I don’t mean that the songs sound exactly the same, but only that maybe the same sequences of notes are used.

The whole thing reminded me of a Gladwell article I recently read, Something Borrowed, about plagiarism.

It started off feeling kind of upbeat girl pop and while that impression was briefly challenged as I was listening to “It Hurts to See You Dance So Well” ultimately it was a song that I found it difficult to relate to.

This feeling persisted as I continued to listen to the music whilst doing dishes and then after that, idly playing some games and reading a book.

Maybe if I were in a more energetic mood I could get into this but right now, as I’m writing down these notes and listening to “Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me” it seems just too much out of alignment with how I feel, perhaps being neither something I have related to nor something I would even especially want to?

This doesn’t quite make sense to me though. I listen to all sorts of music that I shouldn’t really relate to at all. What is it about gangster rap that I find so fun to listen to? Reckless excess and macho personas? Uhhh… whatever it is, I don’t know, but it’s one quality that evidently creates enjoyment out of music for me in a way that my experience of the Pipettes thus far does not.

I’ll try another listen tomorrow by which time my mood might have changed and I’ll have a different reaction.

For most, the phrase “pretty in pink” probably calls to mind either simply the color, or, the Molly Ringwald vehicle of the same name. When I first heard of this party, however, I knew only that people were thinking up pink outfits to wear, and to me the word pink is most immediately associated with the phrase “tickled pink”.

There’s a line in the first real track on the Re-Up Gang’s excellent mixtape We Got It 4 Cheap Vol 2 titled Re-Up Intro, a running start to an album full of inventive new ways of saying not-much about slinging crack, which makes use of the phrase tickled pink in a way that I have been thus far unable to disassociate with the color.

While in college, I knew a lot of people who shared a love for the same crack-rap that I was listening to far too much of, but now I don’t. They would have, I think, appreciated why I find this amusing but as it is, I can’t share this chuckle with anybody. Maybe I don’t share music in the same way anymore, maybe I don’t advertise as clearly what I’m listening to, maybe I just have a different group of friends, or, perhaps as I’m so often reminded by my old friend Ben’s gchat status message, it was all just too much of that gangsta music.

It is called Strictly Game and is apparently the single off of some new album. I think my sister told me about this band, Harlem Shakes (blocked in China? why?), before but I never got around to listening to anything before today.

Occasionally though I’ll come across a comment such as this one:

“This song brings back a lot of memories for me. Back when I lived in the dorms at school there was this girl who would wake me up early every Saturday morning to do laundry with her. I would drag myself all hungover, down to the laundry room. She would bring her boom box and listen to music and dance as we did our laundry. This was one of her favorite songs. It moved me to see this girl dance and sing so early in the morning, so happy. It still moves me, it makes me happy inside, I miss doing that with her so much.”

And then I’ll wonder what happened to this guy? (I assume it’s a guy, I don’t know that it is.) What happened to the girl? Given that I am looking at comments on the internet, is this the wistful regrets of somebody over something they wish they had done in college and this song is a persistent reminder of that? But surely that can’t be it because it’s a positive memory that remains. Am I projecting my own regrets on to this anonymous internet person? Only a little.

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

– from “Leisure,” by W.H. Davies

I don’t miss where I came from
But each night I dream about being back home
When I wake up in the morning
I’m too tired, tired of being alone

Ah, 2005.
It was a good year.

(what the hell, nostalgic for two years ago, at my age?)

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Note first that I do not feel miserable in spite of listening to pop music. What happened was that I’ve been taking random lines that from whatever media I’d been consuming (listening to music, reading a book, watching a TV show or movie) and using them as away messages, as I think I’ve been doing basically since high school. Then, somebody remarked how I’d had an interesting string of messages, to which I replied that they were merely lines I’d cribbed from other sources.

The surprise came when I was informed that they’d gotten the impression that I’d been going through some “torturous breakup”.

No, there is no torturous breakup. A little over a year ago, I found Pitchfork Media’s list of their 100 top albums from the 90s (revisited), and decided that I’d see if I could manage to go through and listen to all of them. I’m still slowly but surely working my way through this task, usually picking one to listen to on the way to and from work while on the metro, sometimes choosing off of other stuff from other lists from later years. The albums I remember quoting from recently are Interpol’s “Antics”, Weezer’s “Blue Album” and “Pinkerton”, Belle and Sebastian’s “If You’re Feeling Sinister”, Elliott Smith’s “Either/Or” and “XO”, Radiohead’s “The Bends”, and The Beta Band’s “Three EPs”. There’s more, too, I just can’t remember at this very moment. Given this, I guess it is not necessarily such a surprise that one might get the wrong impression from my away messages.

It does give me pause to consider how I made the selections I did. Does this betray something about my subconscious state of mind, that I should have chosen a set of lines that paints this unflattering picture? I don’t think so, but I guess it is possible.

Even so, I think I am going to be a bit more self conscious of my choice of away messages for a while. Every time I’m reminded that people not only read them but make guesses about me based on them, I think that I should be more careful, after all I wouldn’t want to be unintentionally misleading.

I first heard of them because I saw a quote of one of their songs in somebody else’s AIM profile, or maybe it was an away message, I don’t know. Maybe it was a blog? No I still think it was an AIM profile. I’m pretty sure it was my second year, because I remember living in 612, and I remember how thefacebook.com was still just an emerging craze.

I have a bad habit of adding people to my AIM buddy list and then never doing anything besides watching their away messages and profile change over time. On the up side, I do seem to see random lyrics fragments pretty often in this process, and when I see lyrics quoted by somebody I’ve obviously decided is interesting enough to add to my “buddy” list, I’ll usually go ahead and at least find a way to listen to the quote song.

In the case of Final Straw, I went for the whole album, and upon listening to it, decided that I liked it. Actually it doesn’t seem to have quite the same appeal to me now, and I’ve got no explanation for that besides me having changed.

I wonder if I’m going to keep liking the album, just because of its positive association with my memories. A few years from now, I imagine they’ll have all but disappeared from most people’s memories, and I might decide to give another listen, for nostalgia’s sake.

I remember playing Euchre in that room over on the odd-numbered side of Shoreland, even though apparently even the people I played with have since forgotten, this association being due to the profile I think I saw the quote in. I also remember the Summer I spent living on the floor of a friend’s dorm room, because he too, at least for that Summer, became a fan, and I seem to recall listening to Snow Patrol’s other albums that Summer.

I really need to spend less time sitting around reminiscing. It too often has the unfortunate side effect of me getting caught up in all the things I didn’t do, and dwelling this much on the over-zealously interpreted opportunity-cost of the things I did do, leads only to undue regret.

this could be the very minute
I’m aware I’m alive
all these places feel like home