This seems like a slow day, so for the interested-- which I’m sure there are, since I totally haven’t posted a crap-ton of music that has made people sick of my volume in this thread or anything-- here are all the S songs I considered but ultimately didn’t get around to (or that didn’t rate as highly as the ones I did post).
Song
Artist
She Sells Sanctuary
The Cult
Song #1
Fugazi
Someday, Someway
Marshall Crenshaw
So Begins Our Alabee
Of Montreal
Star Sign
Teenage Fanclub
The Senator’s Daughter
Fountains of Wayne
Smith & Jones Forever
Silver Jews
Sabotage
Beastie Boys
The Saga Begins
Weird Al Yankovic
She Will Only Bring You Happiness
Mclusky
Sign Your Name
Terence Trent D’Arby
Split Myself in Two
Meat Puppets
Slow Jamz
Kanye West
Someone Great
LCD Soundsystem
Song #4
The Soft Boys
Sound & Vision
David Bowie
Space Age Love Song
A Flock of Seagulls
Speed of Life
David Bowie
Spirits in the Material World
The Police
Station to Station
David Bowie
Stay With Me
Faces
(Stuck Inside of Mobile with the) Memphis Blues Again
Unlike what I gather from most Of Montreal fans, I prefer their psychedelic period (The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic in the Attic, primarily) to their darker/funkier period that came starting with Hissing Fauna.
(I did remember to post “The Party’s Crashing Us,” right?)
Ives wrote this in 1908 but it was ignored until the late 1940s—the world ignored pretty much all of Ives’s music for the thirty years he composed. He didn’t care though, the guy just did his own thing. He was a super successful life insurance agent in Connecticut who composed on weekends, and apparently many of his close friends and colleagues had no idea he was into music. The music he was writing was way ahead of its time, it was “modern” (in his case, whimsical, dissonant, polytonal, weird) fifty years before modern/experimental classical music had taken form
not gonna sentence his music to death by inventory but Ives himself offered a few breadcrumbs about The Unanswered Question:
the sustained notes by the strings are the “cosmic landscape,” “the silence of the druids — who know, see, and hear nothing.” In Ives’s perfect world these string players would be playing off-stage
the trumpet periodically asks “the perennial question of existence”
the woodwind quartet = the “fighting answerers,” whose first responses are cautious and shy, then get stronger but more jumbled, and “eventually realise futility and begin to mock The Question”
Random trivia: Amy Winehouse’s spoken line at the beginning of the song is “I’m sorry Charlie Murphy, I was having too much fun.” in reference to a classic Chappelle Show skit.
V is weak for me. But here’s Japanese garage rock band The Michelle Gun Elephant with “Velvet” (pronounced in the song as “veruvetto”). Yeah, there aren’t any typos in that band name. Engrish only.
V = Vltava, aka “The Moldau,” the second of six pieces that make up Má vlast (“My Homeland”) by Bedřich Smetana
Má Vlast is a series of tone poems that portray real & mythical Czech scenes. The notes Smetana used for Vltava (a river known in german as the Moldau) read: “This composition depicts the flow of the Moldau. It sings of its first two springs rising separately in the forest, one warm the other cold, then watches the streams as they unify into a single current, then follows the river as it courses through fields and woods, through a meadow where a farmer’s wedding is celebrated, through the round dance of the river nymphs in the moonlight, past castles and proud palaces, past ancient ruins that loom out of the wild cliffs. The Moldau foams and swirls into the St. John’s Rapids, then widens toward Prague, glides past Vyšehrad Castle, and majestically passes into the distance, lost to view, finally yielding to the Elbe.”
if you listen, stick with it through the first minute into the “unify into a single current” part, when we get the main melody that’s so dear to Bohemia
—my favorite recorded version by szell/cleveland
—a live version played at the Prague Spring Festival soon after the 1989 velvet revolution and the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, a few weeks before their first democratic elections since WWII. The conductor is Kubelík, who founded the festival in 1946 but left in 1948 swearing he wouldn’t return to Czechoslovakia until the country had been liberated. He kept his word; this was his return appearance. It’s a famous concert.
