No Offense Meant to Your Innate Sensibilities

Take a former high-speed military guy, add a flagrantly narrow view of music and the arts, ignite the passion and conviction that so often come only in later years, mix in 30 years of psycho-spiritual experimentation, a healthy belief that the Ashkenazi and Sephardics really ARE the REAL Jews, add a dollop of cancer and poverty and VOILA! I have come.



Friday, April 8, 2011

Music to Sooth the Savage Beast

Ah, music. It takes my soul to wing in a breathless rearranging of my aural reality and changes everything.

But I've a very narrow view of what's good. I'm like a one-act play when it comes to my tunage.

Currently (like now and going back a good two years) I listen to Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath featuring Tony Martin or Ronnie James Dio. Other stuff I listen to is Iron Maiden, some Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath and sometimes the Sab with Ronnie James Dio aboard. Then of course there's Maiden and occasional Black Sabbath.

I don't listen to this stuff because it's gloomy and doomy. I find Iron Maiden to represent the technological and virtuoistic pinnacle of modern guitar music. Deep and historic stories being told over the ambient throbbing and rumbling that is both foreboding and triumphant. And anyone who denies the supremacy of Bruce Dickinson's voice as it pierces the heavens quite actually knows very little about music, sorry to say.
When you can go into their inventory and find songs on all subjects from prehistoric man to an astronaut lost in the void to a fallen WWII soldier, you're not dealing with pimply-faced angsty teens anymore but magicians of the plucked string and story set to music.

I submit their excellent piece-de-resistance album "The Final Frontier" for serious consideration when the Grammys come around.

And Sabbath? Well, my first actual music ever. It was the summer betwixt 8th grade and freshman year and I received a copy of "Paranoid" to listen to on my little Hitachi cassette deck. My first rock and it was crunchy indeed.

Now that I'm older though, I can do without Ozzy's caterwauling. I think Sabbath should be Sabbath and Ozzy should be Ozzy and other than four or five damn good albums, it was a thing that needed to die. Try listening to "The Headless Cross" album or "The Devil You Know" if you don't agree.

What else do I listen to? Pachelbel's Canon, lots of world music, Sarah MacLachlan, Nightwish....and NO radio.

I've grown stuffy in my old age.

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