A three-pointed ramble.

I tend to use song rating in iTunes, systematically. I use everything from 2 to 5 stars, with the majority getting 3 stars (about a quarter of my library, at the moment) and a lot getting 5 stars (about 1/6th at the moment, but hypothetically a lot of them belong in 4 star land, because of rating-reshuffle). A bit less than half my library is unrated, which is not really a rating in itself, but just means that they are... Pending rating.

I can understand the arguments against this kind of thing; that it's distressingly arbitrary, that it only works at a song level, even though some pieces can only be properly judged at an album level, that there's something denegrating about trying to encapsulate all the qualities of a song in a simple numerical rating system with limited range, that it's just too much bother, etc.

But I do use the ratings in a practical way. I tend to shuffle a lot, rather than listening to an album at the time, or even sticking to a genre. But I can't be arsed switching songs all the time, and there's a fair amount of bumf in my library (though I do try to clear it out), so when I'm, say, walking to or from uni, listening to my iPod, I often just stick on the 5 Star Playlist, on the expectation that nothing really dull or distressing will come up. It works pretty well. Also, when I'm playing Civilization or Team Fortress 2 or something, where I have music playing but can't switch to iTunes too easily, I find it handy to use Party Shuffle with the weighting for higher rating songs turned on.

Anyway, the point of all that dull backstory was mainly to say: The one song in my library that has had the greatest shift from not-so-fond to absolutely-loved has to be Fatal Flower Garden, from Andrew Bird's album The Swimming Hour. It's a rendition of an old, kinda creepy folk song (I've heard the version by... "Nelstone's Hawaiians," on Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music. It... Wasn't as good as Bird's version? The... Quality of recording equipment has improved?). This fact already makes it really stand out on The Swimming Hour, which, though it seems consciously written to span genres, is nonetheless largely marked by the kind of jazzy, swingy style that Bird has moved away from since Weather Systems.

When I first heard it, I'm pretty sure I gave it 2 stars. I honestly can't remember what I didn't like about it now. After I'd had it for a while... I distinctly remember sitting in Victoria Park one fine day when it came up on my iPod, and I gave it a real, close listen. Like, you know, focusing on it, rather than just letting it wash over me as I concentrate on not making an astoundingly dumb move in Freecell. And this led me to think: "wait, this song is actually really good." It jumped up to 4 stars. A movement of 2 stars in a single listen? Unheard of!

Over time, even as a few other tracks from The Swimming Hour, such How Indiscreet and Core And Rind, slowly shuddered downwards in the ratings, Fatal Flower Garden moved up to 5 stars. And just then I added it to my Loved tracks on Last.fm, which is like the pinnacle of musical accomplishment in my lame, complusively quantified world. I thought I'd added it ages ago, but apparently not.

Anyway, the moral of the story is... Sometimes I'd like to be one of those people who, upon hearing a song for the first time, knows how much he'll like it forever and always. I could thus feel confident that I haven't given up on a song that is secretly awesome. I could also feel confident that if I run around saying "Robyn Hitchcock is friggin' awesome!!" today, I won't find myself severely embaressed in a month or two. (Seriously though, Robyn Hitchcock is friggin' awesome.) Last.fm stands as a horrible testament to the regretable musical obsessions that I have harboured, and discardboured. Like, seriously, XTC: 2,399 plays? What was I, tone deaf? I mean, on some level I can still appreciate that they were a fairly original band, pretty good popsmiths, reasonably influential, and have a few almost-great songs. But they aren't 2,399 plays good.

On the other hand, I figure there's probably some merits to songs growing on me as well. Maybe this is just a secret suspicion that the degree to which I like a song like Fatal Flower Garden is currently greater than the degree to which I would like the same song in the alternate Possible World where I really liked the song the first time I heard it. Which doesn't clearly make sense. Also, in that Possible World, I can magically shoot chocolate flavoured rainbow-beams out of my eyes, so clearly I'm being ripped off over here.

The other moral of the story is that Fatal Flower Garden is an excellent song.

The final moral of the story is that this post was a bit of a ramble, wasn't it? Also, moral-of-the-stories probably shouldn't consist of questions... Should they?

I'm done here.

Blogging? My foot!

So I figured this might happen. I decide to start making more posts here for the first time in half a year... And then I start too high. I mean, I don't mean to suggest that that previous post was Earth-Shattering, and it's really just sometime that had, for some reason, been on my mind quite a bit of late (hey, I can't spend all my thinking time thinking Philosophy). But it was a pretty well-crafted post, reasonably well worded, edited, proof-read... I even put together that imagy thing. All up, the post probably took me, like, an hour. (An hour? Seems right, even though I loathe people who write "an historian"). But of course I can't keep up that pace. If I want to write here semi-regularly then I'll need to set my sights lower. I can't have a blindingly brilliant idea like that every few days.

So instead it's time to tell everyone what I did to my foot yesterday!

Basically, in the morning, my foot looked like this:


Then, by evening, it looked more like this:

So yeah, that hurt quite a bit.

Actually, those images aren't strictly accurate. Besides the fact that my feet aren't obsidian black, that my toeses aren't mere sticks, and that stars don't appear and become labelled as I wound myself, there is also the fact that my displaced extremities were in bandages by evening.

Anyway, it's looking much better now, thanks for asking.

The Kitsch Stewart Theory

I was recently advised to maybe consider updating my blog, so I thought this might be a good place to put forth a thesis I have recently been developing. It concerns Al Stewart.

Al Stewart is a singer/songwriter from... Oh, let's say... The 70s. He plays a guitar, or something. If you've had the misfortune to have heard of him at all, it was probably in connection to his big hit, Year Of The Cat.

I first heard (of) Al Stewart when some music blog or such mentioned his song Sirens Of Titan. "A song based on what is possibly my favourite book by my possibly favourite author, Kurt Vonnegut?" I mused, "this Al Stewart must be good times!" I got my ears on it, and... I mean, yeah. It's alright...

Okay, so I have to admit, I take a great amount of guilty pleasure from Al Stewart. Like, everything about him should be terrible; his annoying, calm, cultivated voice, his inoffensive melodies, his predictable, poppy songs, his mediocre lyrics and apparent utter lack of humour... But for some reason, I keep finding myself listening to Year Of The Cat, On The Border, Broadway Hotel, Apple Cider Re-Constitution, and, of course, Sirens Of Titan.

Check out that random lens flare!
Okay, so I admit I added one thing to this cover art, but it wasn't the lens flare.

Anyway, I was wondering today whether Al Stewart's mid-seventies work could be thought of as a kind of musical kitsch. Now I am no expert in the field of kitsch studies - I would tend to defer to my sister in this area - and so I have no idea of how original or unusual this thesis may be, but, without having a clear account of what it is to be kitsch, something about his songs scream kitschianity to me.

It is screamed by the all-too-smooth vocals, as they throw a sudden emotional plea into an inappropriate location:

"In the village where I grew up
Nothing seems the same.
Still you never see the change
From day to day!"

What exactly about the line "From day to day" calls for a sharp raise in pitch, increase in volume, and oddly sustained, vibratto singing? Who knows? But it sure has a nice effect.

Kitsch is screamed by the randomly tinkling piano thrown haphazardly into a song like Sirens Of Titan. Composing a song entirely based on a brilliant work of black comedy, and managing to make it neither black, nor comedic? This strikes me as a kind of demented kitsch genius.

Kitsch is screamed by the cloying sentimentality in a song like Year Of The Cat, the poetastic pretentiousness of a song like On The Border, the village-green nostalgia in a song like Modern Times... The overwhelming sense of bland inoffensiveness that permeates his oeuvre, at least from this particular era.

As often seems to be the case when I try to make a point in a blog post, I thought there was more to this idea when I started, but perhaps all I can ultimately say is that listening to his work creates a particular impression in me, an impression I associate with floral wallpaper, lawn gnomes, tiny plastic terrapins, babushka dolls, and ducks on the wall. I also see, on reflection, that he is perhaps not so unique in creating this impression, nor would he be the earliest musician to do so; The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society gives me much the same feeling, albeit with a lot less accompanying pleasure, guilty or otherwise.

As a final note, I feel compelled to raise the possibility that Al Stewart is perhaps not so terrible as I may be suggesting. After all, as Wikipedia tells me, some guy called Broch referred to kitsch as "the evil within the value-system of art." To see Al Stewart as aesthetically evil is probably just a bit harsh.

Perhaps, feeling, for whatever reason, that he is a guilty pleasure, I then feel the need to disassociate myself from the pleasure his music can give me, reason it away, broadcast my disapproval, paint myself as an innocent, captivated victim... But perhaps, rather, the best response would be, as I have long ago done with Elton John, to simply reevaluate the artist's genuine merit, assert the excellence of his popcraft, and remove all sense of guilt from the pleasure. After all, he did write a song about a Kurt Vonnegut book.