”

But I was undeterred!  The angelic boy chorus that comes in around 1:30 gave me visions of eternal, perfect, heartbreaking love, because when you’re a teenager, love and pain are obvious synonyms.  (Spoiler alert for any teenagers reading this: wrong!  They’re antonyms.  Trust me.)  I put it on a mix I’m horrified to admit I called “Romance Mix” that I brought with me to college.  I played it during my first relationship, and the breakup of my first relationship.  It slowly fell out of rotation through my early and mid-20s as relationships became less of an item of necessity, like a purse, and more of an item of choice.  Now, a decade on from university, I kind of like its treacly intensity.  The older you get, irony becomes lame and earnestness is more appealing.  Even if whatever is earnest is also just a tad cloying

 

SHAME WEEK! Funk Friday: “Kalimba,” Mr Scruff

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Mr Scruff is a legitimately good DJ.  This song is a pretty good song – maybe a little repetitive and pointless, but it’s got a good groove.  So what’s so embarrassing about this song?

Anyone reading this blog on a PC knows exactly why this song is so embarrassing.  It’s because this is one of three or four songs pre-loaded onto the Windows Media Player as sample pieces.  I don’t know why they did that.  All I know is that, one day, when I had to work at another facility and I didn’t have my own music with me, I hoped against hope there would be something already on the Windows machine I had to use – and, God bless America, there was.  I listened to this song on repeat for eight hours.

Eight.  Hours.

Stockholm syndrome is real, my friends.

SHAME WEEK! Throwback Thursday: “Un Bel Di,” OperaBabes

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Talk about gilding the lily.  The original aria is delicate and tender and completely heartbreaking in the context of the story.

The OperaBabes (seriously, that’s their name) version is mindless elevator music.  It was part of a mix CD I got during a summer semester in college.  I didn’t know much about the original opera, let alone the story, and, being totally addicted to rhythm then as I am now, I thought it was really catchy and great exercise music.  And then years passed and I heard the story behind Madame Butterfly and had an excellent “facepalm” moment.

SHAME WEEK! Worldly Wednesday: “Dragostea Din Tei,” O-Zone

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Oh you totally knew this was coming.  Like there is any other song I could post on Wednesday during Shame Week.  (Happily I don’t own any Venga Boys.  This entry could have taken way longer to come up with.)  And don’t pretend like you don’t secretly love this song.  It’s a great song!  It’s also so terrible that I have never once wondered what it actually means.  It just doesn’t make that much of a difference to me.  It’s fun to yell “maaayaHEEE, maaayaHOOO” while bopping up and down at a house party, and that’s good enough for me.

SHAME WEEK! Termagant Tuesday: “Tapestry,” Michael Jones

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Wood varnish, modern dance, and New York City.  Those are the three things that come to mind when I hear this.

Wood varnish: I am seven.  My mom refinished…man. I lost count of the number of things she refinished in the house I grew up in.  Our beautiful old upright piano, tables, chairs.  Not to mention all of the other home improvement projects she had going on.  A Michael Jones cassette was part of the music rotation she would put on the paint-splattered radio-tape player that kept her company when the fumes were too strong for a kid to deal with.  Michael Jones was soon supplanted by Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” and I took “Pianoscapes” for myself.  It heavily influenced my own early compositions.  Don’t get me wrong – this music isn’t that great.  But what it did do for a little kid writing her own stuff was make it okay to experiment with melodic changes, time signature changes, and rhythmic changes.  It also made it okay to write “songs” that were more than ten minutes long.  You’re welcome, neighbors.

Modern dance: I am ten.  I took a bunch of different styles of dance when I was a kid but modern dance was the only one that I really got into because – surprise! – there aren’t a whole lot of rules.  Perfect.  One homework assignment was to create our own dance and set it to music.  The person who came up with the most popular dance (decided by a very public vote) would choreograph a whole group routine.  I used “Tapestry.”  I did not win.

New York City: I am thirteen.  For my thirteenth birthday, I got to go to New York City and visit my godmother.  She lived by the courthouse in Manhattan and worked in the fashion industry.  She was (and still is), very tall and very glamorous.  She took me shopping to buy my very first make-up (Clinique – what’s up).  She bought me my first pair of black cigarette pants.  We ate escargot and went to the theater.  It was incredible.  We also went to a bookstore that had a CD section and I bought the CD version of the now six-year-old cassette tape.  I put it on her CD player when we got back to her enormous apartment and I remember walking around her very modernist two-bedroom, looking at the city lights glowing in the dark, with this piece pouring out of the speakers.  That’s a very happy memory.

SHAME WEEK! Modernism Monday: “Life in a Northern Town,” The Dream Academy

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I recently got a few boxes delivered from a storage unit I had more or less forgotten I had.  One of them had photos in it.  It was marked, “Photos.”  Another had scratch-and-sniff stickers in a jewelry box, an orange stopwatch in a plastic bag with some loose Euro coins, and approximately seven different guidebooks of Washington, D.C.  It was marked, “Random.”  The third box was marked “DO NOT PUT ANYTHING ON TOP OF THIS BOX” and was filled with all of my old CD binders dating back to senior year of high school.  Oh man.  This was going to take some time.

Leafing through page after page of CDs was way more intense that looking at old snapshots of myself and my degenerate college friends.  It was a tour of my innermost thoughts and – worst – tastes and preferences.  “Oh Christ” was a common thought that sprang to mind every three or four page-turns.  Talking about this with some friends over beers last week, it became clear that they – and therefore the entire universe of still-alive humans – have music that they still love but are too ashamed to tell people about.

I am not ashamed.  I am going to air my dirty musical laundry for all to see.  Welcome, dear readers, to Shame Week.  We begin our tour with the odd little British group The Dream Academy, whose song “Life In A Northern Town” is a nice pre-chewed bite of moodiness, punctuated by a howlingly out of place “African”-style chant in the chorus.  Oh, and there’s an oboe.  Okay.

Sacred Sunday: “Gloria,” from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass

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This is such a bonkers piece in a way and I just love it.  It’s so very Broadway, with some serious “West Side Story” throwbacks from around 1:55 to 2:15; it’s got a very Latin vibe to it; and its various rhythms give it a colorful brightness that other stolid versions just don’t have.  It’s a good piece for today – Pentecost Sunday, the day that (according to the Bible) Jesus’s disciples received the Holy Spirit through wind and fire and baptized thousands of people.  In effect, it’s the day the Christian church was born.

Salubrious Saturday: “Shattered,” The Rolling Stones

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Look at me!  I’m in tatters!  So I’m going to go play kickball in the park today.  And then?  I might take a nap.  And after that?  I might go dancing.  Success success success!  Does it matter?  Pride and joy and dirty dreams – that’s what makes our town the best.  Also: kickball in the park.  That’s my reasoned opinion.

Throwback Thursday: “La Canarie,” Michael Praetorius

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I’m sorry, Tune-Up fans – this week is bananas so I don’t have an inspiring (or even amusing) write-up for you today.  But I wanted to at least give you something cheerful to listen to.  I love Praetorius, as you’ve probably picked up, and the man who does these recordings, Eduardo Antonello, is a just amazing.  Hey, Folger Consort: call him.  From what I can tell, he is self-taught and a complete early music instrument savant.  I am so grateful to musicians like him who are keeping gorgeous pieces like this alive and well.