The Blind Dice-Thrower

For the past couple of years I seem to have become more and more addicted to music. Since I first realised how to get lots of it for free I've been collecting huge archives of songs of all kinds of different music. It never used to be so bad. I would get a new album or a few singles and listen to them and if I liked them I'd add them to my general playlist which would rotate songs randomly. Then I found methods to get more music, faster than I could really listen to it. So now I have a huge waiting list of music to listen to, and yet I'm still pre-occupied with adding to the list rather than listening to any of it.

I think my central reasoning is that what I'm doing is stocking up on resources that will last me throughout my life, and the opportunity to get it so easily may not always be available.

I've also begun to realise that the only reason I think I'm better than other people is to do with my musical taste. It isn't because I'm more intelligent or know more than them (which is usually true too), but because I have better musical taste. I'm tempted to think that musical taste is entirely subjective, that of course everybody thinks that they have good musical taste like they think they have a good sense of humour, and that therefore the evidence that you believe either of these ought to make you doubt them. Most people believe them and are wrong, so therefore my belief in the same is probably wrong too. But at the same time, I've never come across somebody who has the same attitude to me. I don't think that's because I'm particularly arrogant. I think it's more likely that most people don't claim to be better in virtue of their musical taste because they would admit that they had not really been very moved by music anyway. They're modest and they've got a lot to be modest about. If I came across somebody who shared my attitude then I would want to know what they'd been listening to in order to have such an attitude, and as a result I'd possibly discover new good music and have more justification for my own attitude.

One genre of music that I'm currently not very interested in is classical music. I suppose some sophisticats would instantly make disparaging remarks about my musical taste were they to learn that. I know a few classical pieces, a few names of pieces and a few names of composers but I think the only case where they all overlap is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I don't think I can identify the tune, composer and name of any other piece. I believe it's simply a mistake that classical music is superior to modern music, or even foundational to it. I'm mostly only interested in music that contains the two greatest instruments. Firstly, the guitar. It's just so much more versatile than a piano. You can get it to do far more. A piano is just a glorified drumkit. Secondly, there is no instrument that can express as much emotion as the human voice. and because it's so natural, there's nobody who can play any musical instrument as well as most people can sing. I think that people who prefer classical music to modern pop are probably quite emotionally stunted, to the point of solipsism.

One of my favourite quotes of Napoleon is the following:

"Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day."

I think he was probably influenced to say such a thing by reading the Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar, where the title character says:

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.
--Caesar [Julius Caesar 2.2.32-33]

A similar sentiment is expressed in this quote reported on the internet to belong to Marcus Aurelius:

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

However I am 90% certain that Aurelius never said this and that the above quote is a bastardised version of his opening paragraph of Book XII of the Meditations, which reads quite differently:

"If then, whatever the time may be when thou shalt be near to thy departure, neglecting everything else thou shalt respect only thy ruling faculty and the divinity within thee, and if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature - then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee, and thou wilt cease to be a stranger in thy native land, and to wonder at things which happen daily as if they were something unexpected, and to be dependent on this or that."

Whether he said the first quote or not, I like it and prefer it to what he actually said. But are any of these quotes right? Let's just make a brief analysis of them. They seem to be saying that bravery, valiance, risk-seeking, glory-seeking behaviour is a necessary virtue for a good life. The quotes are metaphorical, saying that to live without such a virtue is not to live at all; which we should understand as not living well. They remind me a little of Bertrand Russell's quote:

"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."

I'd like to think all the quotes are metaphorical, otherwise they are relatively de-humanising. It's quite a common sentiment in the world that such-and-such a person, lacking such-and-such virtue or property, isn't really living at all. Sometimes these statements are deliberately hyperbolic, for example if I were to say, "You haven't lived until you've tasted this chocolate cake!" I should interpret them as saying:

"Without glory, life is unfulfilling."

The majority of people lead inglorious lives, but seem reasonably satisfied with them, finding value in other virtues. Or perhaps they equate less significant victories in their lives with glorious victories. Where Napoleon fixates on events like Marengo and Austerlitz, maybe for your typical peasant such events as a marriage, child or even a successful party or work bonus counts as a glorious victory. Does Napoleon reserve the glory for himself and his subordinate generals, or for every soldier in his army, and by extension the citizens of France who share in their glory? I don't think he believes in any such thing as shared glory. While Napoleon may revel in his role at Marengo (which he probably and rightfully believes to be the most important role), other soldiers can revel in their own roles at Marengo. Certainly he would say that the private who fights heroically without credit has more glory than the general who commands badly but contingently ends up on the winning side, and is acknowledged as such in dispatches.

Glory cannot be bought or sold and only in a perfect world is it conjoined with credit. Some people would say that there's little to distinguish bravery from stupidity. As they say in the movies when the hero makes a rash and dangerous decision, "He's either very, very brave, or very, very stupid." And glory or death, the foci of our enquiry, are the most likely results of bravery. So if the equivalence of bravery and stupidity holds credence then we could define glory as either stupidity plus fortune or merit plus opportunity. As Napoleon also said, “Ability is of little account without opportunity.” Even the best need a little bit of luck, or they need to at least not be cursed. If we are elite then we are given two choices. We can play it safe, take few risks and expect to reside in upper mediocrity, or we can take the endless risks and have a chance to be the greatest. I don't think that any of the sources of the quotes ignore the non-elite. I believe they would argue that the non-elite can and should make the same risk to be greater than their talents deserve: to beat themselves. But I think the sources are specifically implying that if you are elite and choose to remain in mediocrity then you're the least virtuous. To pass up on a chance at greatness, no matter how small the chance, is despicable, since for most people there is no amount of opportunity that in conjunction with their ability will result in true glory.

Such a theory is hinted at in the episode of Red Dwarf, "The Inquisitor", that I've always found intriguing. In it, the Inquisitor is said to be an agent who lived until the end of the universe and somehow invented a time machine. He then decided that only he could give life a purpose by acting upon his theory of the virtuous life. So he goes back in time to every person who has ever lived and if their lives are deemed worthy they are allowed to remain actual. If not then he deletes them from actuality and they are replaced by one of their inactual counterparts. The intriguing part is that for every person he generates a psychological clone and has the clone judge the original. Each person judges themselves as to whether they succeeded enough in life given the ability and opportunity they were given. Both of those facts we regard as being pre-determined though, or at least they are out of our own control. So it seems unfair to judge somebody on two facts that were out of their control. There must be a third factor then, akin to effort. The question then becomes, given the abilities you were born with, and the opportunity (luck) that befell you, have you tried hard enough? What you have achieved ought to be a direct function of these three factors. Those who I think the sources condemn are those whose ability was abundant and who didn't take the necessary risks, didn't try hard enough to fulfill what they could have fulfilled. Even those who were technically rational, those who settled for upper mediocrity rather than take the gamble between greatness and absolute failure (death), are to be condemned. In fact those who died trying to achieve more than their ability, desire and luck could produce are often celebrated: people like Ned Kelly, Guy Fawkes, Donald Campbell, William Wallace, Harold Godwinsson, Hector and Achilles of the Iliad, the Red Baron and Wat Tyler. I'm tempted to include Admiral Nelson but it's possible that he achieved exactly what he wanted, including his death. Sometimes these people are more celebrated than those whose successes were absolute and still lived to tell the tale, like Churchill, Wellington, Odysseus, Thomas Cochrane and Marshal Bernadotte. Maybe it is because these people never experienced the sensation of ultimate sacrifice, even if they were more than prepared for it. Or maybe it is because we can't be sure that the successful ones really tried as hard as their limits allowed. They probably did but we can't be sure. Maybe Calzaghe and Mayweather each could have been regarded as the greatest boxer ever had they continued to fight. Ricky Hatton, who has been defeated once, might be thought to be probably more glorious by Napoleon because he fought a boxer beyond his ability, effort and luck, his ability was finally quantified and he would be judged to have put in more than an acceptable amount of effort to be the greatest.

It's also worth keeping in mind that three of the people these quotes are attributed to were emperors. That they were willing to risk everything to get to the top ought to tell you that they would have these sorts of opinions, and it suggests if anything that these opinions are the result of imbalanced mental states. Quite a lot of their possible counterparts that failed at an early stage we would probably mock as being rather silly people. These people would prefer to probably look rather silly than actually be unfulfilled and timid.

I haven't really got any further to working out whether these quotes are true. Such is the problem of ethics. There just aren't enough justified premises to make arguments with. Moore's Open Question Argument pretty much puts an end to any objective account of morality. All of these quotes appear to be merely expressions of the preferences of risk-seeking people. We're subjected to more aphorisms that express that attitude because history is filled with successful people who are far more likely to be naturally risk-seeking than not and who got the opportunity to say what they believe publicly, and even though the majority of common people do not share the attitude, they do share a respect for it, and a respect for the people who have it. So we enjoy the content of quotes like:

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees",

much more than we enjoy the content of quotes like:

"Better safe than sorry",

even if we really agree more with quotes like the latter. I suppose like most moral issues, any truth of the matter about whether these quotes are correct is down to personal preference, or they aren't even truth-apt. But they sound cool.

I don't get much traffic on this blog. Either the posts I write are too technical, not really interesting to anybody but me or not even that coherent. Sometimes all three. The reason I keep this blog is mainly so that I can re-read at a later point whatever I used to believe, and either mock it or use it to revise my own belief set. I also write down ideas I have here which I would otherwise forget about. Anyway here are some of the keywords that Blog.co.uk tell me that people use that link to my blog. I think they probably google these terms and end up here.

The most common term is "Life Tilt", a poker term expressing a mental state marked for its self-destructive nature, belief that the world is constantly conspiring against you, leading you to the delusional belief that you just don't care any more. Just fuck it. Fuck it all to hell. But of course you do care and hate yourself all the more for it. I don't know what would make somebody google "Life Tilt" . It could be to make themselves feel better about their current tilt by reading about somebody else's even worse life tilt. Unless you're Archie Karas there'll be somebody out there with a worse bad beat story than yours. By the way I have a tip for live tournament players who experience tilt. When you're knocked out, whether on a bad beat or not, you're perfectly entitled to walk away from the table in a bad mood. Shake your opponent's hand if they offer it, but you don't need to offer your own. Just get up and walk away and cool off for a bit: anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour. Then come back to the table and wish the person who knocked you out good luck (if they are still there), and your tilt should soon dissipate. In the heat of a knockout it's easy to hate your opponents with the deepest hate, but after a cooling off period you should be able to come back and wish them luck as a casual, neutral observer. You might even find yourself thinking, "Thank God I'm no longer involved in this complete madness."

The second most searched-for term is "naomi campbell evolutionary psychologists". This is followed by terms like "Keira Knightley" and "do men find keira knightley attractive?" and "the media's false beauty". Whoever came to my blog searching for those terms would have seen my entry entitled, The Popular But False Conception of Beauty. The main thing I regret about that entry was that I didn't make it clear enough that there are two conceptions of beauty. Ultimately, beauty is subjective. If you think it's beautiful then it is beautiful, I suppose. But I was mainly referring to human beauty from evolutionary game-theoretic perspective, i.e. not too dissimilar to Darwinian fitness. My point was that a lot of people, actually men and women, moreorless anybody who subscribes to some popular view about fashion, are deluded about what beauty is. They let small groups of people dictate to them what will make them more attractive to the opposite sex, and unfortunately these claims are mostly false.

I have a few searches about Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and The Odyssey which must link to my piece on The Odyssey and Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, probably one of the better or more accessible entries in this blog. Somebody asked, "are the sirens in the rime of the ancient mariner", so maybe it is quite common to compare the two, although I had never heard of such a thing prior to my study of Ancient Mariner.

The next most searched-for term is on Marshal Bernadotte, a subject I seemed to have quite little to say about. I'm still of the opinion nowadays that Bernadotte has done more than most to protect his bloodline, and that he is perhaps a greater paragon of meritocracy than Napoleon himself. Of all the marshals and their Emperor though I probably idolise Marshal Ney more than any of the others. One of my greatest fascinations in life is with the concept of chance, and more specifically: luck. Ney simply has to be one of the luckiest people to ever live. I have always had this strange (admittedly irrational) idea that being lucky is better than being good. I sometimes fear that I might die in some bizarre, slightly hilarious way that no person could ever reasonably hope to avoid, like being struck by falling masonry or randomly killed in an armed robbery. When I read articles about people who die through no fault of their own I cannot help but think that they just fail at life. I have a guilty chuckle that everything they ever did was a waste. Their diet was a waste because they were going to die a week later anyway. Their studies were a waste. They could have enjoyed themselves but instead they invested foolishly in their own non-futures. I feel like a dick for thinking this way, but I can't really help it, and I fear the same thing happening to me.

Of course Ney was both good and lucky, probably the best and the luckiest. He fought in over one hundred battles, usually leading from the front. He was wounded in quite a lot of the battles he fought in, but somehow the enemy never managed to keep him down. He commanded the rearguard action of the Grand Army on its retreat from Moscow. When he left Moscow he had something like 20,000 soldiers in his corps but by the time he reached Kovno it was less than 200. Some people even say that it was just him. There's a story, probably false, about how he entered an inn and told General Dumas that he was all that was left of the rearguard. Several times his band of survivors were totally surrounded by the enemy, he was ambushed at virtually every location he possibly could be, and they still never got him.

But that's not even the most astounding story of his survival. At Waterloo, it is reported, he personally led the French cavalry charge that resulted in Napoleon's defeat. He is said to have charged the British squares between ten and twenty times, unsuccessfully. He is also said to have had about 5 horses shot from underneath him during the battle. British marksmen were trained to shoot specifically at officers, and he was the most conspicuous person on the battlefield, so I don;t understand how he survived that. What I understand even less is that he was apparently at the head of the Old Guard when they advanced on the last military orders Napoleon would ever give. From what I know, Ney was at the front of the column, and it's also widely believed that the column was ripped to shreds by infantry fire, particularly at the front. How did he survive that? When the Old Guard retreated Ney was left in one of the three remaining squares that refused to surrender. The British were swarming all over them and somehow he escaped. One story states that one of the squares was surrounded by British who ordered the French to surrender and give up their arms, to which their general replied "The Guard dies, it does not surrender!" Ney, suicidally distraught at this point, with a blackened face and uniform destroyed by bulletholes, managed to stumble back to his own lines evading capture. One quote of Napoleon that I've been thinking about recently is the line, "Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day." I wonder sometimes whether I agree with this. If I do then it's not something I agree with enough to live by.

The fourth most searched for term is "nietzsche fail". That's quite a comical thought and I don't know why anybody would search for it. "Fail" is a concept, as I understand it, that is quite new and mainly exists only on the internet. It can be summed up by funny pictures like this, always with the appropriate "fail"-related caption.

I find the concept of "Nietzsche fail" quite funny, although not necessarily appropriate in most contexts.

But the weirdest keyword anybody has used to find my blog has been "Horse Ejaculates". They must have got to my entry on RPT. I also have a strange number of keywords based around Steeleye Span tabs. I don't know why because I don't think there are any on the blog. This anti-climactic technique of finishing an entry without a conclusion is probably the fourth reason as to why this blog isn't a very good blog.

I know it's February 2009 already, but this took me so long to write that I have only just finished it.

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Earlier in the year [2008] I made a post about my favourite songs of the year so far. Most of those songs were not actually released in 2008. It’s just that I first heard them in 2008. Therefore that post and also this post are fairly meaningless to anybody except me.

Overall I think that 2008 has been a record-breaking year for me discovering new music. It seems that I have nearly doubled the size of my library this year, although there are quite a few dud songs that I have collected, and many I have not yet listened to. In real terms I think that I have added about 25% to my library. I’ll have a look through my media player and see what new music I discovered each month of the year.

January

This seems so long ago now. I got Sonic Boom 6, Karine Polwart and Serj Tankian for Christmas last year. Sonic Boom 6 was considerably the best of those albums and showed a great degree of progression from their first and second albums. Arcade Perfect seems to have a classic song from every single genre of music on it. It’s deeply surprising that they are capable of making such good music at such young ages. They still have probably the best lyrical content I have heard from any band or musician as well. I believe that they are probably the most promising band of the future, anywhere in the world. I missed their last tour but they tour often, and I’m confident that they will make it in the world and achieve the success that so many of my favourite little bands have not managed.

Serj Tankian’s album took a while to grow on me, and is definitely inferior to any System Of A Down album. There really is a lack of Daron on it, and it seems that when Serj is on his own he resorts to some pretty absurd lyrics. I don’t usually care much for lyrics, but this is one of those albums where I think the artist thinks lyrics can make up for imperfect music.

I remember that in the run-up to Christmas I visited a record shop for the first time in quite a while. It was there that I bought compilation albums of Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention and the Dubliners. The former two bands I already knew a fair amount about as I had listened to them throughout my life, although I had not heard most of their songs. These two CDs gave me the opportunity to re-discover some of their best material and hear some of the music they made from other periods in their careers. My parents only really listened to these bands between 1970 and 1980 so there is a large amount of later material I also needed to listen to. The Dubliners were almost new to me, having not heard any of their recordings for many years. A few of their songs came immediately back to me, like Rocky Road to Dublin and Seven Drunken Nights. Who could forget those? They are now one of my favourite bands, and this purchase inspired me to get back into Irish music. At the record store I saw other compilation albums by Dolly Parton and Joan Baez, both singers who I previously had heard very little of but who would be important members of my new-for-2008 library in later months.

Also during January I discovered the website http://www.pondlifestudios.com/ and downloaded all of the free mp3s I could find there. (You can also get all of Martha Tilston's RopeSwing album there for free. I strongly recommend you go there and get it as it is a lovely piece of work.) They have a wide range of small folk bands (although some don’t resemble folk that much) and I found some really good songs on there which could provide me with opportunities at a later date to find excellent music. Some of my favourite bands and music from the site were Hearth, Emily Barker, Sarah Curtis, PinknRuby and Mouse (Martha Tilston’s old band. She is how I found the website in the first place).

February and March

February and March were most notable for Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, two fairly different American folk singers. The only songs I had ever heard either of them sing were Big Yellow Taxi and Free Man in Paris. I think that Baez has a better voice than Mitchell, and she is still going strong too. I’ve heard Mitchell sing quite recently and she seems to have lost her fine voice, whereas Baez is almost identical to how she sang in her twenties. However, I feel that Mitchell often sings more beautifully and with greater feeling and emotion. I think that her album, Blue, is one of the best albums I have ever heard, just jam-packed with classics. My particular favourites are A Case Of You and California. My favourite Joan Baez song is by far Diamonds and Rust, which I have learned to play on guitar and might be my highest-played song of the year. I also realise that I prefer every single one of Bob Dylan’s songs when they are sung by Joan Baez, particularly Boots of Spanish Leather, which is a brilliant song when she sings it, and a boring monotonic sermon when Dylan sings it.

I also first heard of Kristin Hersh during February, an American new folk singer. I can’t say that she is that great, and I find a lot of her songs depressing and her voice sometimes gets a bit grating. Still, she is a worthy addition to my library. I also heard Foo Fighters latest album. It’s not quite as good as their previous albums, but they are certainly one of the best bands in the world nowadays, and I think they probably beat Nirvana on every criterion of quality now. Even Nirvana’s absolutely classic tracks like Lithium, Smells Like Teen Spirit and Rape Me are matched and bettered by songs like Everlong, My Hero and Best of You. Alanis Morissette’s live album, MTV Unplugged, was worth getting just for live versions of the songs from Jagged Little Pill, one of the greatest albums of all time. I think that Alanis is a brilliant songwriter and singer and continues to write good music, but could never hope to match Jagged Little Pill again. I think it is probably my second favourite ever album by a female vocalist, after Liege & Leif.

I should also mention again The Dubliners here. What’s strange about The Dubliners is that nowadays you can only really get their music by getting compilations, but at the same time they have many compilations which don’t usually overlap with any songs. I have no idea where these songs originally came out, or when. It’s impossible really for me to compare Dubliners songs with songs of most of my favourite musicians, simply because they are so different. These are the sorts of songs that you find it difficult not to sing along to, and they improve significantly when performed live, with the whole crowd singing and clapping along. Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew might be the best performers of Irish music of all time. When Ronnie died this year a whole era came to an end. I never really expected to attend one of his gigs anyway as he was already quite old, but I have enjoyed over the year watching videos of the Dubliners throughout their careers performing songs like Black Velvet Band, Whiskey In The Jar and Seven Drunken Nights. I think his death was the most significant to me of 2008.

April and May

I’m not sure how I first heard about Dropkick Murphys. They were definitely a band that I was faintly aware of, without hearing any of their songs. A few months before I had seen the film, The Departed, which featured the song, Shipping Up To Boston. I listened to all of the Dropkick Murphys albums simultaneously, but especially that one song, which is one of my favourites of the year. Dropkick Murphys represent a link between folk bands like the Dubliners, and the rock music I am more used to. Their versions of songs like Rocky Road to Dublin, Finnegans Wake and Lannigan’s Ball are exemplary, and Dropkicks are probably the most important modern band I have discovered this year. Hopefully I shall see them perform live one day.

Other notable new bands I heard in April and May include Rodrigo y Gabriela, Eva Cassidy and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Rodrigo y Gabriela are a two-piece band that don’t sing. I actually prefer them not to sing because their acoustic playing is so beautiful that it would be spoilt if anything were added to it. Their version of Stairway to Heaven is in the same league as the original. (I was tempted to say it was better!) I also heard Eva Cassidy during this month, who has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. I’ve realized recently that some singers have good, aesthetically pleasing voices and some singers have the ability to express intense meaning and beauty, but very few have both. Eva Cassidy is one of the few that has both in spades. I’m not sure if she is technically better than Sandy Denny, but I think she is a close second to her overall. Fields of Gold and Over The Rainbow are her best songs I think. If she could write as well as Sandy Denny then she would be a serious contender for my favourite musician of all time. I had already heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs before several years ago, but didn’t bother to investigate them any further until now. I had previously considered their most famous song, Date With The Night, to be quite annoying when it first came out. Now it has grown on me quite severely, and their two albums are definitely highlights of my year. They have a youthful and exciting personality, and I always like a fast song, which most of theirs are. Prior to May I had only considered Maps, their slowest song, to be good, but now I rate songs like Phenomena and Pin higher. They’re definitely a band I look forward to hearing more from in the future.

June

This might have been my most active month, musically. I set myself the challenge of collecting all of the albums of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. I’m not sure if I managed that because I was overwhelemed with albums as they probably have about thirty in total. I haven’t listened to them all yet, and I suspect that each band has a few “dud” albums, but I was definitely surprised to find that they have good albums from both ends of their careers. I re-discovered many more Steeleye Span songs that I hadn’t heard in many years, like Rosebud in June, Saucy Sailor, Weary Cutters, Elfin, Demon Lover, Searching for Lambs and Betsy Bell and Mary Gray. To re-discover a song that you last heard when you were four or five years old is a truly brilliantly nostalgic experience. It’s like re-opening a door in your mind that has been shut for years and years that you didn’t ever notice has been shut at all. I told my father that I only recognized about half of the songs on one album, Tempted and Tried, that it appeared to have one half consisting of forgotten gems, and a second half that seemed plainly new to me. He replied that the effect was probably due to the fact that when he first got that album, he only liked the first half and I ended up only hearing the first half on it that he copied onto cassette tapes to play in the car on holidays. I was also delighted to hear more early songs that feature Sandy Denny, on albums like Unhalfbricking and What We Did On Our Holidays. Although neither is as good as Liege and Leif, one can still recognize that the combination of Nicol, Thompson and Denny makes an extremely talented band. Some say that Liege and Leif is so inexplicably good because of the very short-lived line-up that featured on the album, but the other alums that feature Thompson, Denny and Nicol are also very worth listening to. It turns out that Fairport Convention and then Steeleye Span are the two bands I have listened to the most this year, followed by Joan Baez, so these two months were surely the most influential of the year for me.

Two other musicians I listened to in June were Dolly Parton and Bob Marley. I don’t think I listened to a single song written in the last decade in June. Like Steeleye Span I had heard Bob Marley during my youth as we would sometimes listen to him in the car too, usually whenever my mother was not present. Dolly Parton however, besides the classic song, 9 to 5, was very new to me. A couple of years ago I heard Jolene on a jukebox in the pub and asked somebody who it was. Since then I’d had her in the back of my mind and finally decided to get more of her material. Jolene is still my favourite song of hers, but it’s closely followed by I Will Always Love You and Why’d You Come In Here Looking Like That? Dolly Parton’s is not like any music I’ve ever listened to before, more resembling pop music than folk music. She does have an astounding, unique voice and enthusiasm, which are always a great combination. I much prefer her version of I Will Always Love You to Whitney Houston’s version. Houston might have a technically better voice, but there is no feeling behind it like there is with Dolly.

July

During this month I discovered two new ways of getting music. Firstly I found some software that lets you download music off Youtube, with the disadvantage that the recording is in mono. Secondly, a friend taught me how to use Google to find websites where people have uploaded mp3s. Suddenly a huge archive of potential music opened up, much quicker to download than using torrent software. I don’t even know if it’s illegal or not. (PM me if you want to know the method, or the website with 2000 classic tracks on it) Using this method I found a lot of recent pop songs and classic rock songs like The Beatles and Rolling Stones. Typically it’s much easier to find music from more famous bands as it’s more likely that somebody has uploaded them but you do occasionally find rarities as well. Using this method I searched for a few bands that I was moderately acquainted with in order to once again expand my musical horizons. I listened to albums by Kate Rusby, All About Eve, cKy and Pendulum. Of these I think that cKy have the best potential, and probably win the award for the band I discovered this year with the best average quality of track, as they have some real classics spread over several albums.

Two other significant events from this month included my first gig in a while, seeing Cerys Matthews at the Glee Club in Birmingham and my discovery of a talented singer-songwriter on YouTube. It had been nearly ten years since I had first and last seen Cerys, when she was singing with Catatonia. Since their break-up I had listened to her first album, Cock-A-Hoop, but not really liked it and considered the matter closed, especially as her voice had deteriated probably due to her drug and alcohol binges that saw her quit Catatonia. I also didn’t much like the country and western sound of her album. After seeing her in Birmingham I was glad to discover that she had gone down the path of more traditional British folk music, and was also playing some old Catatonia songs with a good band. Her voice was also better even than I remember it from the early days of Catatonia, so she has definitely re-emerged for me as a future talent. Secondly, while on YouTube I discovered an American girl singing covers of some songs and performing her own songs under the name, Ignore The Sun. I thought they were good enough to justify buying her album for $5 or so, which she was kind enough to post for free!

This was also the month that I returned home so I got the opportunity to listen to more of my parents’ music that I previously had not bothered with, like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, David Gray, Leonard Cohen and Donovan’s Sunshine Superman album. It was here that I realized that I much prefer Joan Baez to Bob Dylan. I also managed to convert the multi-album, The Clash on Broadway, which a friend had given me in a strange format, so I got to listen to it. It’s still one of those albums that I need to listen to again when I have the opportunity, but sounds promising.

August and September

This period was probably the slowest for me musically this year, as I spent most of my time writing my dissertation and exercising for a bet. In August, Brody Dalle’s new band, Spinnerette, finally released their first track and gave a preview on their website of their upcoming album, which sounds pretty good and I will look forward to in 2009.

For the second year in a row I went to the Moseley Folk Music Festival which is held over three days very near to me. Like last year I only went to one day, and this time it rained all day which was fairly unpleasant. Last year I saw Fairport Convention here which turned out to be my most-listened band of 2008, and I also first heard Martha Tilston, one of my favourite current singers. This year I saw John Tams playing and first heard Ruth Notman. I don’t think she’s quite as promising as Martha Tilston but she definitely has potential.

October

This was another reasonably slow month for me as I was out looking for a job for most of it. I decided to investigate the world of girl power and listened to the Spice Girls and Girls Aloud. I had been watching X Factor so was probably a bit more open to pop music than I usually am. I only listened to their best-of albums, and the Spice Girls one was reasonably enjoyable as they were the group that was most well-known about a year or two before I began to develop my own musical taste. I found a lot of Girls Aloud songs annoying. It seems to me that none of them have good singing voices but when they sing together they sound alright.

I happened to be watching late night TV this month and saw Jeff Beck playing with a band live at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. I had previously heard Jeff Beck on Jools Holland but only now did I begin to “get it”. He played alongside Eric Clapton for one song and I realized that I don’t much care for Clapton whereas I do for Beck. I suspect that Clapton is slightly technically better but his playing doesn’t sound as good. Jeff Beck seems to play exactly what you want him to play as you’re listening to the song, as if he’s reading your mind and translating your vague mental notes into real musical notes.

My third discovery this month was the Irish folk singer Noel Murphy. I had bought my father a best-of album of his for his birthday and listened to it myself and found it to be high quality stuff. He manages to combine comedy with sincere feeling on many of his songs, but unfortunately for me he has now stopped performing live.

November

This was the one month that I added more to my library than probably most of the rest of the year put together. I remember vividly that one day I had heard Smokey Robinson’s song, Tears of A Clown on the radio during the day. Thankfully we now have a digital radio as I wouldn’t have known who it was otherwise. I went online and used my Google-searching method to look for the mp3 of the song and to my delight found a website that purported to contain the 2000 best tracks prior to the year 2000. Apparently a Dutch radio station had played all of these songs in the run-up to the end of the millennium and somebody had uploaded every single one onto a website, which I had now found. A few of the tracks were rubbish Dutch and European ones, but at least 1500 of them make up the bulk of Western rock and pop music since the 1950’s. A lot of the songs were incorrectly labeled, which will take me a few hours of work at some point in 2009, as well as a lot of listening hours. There’s so many of them that I can imagine not having listened to them all into 2010.

Throughout the rest of November I listened to three of the most different female singers imaginable. I had heard Katy Perry’s song, I Kissed A girl, on the radio and quite liked it, so got her album, One Of The Boys. As far as I can tell it’s the best album of the year (i.e. one that was actually released this year), and really the only good new music I heard in 2008. Her voice isn’t fantastic, but she has a personality that only a very attractive girl could have (much like Sarah Silverman), that makes the album fun to listen to, with lots of killer riffs that sets Pop-Rock apart from Pop and rock.

I was reading the BBC news website one day and came across an article saying that a female Columbian singer had died recently, Yma Sumac. I am of the disposition that if I hear about a semi-famous female singer who I have never previously heard about, I usually research them to find out if they are any good. I got hold of her best-of album and listened to it and was taken aback. She has one of the strangest operatic voices I have ever heard, and is capable of singing very deeply and very highly. Sometimes she sings so high that she sounds like she’s whistling, like on the song Virgenes del Sol. It’s hard to describe her style but I could correctly call it “old-fashioned”, sounding like it came from the 1920’s but that is typical of underdeveloped countries like Columbia.

Thirdly I decided it was time to invest in some more albums by Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley and Imagine, the former of which contains her cover of Sandy Denny’s most famous song, Who Knows Where The Time Goes? I definitely prefer Sandy’s version.

Also during November I saw Leonard Cohen at the Birmingham N.E.C, one of the best gigs I’ve ever witnessed, which is strange as his music really is not the sort of thing I usually listen to.

December

At some point at the start of this month I looked at my profile on http://www.Last.fm : a website that tracks what music you listen to on your computer, and checked out some of the recommendations of bands based on the bands I listen to. This is definitely a resource I plan on using more often as I can look at it and tell quite early on that some of the bands I would like. Two bands on my front page that I had never even heard of before were 7 Year Bitch and The Gits. Apparently they were both loosely connected to the Riot Girl movement in the early 90s in America. First I listened to an album by 7 Year Bitch and quite liked it. They reminded me a lot of Bitch Alert and Hole. One song stands out, M.I.A, about the singer of The Gits, Mia Zapata, who at the time of the recording had been recently murdered and nobody had been prosecuted and the case was thought to be closed. Later on somebody was caught and later given a life sentence. With this knowledge I began listening to The Gits and soon enough genuinely regretted the death of Mia, who is clearly a talented singer and songwriter. Three times this year I have discovered brilliant singers as a result of hearing about their deaths: Eva Cassidy, Yma Sumac and Mia Zapata. I suppose that’s part of life and I shouldn’t read much into it, but there’s definitely a different experience involved in listening to a singer who you know to be dead: that’s certainly the case with Eva Cassidy who became world-famous after her death was reported, and it’s eery listening to The Gits knowing that their effervescent, strong-voiced and feminist singer, Mia, was later raped and murdered in a random attack in the middle of the street.

Another discovery I made before Christmas was Sandy Denny’s album, Borrowed Thyme, a group of home recordings and demos that were never released on any album. In many cases the quality is quite bad on them, but they are so worth listening to because they are from the early portion of her career when her voice was at its peak. Sandy’s voice, at its peak, is the best voice that has ever been sung, as far as I know. Even if the songs are hard to hear, or inferior to songs that later were recorded, the passion with which they are sung is phenomenal and they are worth listening to just for that reason. I have lately come to realise that Sandy Denny is my favourite artist in any sense of the word. She has both the vision and ability to express any emotion. She is the David Lewis of art. This also brings me onto Fotheringay 2. I already made a post about a month ago about this album so I went say much about it here except that it was the musical highlight of the year. Just to hear newly-released material from Fotheringay is a bloody miracle. I wonder if they actually hold the record for longest length of time between album releases with 34 years.

The final CD I listened to before the end of the year was Martha Tilston’s latest album, Of Milkmaids and Architects. it had actually been out for about a year before I got hold of it, but last year was a busy musical year for me and I only just managed to get hold of it. She is probably the best folk musician I know of who is currently writing music, followed by Karine Polwart. There’s something about her that is very spiritual (I never use that word). She has music in her blood, as her father is quite a famous folk singer too. You get the impression from listening to her that she would be writing and singing professionally even if she was deeply unpopular. The thing is I actually don’t rate her voice that highly. In terms of pure vocal ability she pails in comparison to the Dennys, Corrs and Baezes of this world. Her voice breaks on nearly every line. In that sense she’s very much like Janis Joplin. She’s not just using her voice to express deep beauty but breaking through her parameters and explicitly demonstrating what she wishes to convey. She isn’t at all limited by her voice which makes her one of my favourite modern singers.

I think if I were to rate my favourite albums of this year (i.e. non-compilations) they would be:

1. Sonic Boom 6- Arcade Perfect
2. Joni Mitchell- Blue
3. Eva Cassidy- Songbird
4. Fotheringay 2
5. Martha Tilston- Of Milkmaids and Architects
6. cKy- Infiltrate Destroy Rebuild
7. Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Fever To Tell
8. Dropkick Murphys- The Meanest Of Times
9. Katy Perry- One Of The Boys.
10. 7 Year Bitch- Viva Zapata!

Apparently the bands and musicians I have listened to most in 2008 are the following:

1. Fairport Convention
2. Steeleye Span
3. Joan Baez
4. R.E.M.
5. Dropkick Murphys
6. Sandy Denny
7. The Dubliners
8. Green Day
9. Donovan
10. Karine Polwart
11. Joni Mitchell
12. System of A Down
13. The Gits
14. Manic Street Preachers
15. Hundred Reasons
16. Catatonia
17. Foo Fighters
18. Bitch Alert
19. Kristin Hersh
20. Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Before I conclude this piece I have to say a farewell to several people and bands in 2008. Firstly, Hell Is For Heroes split up. I saw their last British gig in December. I have to say it wasn’t that good. The fans didn’t really get into it until the last song when they realised that if there was a time to mosh it was now. HIFH should be noted for their truly incredible first album, The Neon Handshake, and their absolutely electrifying live shows when they were touring it. So their latest album and their final tour was definitely a massive upset. I will miss them, but I think they may have always been destined to bring out one breath-taking album and fade away thereafter.

In other news, I think that Bitch Alert broke up. I can’t say for sure but they haven’t toured, even in Finland, for about 18 months now and their website has become idle. They might be back but I doubt it, because they have always been a small band and they just can’t survive out there. They are probably the most consistent band I have ever known; the only band with three albums in my all time top 20.

2008 saw the deaths of Ronnie Drew and Yma Sumac. The second one is a bit bittersweet for me because had I not heard of her death I wouldn’t have heard of her anyway. Ronnie Drew lived a long life, entertained many, many people and will be remembered as a folk hero.

So what does 2009 have in store? Well I currently have a re-mix album of SB6’s Arcade Perfect which I haven’t listened to yet. Some people would be cynical of a band that releases its album twice with the songs re-mixed, but I know for a fact that they wouldn’t have released it unless it was brilliant, and I’m saving it for some point in 2009. They’re also the sort of band that could have a new album before the end of 2009.

At some point this year I’m expecting Courtney Love’s new album to come out. I quite liked her first and all of her Hole material, but I don’t know what to expect from this one. As far as I know she’s gone quite acoustic so it might have potential. Some of her other acoustic songs are brilliant but I think she does work better thrashing around and screaming, so we’ll have to see.

I’m also expecting Melissa Auf der Maur’s new album this year which has been about 6 years since the last one. I have no idea what to expect from it. Spinnerette, Brody Dalle’s new band, are also releasing an album this year. I heard a short clip of all the tracks on the album and it sounds good, although it’s hard to tell when you hear about ten songs in one minute.

There’s a possibility that My Vitriol will release their second album this year. It’s been nearly ten years since their first album so we’ve been waiting a long, long time for it. Their first album is one of my favourites of all time so I just don’t expect them to match it at all. I could be pleasantly surprised though.

I’m not sure who else will have records out this year. Hundred Reasons? No Doubt? Green Day, possibly? Karine Polwart might. If 2009 is anything like 2008 then in a year’s time I’ll be writing a review of the music of 2009 without any of these names in it but with a lot of names of people I currently have never even heard of. That’s why life is worth living.