Year in Music 2010, part 1

[This post is split into two parts, for length. This is part one. Part two is here.]

The Year in Music 2010

This year was the year of the playlist. Many of my favorite songs came to my attention through character-themed playlists given to me by friends. It occurs to me that I don’t know how many of you do this sort of thing, or know what I’m talking about. A character playlist is when you like a character, or a relationship between characters, and you make a playlist to describe that person or relationship. I have found in the last few years that this is the best and easiest way for me to access new songs. The playlist aspect gives me an emotional hook — I listen to the song’s lyrics and apply them to a character I love. I end up feeling that I both know more about the character and also about the song.

This is because the part of music that I most listen to is the emotional story. That story can be in the repeating hook, or it can be in the verses, or the chorus. But I’m not listening to the musical complexity; I’m listening to the story. For a lot of rock tunes the story is … a little bit up to the listener’s discretion. It’s opaque. And for a lot of pop tunes the story is a little generic. In both cases, tying the song to a specific character give me a clearer image of what is happening. (This is also why I like music videos and vids.)

My 2009 in music

This is a personal list, a retrospective, not an attempt at a best-of. I can’t say that this was particularly a year of new music for me. Not in the sense that the music was produced or released in this year. (Well, some of it was.) But this is the music that moved me, that held me, that I fell into in 2009. (And, yes, those tactile metaphors are deliberate. Music-as-overwhelming-physical-sensation, that thing that makes me bang on the steering wheel as I drive to and from work, you know?)

beating like a hammer

1. I think my current favorite song is “Help I’m Alive” by the band Metric. (Title of this post is from that song.) Here’s the song on Blip.fm, I think. (If the links at Blip work the way I think they do, that is.)

2. The soundtrack for writing this next project is all my my Tegan and Sarah, Silversun Pickups, and Metric albums in a random mix. Beware the emotasticness! I think I found the plot engine in this setting I like, and I think I found the pov character. We’ll see.

3. I started watching the live-action version of Blood: The Last Vampire last night. I’ve seen the anime, and I recently read this Heroine Content review of the live action film. I don’t have a complete opinion yet, as I fell asleep before finishing the film, but so far it’s . . . . interesting. Like Skye at Heroine Content, I couldn’t get the anime out of my head. I was a little meh on some of the revisions made for the sake of streamlining. But, that said, I am really loving the actors. Particularly Colin Salmon. The special effects are, um, well-intentioned. A mix of classic puppetry and latex masks with computer-game-style cgi. They are not making the mistake of showing the latex-and-rubber monsters too much, thank goodness. But, even so, I applaud Allison Miller’s ability to look threatened by a wet rubber mask.

4. On Nancy_clue’s recommendation I bought and read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I really liked it, was grabbed by the character of Lisbeth Salander. (I know, I know. Predictable Sigrid is predictable.) It was interesting, though, reading a book in translation. This is not something I usually do. I spent a lot of brain cycles trying to figure out what the town and place references were telling me, that I was missing. What kind of suburb is that? What sort of neighborhood? Where is that town, again? What meaning, what cultural context, would natives of Sweden be getting from this book that I am missing? What do the clothing and furniture references mean? What do they say about the character that I am missing because I’m not from Sweden? Anyway, the book is good, the plot was interesting, and the characters fascinating. If you like slow, inexorable mystery-thrillers, I recommend it.

5. At my workplace, when we are on break, we can be paged back to the area if we are needed. The page is over a building-wide loudspeaker system. Pages are of the format, “Ellis, Sigrid Ellis, Area 4. Sigrid, Area 4.” It’s a practice among some controllers, though, in my area, of paging people back using the names of controllers who are no longer employed here and who were known for incompetence. So you get “Insult Name, real first name Insult Name, Area 4. Real first name, Area 4.” That’s just how we role, here in ZMP.