I like circles. That is, I like going in them. My hobbies are cyclical; when I get tired of something I just throw it in the back of my closet because I know I'll pull it out and start up again eventually. My appearance is cyclical; I go from short-haired femme to long-haired femme to short-haired androgyne and back to short-haired femme and start over. My moods are cyclical -- I'm ecstatic in spring, irritable in summer, despairing in winter but always ecstatic again by my birthday. I never stick with anything for more than a year or leave it behind for more than five years.
At the moment I'm engrossed in one of my periodic rediscoveries of the music I listened to in high school. I wasn't one of you teenage hipsters all knowing what's new and exciting; most of my listening material was appallingly corporate and jaw-droppingly unoriginal. But it was also good. It doesn't matter how many times I listen to my solitary, eponymous Elastica album, I don't get tired of it. The last ten years of new developments in angsty music have failed to convince me that A Boy Named Goo is not a masterpiece for the ages. And there's not a single R.E.M. album up to and including New Adventures in Hi-Fi that doesn't seem to me to be, by itself, sufficient justification for the invention of audio recording technology.
If something's so mainstream that nobody even thinks about it, and I'm going around praising it, does that make me one of those music snobs who'll only talk about music that nobody else is talking about?
No matter. At the moment what I can't stop listening to is Monster. I've had this CD for 9 years and every time I remember to put it back in my CD player it's better than it was the last time. The last song, You, is particularly knocking me off my feet. I once covered the walls of my bedroom in R.E.M. lyrics, but somehow I never thought to include this one even though it contains one of the most intriguing lines I've ever heard in what I think might sort of be a love song:
All my childhood toys with chew marks/
in your smile
Either you're simple, familiar, and brightly colored, or you're something I want to drag around everywhere, mutilate, and grow out of. It's either really sweet or really creepy and I honestly can't decide which.
Cool.
Posted by dianna at May 10, 2006 05:24 PM