(April 4, 2013 at 12:07 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Well I don't know music. Haven't really listened to it aside from games and movies.
What are some good songs people recommend?
I want to give a bit more in-depth reply now. Music sets a mood, as you are likely well aware of if your primary exposure to it is movies and games. I like to treat music as a purely sensory experience most of the time, but I also enjoy figuring out why I like what I like. I don't see it as a logical exercise as much as an emotional one.
Straight Outta Compton's lyrics are a stereotypical look inside the mind of a young urban minority, filled with anger at authority, anger at women, anger at the self. But the voices seethe with a rage that makes it one of my favorite rap songs, though I admit I'm not much of a proponent of rap. The rage gives it an emotional push that the lyrics cannot.
Natalie Merchant has an extraordinary vocal range, and any of the early albums by 10,000 Maniacs are a showcase of her skills. The lyrics are clear and the music is kept fairly simple, because her voice carries the songs all by itself. I highly recommend a listen to her music, everything from such simple tunes as Like the Weather to a broader look at her skill in Because the Night or the power she can generate in a song like Scorpio Rising and finally the beauty of Verdi Cries or The Painted Desert. The list is pretty long and she makes just about all of it memorable.
Equally (if not more) talented is Annie Lennox, who is almost always a tour de force when she sings. She brings an energy to her music that transcends the instrumentals even more than Merchant does. Like Merchant, you're going to want to sample a lot of her songs to really appreciate how good she is. You can try some of the stuff she did while with the Eurythmics, but I think she really came into her own when she went solo. There was a transition period when she took what was otherwise pop fluff (Walking on Broken Glass) and made it magical, through songs like Little Bird and into work that really allowed her to shine, like Why, No More I Love Yous's and Something So Right (one of my personal favorites).
R.E.M. does an amazing job of using both lyrics and music to tell stories, and most of their songs need to be listened to a few times to appreciate the way they do so. Like the previous two, they have a very long list of songs, including many very popular ones like Losing My Religion and Everybody Hurts. What's the Frequency, Kenneth is a great example of how they approach music- clever lyrics and a driving, brain-buzzing beat that helps us feel just how crazy it is. But some of their best examples aren't as popular. Why Not Smile is both brilliant and catchy, and my personal favorite is Falls to Climb, which has an emotional depth that could only have been captured the way they did it.
Music helps establish a mood in movies and games, and when taken by itself it has more freedom to establish a mood that is more to your tastes. Dig in past the surface and you'll find the music that speaks to you.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
Thus I wake up.
