Vintage

Leonard and the Lab Rats - Lonely Avenue MP3

All that we say and do has impact on the world and the people around us.

There is so much selfishness in our culture, and the true tragedy of it is that many people take pride in this selfishness.

Here's the argument I hear them make:

"I have to be myself and if it hurts other people or causes damage to the world around me, I'm not going to feel guilty about that."

Think of your favourite album, one that you've heard many times. Think about the intensity of the feelings you felt when you first heard that album. Now compare that to how you feel when you hear it the third, forth, or fiftieth time. It's different, isn't it?

Once we experience something, our perspective of the world forever changes.

I found a very interesting book called Stumbling on Happiness. Despite its title, it's not a self-help book. It's really a science book. The title promises something that its first chapter tells you it will not help you achieve. Here's an excerpt:

"Once we have an experience, we can't simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.... Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future. And like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the night stand when we find it convenient to do so. But like a pair of contacts that are forever fixed to our eyeballs with super glue.

Once we learn to read we can never again see letters as mere inky squiggles. Once we learn about free jazz we can never again hear Ornette Coleman's saxophone as a source of noise. Once we learn that Van Gogh was a mental patient or that Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite we can never again view their art in the same way."

Madeleine Peyroux's incredible version of Anjani's "Blue Alert" is now used in an Old Navy commercial for jeans. They have used a section of the song without the naughty parts though ("you even touch yourself, you're such a flirt!")

The commercial features a bunch of young teenagers doing silly teenager things in their skinny blue jeans. I'm hoping now that people will start googling "old navy jeans commercial music" and discover more of Madeleine Peyroux's music. Hopefully they will buy the CD rather than downloading it from bit-torrents. Her three last CDs are all well worth purchasing.

Our beloved jazz singer come pop star is now in the top 5 of Canadian Idol. Tara Oram was booted off the show this week and I for one will not miss her country twang. Do we really need another Shania Twain wanna-be?

At the end of the show Tara shouted "Country music is still alive!" Oh but if only country music didn't sound as it does today! Most of the country hits I've heard over the last several years are no different than Britney Spears, but with an accent. They're over-produced, over-compressed, banal and sappy. Maybe country music today needs its own Pavement or Nirvana: a band that will shake the genre up just like grunge and "alternative" did for rock & roll. If anyone knows of such a band, please inform me. I'd love to hear it.