5 Songs — 211019 — Apropos
Hanging on still for something to change in the weather and break in our favour. Balance is a myth, and fate is not a zero sum game, but if all we have is hope, then surely we’ve an obligation to defend it.
Let’s see what the week brings, shall we?
Now, I tend to be generally disengaged from the tidal rushes of popular culture. All those programmes that you’ve fabricated the illusion of friendship through, dropping references and quoting lines with others to terraform common ground, I have pretty much skipped them all. I have always preferred to encounter music/literature/film/tv on my own terms so that I can meet it where the art and my understanding are at, free from the weight of peer pressure and water cooler (is that still a thing?) chat to arrive at my own experience.
If I am late to a party, and the cake is great, I will usually make an effort to work backward and forward to see what other things an artist/author/etc has made. For example, I bought Kid A the day it came out, having never listened to any of the earlier records, and explored them with a different starting point.
Criticism, as it’s usually done, is a painful exercise of the critic’s own predilections and ego-flexing. Not all criticism breaks that way, but it seems to be the established mode of working. When I comment on music, I do so with decades of study and experience, and fully comfortable with and aware of the fact that people can, do, and should love and appreciate disparate styles of music with none being more valuable than another.
When commenting on any other art form, I don’t have the vocabulary or comparative knowledge-base to capture what I mean in its entirety, so I generally steer clear of saying anything unless asked directly and in possession of a particular view. But at the start of this week, I want to break this unwritten and entirely within my head rule.
Very few things pique my interest. Maybe it’s depression, maybe it’s too long in academia, maybe it’s Maybelline. But I can listen to a hundred songs and only a handful will prompt me to listen again, or to explore further. The others aren’t necessarily bad, and I might even like them in the way one briefly smiles at a dog walking by. But I hold out for something special.
As I wrote previously, I made the decision not to go deep with any TV after LOST, and I have stood by this. Living in the UK has the benefit of running programmes in shorter series, so there are many I have watched, some I have enjoyed, but few that have sparked overt enthusiasm.
Giri/Haji is, 5 episodes in, one of the most interesting and expertly executed dramas I have ever seen on television. I won’t say anything else about it now, but it’s on iPlayer and if you have time to watch it, give it a whirl. It feels distinct, and I have greatly enjoyed the discovery (in contrast to recent discoveries written about).
Often, programmes feel as if they have simply changed the location and character names from other shows, but this is not that. Moreover, the characters are portrayed with such incredible skill that they all feel like people, rather than plot functions.
This week’s playlist is loosely tied to themes from the show. Longing for that which was never ours, which includes the past. As painted on a wall casually unharmed in a combustive action sequence, “Nothing Lasts Forever.”
- Time in a Bottle — by Jim Croce
- So Beautiful or So What — by Paul Simon
- Gold Guns Girls — by Metric
- (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano — by Sampha
- Everybody Has a Dream — by Billy Joel
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5UOc7htImpoXMYpC17xKPo?si=MSKMtD0oQ2u_i0ec_IL2ag
