The face of music
I’ve attached (for a long time) importance to who makes the music I like. Songs shouldn’t be reduced to a title; the artist did get involved along the way. From back when music was who we saw on Ed Sullivan, through the Teen Beat magazines that my sisters left around the house, across the covers of the LPs which showed up in the radio station; all of these led to there being somebody behind the whole thing. Maybe that’s why I never fell in love with anonymous piano concertos from long dead men played by faceless hands.
On one side of my musical preferences, there’s been three decades of the who’s who of Quebec music. Today, I hit the jackpot in trivial information. At QuebecPop.com, somebody has gone to great lengths to cross reference the players in my musical lifetime. Fun, because music is inherently a game of “three degrees of separation”. The characters do know each other, and their efforts add a pot-pourri of flavours to the soup. I can’t play this game with my children, yet. With time and exposure, perhaps.
The site brought back a lot of musical memories; I can’t necessarily sing the song, but I can hum along. I’ve even had the chance to see some of the principals, unlike the American market. Maybe it’s time for a similar site devoted to the East Coast.
Obviously there’s a lot more access to recorded music than back in the ’70s. Carrying around sixteen hours of your favourite tunes required strong arms and a lot of patience. Yes, children, we did have random tune choices… it required a blindfold, but we worked through the difficulties. The real crazies would tear the labels off the records, and then try to memorize the pattern in the grooves! Seriously, until you’ve listened to old mix tapes for a weekend to try and find “the song”, you haven’t lived.
Nowadays, the iPod (which someday will seem like a toy) is everywhere. A decent editorial has run in Voir.ca, dealing with the isolation of the melomane on the city bus. If you are comfortable in French, look here. The synopsis is that we don’t have a problem with the strangers around us, because we have learned to “tune them out”. Even better, we get to choose what songs to do it with. Happiness is a full MP3 player with a charged battery.
