Music Taste

A cold day in hell passed in a slow festival of music downloading. The question of what my taste in music is perplexes. Somehow I have come to determine that it is not far from that of David and Tally. That means that my tastes run from gay lounge, to gay club to New York socialite. Should one's tastes in music and fashion match? I think both radiate out from the mid-seventies for me. Those discussions about which decade best matches each person were always fun.

One could also just describe my tastes as tremendously pop or diva-obsessed. This means that I have listening to Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt, Shirley Bassey, Ann Margret, Edith Piaf, Patricia Kaas and Dalida, to name a few, for the last few years. As I mentioned before, I predictably like Pink Martini. I also continue to like some Chinese equivelants like Deng Lijun and Cai Qin. My favorite song of all time is Mary Hopkins' version of Those were the Days my Friend, which as it turns out, Adler also has on his ipod.

When it comes to rock, I have been listening to Aztec Camera, and 80s band, and the Yachts, definitely poppy. I just discovered a band called Curved Air from the 70s that is quite progressive and unrocky. I still listen to Bowie though only the album Station to Station and the song Life on Mars. Chinagirl never stops being a fitting soundtrack though I certainly didn't end up with a little one in the end, which I don't if it is yet. Sometimes I do wish that she was the end.

In terms of classical music, I am rarely in the mood to try to discover anything new, but I guess I listen to whatever is already in the collection without paying attention to what it is. There are the usual Mozart and Beethoven symphonies, the passions from Bach, and Wagner overtures. The only thing I particularly like in this field are Scarlotti harsichord sonatas.

I recently tried to experiment with 50 cent in honor of the reunion of Jeremiah, my childhood friend, my childhood friend whose career-driven sister appears in dreams of a more sexual nature (I wish she would just take care of me).. It makes me feel pretty cool to listen to it, especially when walking down 42nd street (or perhaps it redeems 42nd street). P.I.M.P. is a good song, mostly for the way that he raps "she liked me 'cause I was from New York" in the first fifty seconds. Listening to some other works like "Straight to Da Bank" drives in the point that this music is really middle class - probably not the correct term but I don't study intellectual history. It is all about money, objects and a base kind of ambition. There is nothing romantic about it, which makes it foreign. Still the arrangements are definitely very good and the words are clever, despite the unfortunate subject matter. I can at feel the feeling that makes people like this kind of music.

Anyway, I am eager to find new music. My main requirements are that it involves neither extensive use of electric guitar, especially hard or bouncey in any way, nor is especially "electronic" though I like pop music from the eighties that is kind of like that.