Saturday, October 2, 2010

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill

Usually, when I think about the kind of music I like, I think it's indie-pop. Which makes sense, given that three of my four favorite bands and most of my other well-liked bands since I started listening to contemporary music as opposed to only classic rock have been indie-pop bands. Apart from indie-pop, I know I like Japanese soundtrack music (whether that's for anime or video games), and my other favorite band was Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. So that's another type of music I specifically think of myself as being fond of.

But some of the music I like doesn't quite fit into those categories (I often like to joke about how two songs I really like quite a lot are Enya's "Oronoco Flow" and Laibach's "Tanz mit Laibach," which are very clearly from different genres, neither of which is indie-pop or J-pop). One other genre that I'm clearly fond of is a certain kind of retro standard-esque music. The example that comes to mind here is Jenny Toomey's Tempting. I really like this album, and I suppose it qualifies as indie pop, but it's not at all the kind of indie pop I usually think of when I think of the term. Have a link to "Unionbusting," which isn't only a good song but also has fun lyrics :).

2 comments:

Lonin said...

Hmm... I didn't realize there was a specific moment for this, so, I'm going to ask: when was it that you started listening to contemporary music as opposed to only classic rock? I wonder if that's a phase I have yet to reach! (Although, inspired by reading your posts today, I *am* currently listening to Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?!)

Grace Mulligan said...

When I was fourteen. At the time, I had a subscription to Newsweek (I'd originally subscribed to Newsweek because we all had to for social studies in eighth grade, but I kept my subscription all throughout high school because I enjoyed reading a weekly news magazine more than reading a newspaper every day ;-), and they had an article about Cool Britannia and Britpop. This was also just about when I got my first TV in my room. So when I was procrastinating on homework, I used to flip through TV channels to see if anything interesting was on. At one point, I flipped to MTV or VH1 when the "Wonderwall" video was playing. It was quite obvious just from watching the video that someone had a John Lennon obsession, and when I saw that the video was actually by Oasis, whom I'd just been reading about in Newsweek, I decided I was interested in Britpop and willing to give contemporary pop a chance. After that I used to watch music videos as my way of procrastinating back before there was a web to procrastinate on. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I saw "Common People" and really fell in love with contemporary music, but music videos made up a large part of my high school experience.

Actually, I think I blogged about this once!