Savage Night at the Opera — Destroyer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfuDbWD_PIk

I used to play a game in the library, taking out CDs and ripping them to my laptop in middle school. I had gaps in my musical knowledge: I hadn't heard of most or any of the bands. So I'd take random CDs off the shelf and look at their album art, the band name, the name of the song, and I'd guess: folk or metal? Destroyer is a good example of the bands that would trip me up: they're called Destroyer, one point for metal. The album cover for Kaputt is minimalist, black and white, featuring a landscape, two points for folk. The songs on Kaputt are titled accordingly: Chinatown... maybe a movie reference? Gangsters and violence, possibly a point for metal? Blue Eyes, a point for folk. Savage Night at the Opera... savage is metal, but opera is folk. Nobody gets a point. Suicide Demo... two points for metal. Poor In Love, two points for folk. Kaputt, Downtown, Song for America, too close to call. Bay of Pigs... metal, probably. Impossible to call. Turns out to be neither.

I played this game with Thrice (I was sure it'd be metal, it's really alt-rock); I played it with Lightning Bolt — Hypermagic Mountain (I was sure it'd be folk, it's really noise-rock); I played it with My Morning Jacket (I was sure it'd be metal; it's really indie rock).

The lesson here is that thirteen-year-old James sucked at guessing genres.

Poor In Love — Destroyer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r2VXDLMHzE

I had a fleeting impression today, between trading albums. It was a tactile response to digital file handling; being able to feel by thickness how long an album was; being able to hand albums to someone, and by how gingerly or carelessly you tossed them there would be implications for how much you respected them, and how well you wanted them to care for the albums. And the albums would be tactile; you would put the ones you loved on your wall — a physical, tangible wall of a room, full of album covers — to show your changing tastes; you could literally rummage through the backs of shelves to find albums you'd forgotten. And they could be sorted and lost and traded, and you could get a sense of finished production: you'd have to put in effort to put on an album, and you'd sit down to listen to it. No more would music be background noise. It would be a form of entertainment. Listening would be enough: you could sit down and listen and maybe eat or drink something, but it would consume your attention.

I don't think CDs or records or cassette tapes were like this. I'm not looking to the past. But  I'm not happy with the way I think about and treat the music in my life, and writing about it begins to help.

In a very, very tangential way, that's what this song is about.