Happy Chinese New Year.
This post is about that CD. Or those CDs. Or, those songs.
This is about that set of music in your collection that doesn't get airplay because you played them out once in your lifetime. Maybe twice. You can't bear to get rid of them because, well, they brought back an entire era of your life back. Yet, for that very reason, it doesn't not rank high on the playlist. Who wants to always look back. Live moves forward after all.
This morning, as I was late for work again, I randomly picked a song to set the mood for the day as well as the 'getting ready' stage of my day. Ironically, I was humming some Dashboard Confessional, and I thought, "Hey! I recently got my hands on Remember To Breathe." So I played it.
Simply by loading Dashboard, the entire theory came into focus. There are too many songs. They fit in several categories:
1) All Time Greats - songs that should be at the fingertips. There should be like maybe 10-20 songs here. Among my songs, Wonderwall always stands up.
2) Dominant In An Era - Songs that you thought would be an all time great, but didn't stand the test of time. These are also the songs that bring you back to said era. - Dru Hill's How Deep Is Your Love For Me.
3) Situational - The Gym Song (D12 - Fight Music). The Running Song (Real McCoy - Runaway). The Basketball Song (The Game - This Is How We Do). The First Date Song (John Mayer - My Stupid Mouth). Etc etc. My favourite situational song: my Van Wilder song: Michelle Branch's You Got Me.
4) Current - The current hits that you hope make it to all time great, but you'd settle for dominant in the era. Right now, that song is Fat Joe's I Won't Tell
There are other categories. It's 1 AM. I only think of the theory. Fleshing it out and putting is on paper is hard. Let's call this The Song Categorization Theory.
I wonder why this happens. Some songs end up being timeless (U2's With Or Without you), others speak of a very specific time (Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby). The same song might mean different things to different people. Gwen Stefani's The Sweet Escape is my happy-go-lucky song while I know of very specific people who would gladly pay money, real money, to punch me in the face when they hear this song.
I KNOW this is why I have a song of the moment at the bottom of my blog. Going through the archives of previous generations of posts, I see that my musical tastes have changed, ebbed and flowed. Maybe it's a reflection of my personality. Maybe it's a reflection of my mood. Maybe I'm just too tired to comprehend what music means to me.
Hi-Tek has a great song called "Music For Life" (with an insane beat.. it has a flute!), where the artists try to express what music is to them.
Unbelievable. A post about songs that you love but don't listen to any more because a whole speech about what music means to me. Next post, I want to fine tune this whole music categorization.
Just because I can.
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Song Of The Moment: Chris Brown - With You
Comments: BET recently crowned him as music's #4 best dancer. And named James Brown 1 and MJ 2. And Janet #5. What kind of list is this. No list of this nature can have Michael Jackson at anything but #1. He brought us the moonwalk.
