Musical gauntlets from the renegade Canadian

15 Aug 2005  in the early afternoon  Matt Winckler

Given my distinct opinions on (and general outlook toward) petty social memes, it would seem that my responding to one is contraindicated. However, in addition to being irreparably bigoted toward petty social memery, I am also pretentious, opinionated, and utterly full of hubris. Tim seems to recognize this fact, and he has therefore “tagged” me with some sort of viral musical memery, daring me to come up with something both “interesting” and “odd”. Being the most normal and well-adjusted person that I know, I anticipate that this will be a daunting task. However, the little brute of a memetic gauntlet is sitting there on the floor, sneering at me. If I don’t pick it up now, I’m bound to trip over it and do myself an injury sometime later. (And with my luck, the accident will occur at work, and who knows what will happen to me then.) So get ready, because now you’re going to see something you’ve almost never seen before, and the likes of which you may never see again. This is Matt: live, unedited, and uncultured.

A Pernicious and Droll Meme About My Musical Tastelessness

Or, “I Like At Least One Song by Sixpence None the Richer, and That Song Doesn’t Involve Kissing Anybody, Albeit It Does Involve Something About Hearts and Breathing People’s Names–I Like to Think It’s Symbolic”

By Matt Winckler, FMHE

Amount of music on my computer

139 songs, 9:59:02 total time, 556.4MB. And that does not include the Windows startup sound.

Currently listening to

• Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard: The Battle (Gladiator soundtrack)
• Hans Zimmer: Leave No Man Behind (Black Hawk Down soundtrack)
• Rachid Taha: Barra Barra (Black Hawk Down soundtrack) - barra barra, unh!
• Coldplay: Speed of Sound (single) - I purchased this because it sounds just like Clocks (which sounds just like eight of their other songs) but shaves off a good 20 seconds of mindless repetition. Besides, Coldplay the band consists entirely of Communist environmentalist wackos. (Just tell me this: what the aardvark do wooden houses have to do with making friends, anyway?) To summarize, I’m not sure exactly why I bought this song. I blame Oprah.
• Gustav Holst: Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity (The Planets, Op. 32) - Because we can always use more jollity around this place.

Five songs that mean a lot to me

What a happy-sappy question. What is this, the songs I’m supposed to mention on stage when I go up to receive my Grammy award or something? *wipes tears from eyes* “And I’d like to thank Buffalo Springfield, ’cause without For What It’s Worth, I wouldn’t be here! *sob* Yeah, man! *sniffle* *gag*“

And furthermore, why is it that below, I’m supposed to list “top 5 albums”, but here I’m supposed to list “Five songs that mean a lot to me”, and there is no place for “top 5 songs”? What if the songs that mean a lot to me happen to be utter detritus?

So then, given these unreasonable operating parameters, I guess I’d have to say:

1. Buffalo Springfield - For What It’s Worth (Buffalo Springfield) - crazy hippies! Nice harmony though. And I just can’t get past that great gittar pickin’. bwannnng………bwinnnng!
2. Sarah MacLachlan - World On Fire (Afterglow) - fire. yeah. Almost anything involving fire can make a top-5 list.
3. Rachid Taha - Barra Barra (Black Hawk Down soundtrack) - nnnh! I just can’t get enough of that Arabic rap. Yea, It moves me unto the very depths of my intellect. By Arabic rap do I set my coding fingers in motion. unh! I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s not really Arabic rap. But that sounds good, and the “genre” column in iTunes never means anything to me anyway. “Alternative”? Alternative to what? Ice cream? Arabic rap it is.
4. Simon & Garfunkel - Mrs. Robinson (The Best of S&G) - “Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon / Goin’ to the candidates’ debate / Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose / Every way you look at it you lose”
5. Harry Gregson-Williams - Ibelin (Kingdom of Heaven soundtrack) - actually, this is just on the list because if you use iTunes to set the stop time to 2:02 (instead of 2:05), and set “Crossfade playback” to 2 seconds, and then repeat this song only, you get an almost seamless infinitely looping track. That means a lot to me.

Top 5 Albums

I’m not sure I’ve ever bought five albums. Albums aren’t good; songs are good. That said, in very particular order:

1. Gladiator soundtrack (Hans Zimmer/Lisa Gerrard)
2. The Bourne Supremacy soundtrack (John Powell)
3. Gladiator soundtrack (Hans Zimmer/Lisa Gerrard)
4. The Hunt for Red October soundtrack (Basil Poledouris) (Not really; I’m just running out of full albums that I own and listen to)
5. The Bourne Supremacy soundtrack (John Powell)

And we’re done. There you go, interesting and odd all in one shot.

Bonus Track!

(because bonus tracks are very hip, yo)

I’m also a closet Enya fan (all Enya fans are of the closet variety; if anybody brings them out of the closet they cease to be Enya fans), but only on rainy Tuesdays. And I have a very particular place in my heart for Beethoven’s Adagio from the Moonlight Sonata, though obviously it does not touch me at quite the same depth as Buffalo Springfield. I also have a song by U2, which is pretty catchy, if a little vague. And of course that’s not to mention the lyrically brilliant Walkin’ on the Sun by Smash Mouth, without which no one’s music collection is complete. The second to last sentence of this paragraph may or may not be a barefaced lie.

Yes, that’s pretty much it. I obdurately refuse to “tag” anybody, because frankly, for the most part, I couldn’t care less what anybody else’s 5 most meaningful songs are, and even if I did care, I wouldn’t recognize the song names anyway. This meme dies with me!

*BLAM*

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