It’s been a grey, cold day. We’ve finally gotten some wintry weather. Perfect for bundling up in a blanket on the couch and binge watching all those great Films Noir — “Laura,” “The Big Sleep,” “Strangers on a Train,” “Woman in the Window,” “The Big Heat,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca.” Turner Classic Movies was not cooperating, unfortunately, and besides, I have snowflakes to crochet, and then I remembered I had this Carly Simon album. . . .
And when this palls, I’ve got playlists of instrumental smooth jazz on Napster. Now that I think of it, a Carly Simon playlist — maybe mix in some laid back JT, and Linda Ronstadt did these albums with Nelson Riddle . . . hmmmm.
Am I such an old fogey that all this thumpy-bumpy-chanty-ranty-herky-twerky modern music palls so very quickly? I run across a nice one now and then, but they seem to be few and far between (I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s interview with Katy Perry on Star Talk the other day — I’m sorry. It was like the astrophysicist and the space cadet.) I like melodies and harmonies. I like the sound of orchestral strings as much as I like the sound of guitar strings. I like music that doesn’t beat you over the head or hit you with a wall of sound, with singers who can actually sing and literate lyrics .
I don’t think I’m a musical snob. I mean, if you look at my playlists on Napster, I’ve got everything: Paganini, Pink Floyd, Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the Pointer Sisters; Mozart, Moby, Mancini, and Morton; Tchaikovsky, Tingstad and Rumbel, and Tangerine Dream; Brahams, Beatles, Biosphere and boogie woogie; Liszt, Llewellyn, Lucette Bourdin and Loop Guru. I’ve got Eleftheria Arvanitaki and Lisa Gerrard, Ofra Haza, James Taylor and Michael Franks; blue grass, klezmer, and early Brubeck, Dadawa, Niyaz and Cirque du Soleil. I’ve got Ravi Shankar and both his daughters. In addition to almost every genre from the USA, there’s music on there from Turkey, Iceland, India, eastern Europe, Yemen, Mali, Ireland, Algeria, Greece, Morocco, and Norway. (Ghod, I love the interwebs so much!)
But right now, I’m in a Films Noir mood. . .
The Owl Underground 
I expect each generation repudiates the new generation’s music. Even Beethoven was dismissed by a lot of people at the beginning of his career.
I try to be fair (though sometimes not very hard) about other people’s musical preferences. However, I have never managed to be fair about pop music or whatever they call it these days. Badly written lyrics and banal tunes larded with special effects to disguise their emptiness, that, I think, describes modern popular music. I don’t mind people listening to it if it floats their boat but I do object to having it blasted at me from loudspeakers in shops and restaurants. I often turn off my hearing aids because the din hurts my ears.
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Yesterday, I fell back into the Bossa Nova era, and I’m still there. There’s nothing quite like a little samba tune in the midst of a first cold snap to help ease things a bit.
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