Five Song Friday: Open Your Ears
This Week: No Shirts, Happy Hip-Hop and Skimpy Sweets
If you listen hard enough you can hear music everywhere.
I’m not talking about the wild songs that float through the air from passing car stereos and slip out doors of shops and restaurants.
Or the music that greets you inside taxis and elevators. Or the window-rattling bass at stoplights. Or the muffled ear worms from the TikTok scroller at the far end of the couch.
That’s all audible leftovers. Scraps and crumbs from other people’s musical meals.
The good stuff I’m talking about doesn’t bother with formality. There is no play or pause. No rewind or download.
No beginning or end.
Listen hard and you can hear them everywhere, these secret combinations of rhythm and melody that happen by accident, in an instant, for an audience of one.
Songs are everywhere if you open your ears.
The world is always jamming.
They are compositions made of birds and noise and a hundred simultaneous conversations.
The tweet tweet of a crosswalk sign. A rolling bag clacking over gaps in the sidewalk. Dog barks and bell towers.
It’s easiest if you are in a new place and your senses are ignited by novelty. Even better if the language is unfamiliar, so that the simplest sentences sound like stanzas and lyrics.
Sit still and adjust your brain like a transistor radio searching for notes between the static.
Listen to the sounds you usually ignore. Take it all in and go where the “music” takes you.
Unless that “music” is all sirens and screaming, in which case you should probably go the opposite way.
I’d also be wary of any time carnival sounds mix with crying babies.
But you do you.
Full disclosure: I’m on a train in Spain.
I’m trying to write with my thumbs on my phone in a backwards-facing seat as we roll through the mountains.
There are lots of tunnels and cell service is spotty.
The conditions are not ideal for composing an email.
But it’s a lovely way to spend the day.
So if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to get back to gazing out the window and grooving on the sick beat this passenger coach is laying down.
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete
Five Song Friday 060
“Funk Off” - Big Boys
If you’re lucky, you learn something new every day. Today I learned that the Big Boys helped invent and introduce skate punk to the world. After forming in Austin in 1977, the boys went on to fuse funk and hardcore, resulting in a new genre that allowed Anthony Kiedis to spend most of his adult life without a shirt as the frontman for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Trailblazers!
“Everyday” - Tristesse Contemporaine
It has been said that this Paris trio “seized the hazes of shoegaze, krautrock and madchester to compose the soundtrack of an era lost in the night.” I didn’t say it, but somebody did and the way you can tell is because I put the words in quotation marks.
“My Girl” - Dafuniks, Kuku Agami
I was one of those silly white kids who glommed onto gangsta rap like it was the new punk rock. When I was 19, there was no bigger musical middle finger to “The Man” than tooling around in my shitty Honda, bobbing my big dumb head along with NWA’s Straight Out of Compton. But then I realized it was weird and maybe not culturally appropriate and then one band member released a solo album with a song that was basically a guy getting gun-murdered in an alley and begging for his life and gurgling blood and I was like, no thank you. So I sought out brighter, less homicidal hip-hop that sounded a lot like this upbeat track from the Danish MCs.
“I’m Not In Love” - Ber
You ever go to fancy pants restaurant and order dessert and feel ripped off because it’s so small? Me too! But here’s the thing, those places know what they’re doing. Just because the portion seems measly doesn’t mean a tiny tasty treat can’t satisfy your sweet tooth. Same goes for a itty bitty ditty like this. Pop confection perfection in just over 90 seconds.
“Rio” - Low Cut Connie
What can I tell you about Low Cut Connie that you don’t already know? If the answer is “everything,” please Google them because I’m due for a nap.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube Music
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
“If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.” ― Confucius