Category: music

Today’s Theme Music

I’ve frequently reminisced in posts about songs I know and love from past eras. Each song tags itself to events going on then.

Today’s song is from the here and now. We’ve just ended a month of smoke from wildfires in Ashland. You either stayed inside, out of the smoke, or wore masks. The fires still burn and light smoke remains present, but rains scrubbed the worst smoke out of our air. I can only address our area, but I hope other areas have been pardoned from serving life with air hazardous to their health.

Life goes on. Refugees and survivors hunt safety, DACA is being strangled, the ACA is being stalked, towns and mountains burn in the American west, hurricanes pummel the east, and talk of nukes and military action ride the airwaves. This song, “Despacito,” by Luis Fonti, and featuring Daddy Yankee, provides a refreshing break from our twenty-first century Sturm and Drang.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s music comes because my wife and I mis-heard song lyrics. This is sometimes called an ononym, but is often called a mondegreen.

Jon Carroll used to write about mondegreens in his SF Chronicle column.  (Maybe he still does. My subscription ended.) Along with his commentary about his cats, Archie and Bucket, I enjoyed these mondegreen columns. Although I didn’t know what a mondegreen was, I first encountered one with Jimi Hendrix. He was singing, “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky.” I heard him telling me he was going to kiss a guy. Like most mondegreens, I wasn’t alone in my mis-hearing.

That’s the same today. There’s a Calvin Harris song out called “Feels.” The song features Pharrell Williams, Katy Perry, and Big Sean. It was the Katy Perry part that confused us. We were certain Katy was singing, “Don’t be afraid to catch fish.”

Being semi-rational sentient individuals, my other and I wondered, what the hell? Why is she singing about fish? Is this a reference to there being many fish in the sea? Perhaps fish was another euphemism for dating or sex.

What? Really?

Reaching home, I employed a minute to search for the truth. First, I wasn’t alone; lots of us thought Katy Perry was singing about fish. Most of us are older.

Second, Katy Perry was singing, “Don’t be afraid to catch feels.”

Well, honestly, ‘catch feels’ made little more sense than catching fish, but at least we knew the truth. Listen for yourself, then tell me that it doesn’t sound like fish.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Jimi Hendrix took me like he’d done so many others. I heard his music and thought, “Whoa. Who is that?”

Hendrix died when I was in my freshman year at high school. School had just begun a few weeks before. Attending John H. Linton Intermediate school, I was smitten with Melissa Smith. Melissa sat behind me in science. I was shy, so Melissa took it upon her to talk to me. Her opening gambit was about music. First we talked about “Tommy” and other Who songs. Then Hendrix died, so we talked about his music and death. Funny, but in my memory, Melissa was my opposite. She dressed in a preppie style, skirts, blouses and sweaters, while my attire skated along the spectrum toward unkempt hippie. My hair was a wild and curly mess while she sported something from “That Girl.” Nevertheless, we liked each other.

Years after Hendrix’s passing, I learned about his influence on the British musicians, like Clapton, Lennon, Jagger, Jones, and Townsend. Their interest and impressions of him provided me with a vicarious bond to the times.  Almost fifty hears later, “Fire” energizes me in a way few other songs ever do.

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Today’s Theme Music

Hurricanes. Floods. Wildfires. Nuke threats. Politics. Fake news. Bad beer. Violence.

Sometimes I think that I need to just get away from it all. Stick me in a stasis chamber and call me when it’s over. If not that, let me just fly away. Sing it for me, Lenny. From nineteen ninety-eight.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

How about a little Sam Cooke,delivered live by Van Morrison with Jeff Beck’s help, to move your day along? Recorded live this year, here is “Bring It On Home to Me.”

h/t to Rolling Stone Magazine for delivering this to my ebox today.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Here we go. Reference to what is a classic in your personal realm of taste is different from others. Age, era, and where and when you grew up all count into it, right? Other factor play into it. The net, what’s classic in my personal universe is foreign to you, and the reverse applies.

But this is a classic for me. It often streams into my head in conjunction with my muse. Muse might be properly plural here. I have multiple voices in my head. They all might belong to one muse, who likes doing other voices, or an army of muses. I don’t know. I sometimes wonder, when you die, what happens to the voices in your head, like your muses? I believe they go find someone else to reside in.

Here is my classic, a song for my muse. Several have covered it, but the classic for me is Santana, in nineteen seventy. I remember listening it on my little AM/FM clock radio, “with stereo.” Then I had it on vinyl, open reel, cassette tape, and CD.

Here is “Black Magic Woman.”

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Today’s Theme Music

Do you have daily theme music, or music that highlights an activity?

My daily theme music is often a reflection of a momentary lapse of reason, or a thought in the nick of time. Themes vary through the day, though, mirroring moods and events. Sometimes I find myself with the themes from the television series “Mission Impossible” or “Sanford and Son” in my head.

The smoke levels dropped today. The A.Q.I. remains listed as unhealthy, but it seems much clearer and more comfortable. The air temp was a comfortable seventy-six F under partly cloudy skies. That allowed me to walk in comfort.

I wrote in my head as I walked around town (actually designing the Epitomy, the starship serving as base in “Black Dust”). Bonnie Tyler’s song, “Holding Out For A Hero,” accompanied my thoughts. The song was in a movie you might have seen, “Footloose,” in nineteen eighty-four, but it’s been used for multiple campaigns. Bonnie puts a lot into singing the song, which was written by the talented Dean Pritchford.

I could use a hero this year, not just in my novels, but in life. Maybe I just place an ad: “Wanted: principled individual to save the world.”

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

“There’s something wrong with the world today.”

When Aerosmith sang that in nineteen ninety-three, I think fuckin’ A, there’s a lot wrong with the world today. I don’t think we’ve advanced much since ’93. It feels like we’re sliding down a steep hill. It’s getting steeper, and we’re picking up speed. I can’t see the bottom, and I don’t know what’s down there, and all these things scare the hell out of me. The Doomsday Clock stayed at three minutes until midnight until twenty seventeen. Now it’s been moved to two and half minutes before midnight.

2017

IT IS TWO AND A HALF MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.” In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater, the need for action more urgent. It is two and a half minutes to midnight, the Clock is ticking, global danger looms. Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead the way.  See the full statement from the Science and Security Board on the 2017 time of the Doomsday Clock.

 

Don’t know why it matters to me; I’m sixty-one. How long until death? Yes, but isn’t it the quality of life until death that matters? And do I not want to think the world became better while I was in it, and maybe helped make it a little, teeny-tiny bit better?

Here’s Aerosmith, with “Livin’ On the Edge.”

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Today’s Theme Music

Like later, in “Where’s the beef,” I missed out on what was going on with this song, because I was living elsewhere in the world. Contact with American pop culture was intermittent in those days.

I really first heard of it was when I visited Mom after returning to America. My younger sisters lived with her. They loved this song, “My Sharona.” I’d heard little of it, or the Knack. When I mentioned that to them, they replied, “I’m getting a little sick of it. It’s being played all the time.”

This was nineteen seventy-nine, the middle of the disco reign. “My Sharona” was nothing like disco of the time. It reminded me of the early Brit invasion stuff, like “Bang the Gong,” in structure, but with less textures.

The song never really caught fire with me. I was immune to its spell. But – there’s always a but, isn’t there? “Welcome to Heaven.” “I’m made it to Heaven?” “Yes, but, it’s not what you think.” Or, “I love you, but — ”

Yeah. Fear the “but.”

But, I awoke with a variation of “My Sharona” in my head. Here’s Weird Al Yankovic with his parody song, “My Bologna.” It was all in nineteen seventy-nine, when nobody needed to remind the POTUS not to look at the sun without proper eye-protection.

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Feline Rhapsody

Inspired by cats and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen (and sung to that melody, with the instrumentals). We pick it up about a third of the way in.

I’m just a ginger silhouetto of a cat.

Scalaboosh, scalaboosh, can we give him some kibble?

Thunderbolt and lightning,

His claws are very frightening to me.

Galileo. Galileo.

Galileo. Galileo.

His name’s not Galileo,

Is it Magnifico-ooo-oooo?

Oh, no, no, no, no, NO!

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I’m just a ginger cat, nobody loves me,

He’s just a ginger cat, from a ginger litter,

Let him sleep on the bed tonight.

 

Easy come, easy go,

Let me go back out.

You just came in,

We will not let you out.

Let me out.

We will not let you out.

Let me out.

We will not let you out.

Let me out.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO!

 

Oh, Mama Mia, Mama Mia,

Mama Mia, can I keep this cat?

You can’t keep this cat because it’ll be more work for me,

For ME,

For MEEEE!

 

So you think you can lock me inside?

So you think I won’t run around and cry?

Oh, human,

You can’t do this to me, human.

I just gotta get out,

Just gotta get right

Outta here.

 

Nothing really matters,

Anyone can see,

Nothing really matters,

I’m just a feline that you must…

Pleeease.

 

Sorry, Queen.

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