Music

Wuthering Heights

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

Sometimes, my brain, I tell you.

No, wait, none of that actually makes sense when it’s written as a sentence. Let me try that again.

So on the way out of the house this morning, I passed my CD rack and thought to myself, you know what I feel like listening to right now? Fucking Bombtrack. It’s been ages.

So I pulled the first Rage Against the Machine disc out of my collection and took it out to the car and rocked the fuck out on my entire drive to work.

It was awesome.

I mean, even the pub with its motorized esky races and its double-exclamation points on pretty much anything they’re trying to advertise didn’t bother me today. I was listening to some old school RatM and I was at peace with the fucking world.

Then I got to work and I parked the car and I started whistling as I walked upstairs to the QWC office where I’d spend the hour and a half before work writing thigns, as I’ve done every day-job morning this year. ‘Cause apparently I’ve become someone who whistles this year, I whistled the entire way up. Not well, you understand, ’cause I’m not really built for whistling, but there was a tune inside my head and it wanted to get out.

And what came out was the chorus for Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights.

I don’t even want to know how my brain made that connection.

Makin’ a Racket

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , ,

I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me.

‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games.

Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music listening gradually whittled down to playing things in my car and listening to the same Dresden Doll’s live DVD while I cleaned the old apartment. Even upgrading laptops to Shifty Silas didn’t help much – he could play audio at the same time as word-processing, but his speakers were…well, lets just say they weren’t designed with audio in mind.

So, there’s suddenly a stereo I can pack with music that floats around the space I spend most of my non-day-job waking hours. Net result: I’ve listened to a lot more music in the last two weeks than I have in the previous two years.

And it’s been freakin’ GLORIOUS.

I’ve largely celebrated this by listening to a stream of classics from the eighties and nineties. If you’re wondering what the interior of my head sounds like this week, it can be captured by the following three youtube clips:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-AYAv0IoWI]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4GZFbCqx18]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1tj2zJ2Wvg]

It must be said, all three of these songs benefit greatly from volume. It’s eleven-thirty as I type this, which means I don’t have the freedom to crank the stereo the levels all three songs demand, but you can be sure I’ll rectify that the moment I’m left in the house alone.

It must also be said that I’m a man singularly lacking in musical taste and class, but I’ve had years to get used to that.