Soundscape #56: “Oh, There Are Loads Of Rules”
October 5th, 2007A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules. —Rob Gordon, High Fidelity
Robert Sergel. Apt Metaphors, February 2007.
In this age of IMs, one-liner subject-field <eom> emails and text messages, it’s hard to find anyone with the time to write a proper letter, much less find a stamp and a postbox to stick it in. I hate to think that a couple of years from now, there won’t be any old forgotten letters bundled up in old trunks buried in even older attics or torrid affairs revealed in desperate letters to forbidden lovers to be found.
We may have inadvertently killed the romance of the epistolatory tradition since all we get through the mail now are bills and more bills. And with our obsession with instant gratification, one can always write a nice long email whenever. But reading words on a piece of paper is somehow more real than reading them on a screen. Despite everything, all is not lost. I think that the art of writing a letter has simply been updated—though inevitably transmuted—to the art of creating a mixtape for someone. And I ain’t talking about no div-sharing or you-send-it-ing of random “dude!-i’ve-got-the-new-radiohead-tracks” stuff either. I’m talking about sitting down in front of your stereo among piles and piles of cds, ok scrape that, sitting in front of your PC sifting through your iTunes library, curating a playlist that would say all the things you want to say to someone maybe just a little special. You are essentially borrowing someone else’s words to convey all your hopes and dreams. All your wishes, all the things you want to say but have no balls to say it and more importantly, all the things to which you have no words. All in the hope that he/she will listen to the CD one quiet rainy day and slowly begin to understand all that is unsaid.
Playlist:
1. (0:00) Teenage Fanclub - What You Do To Me (Four Thousand Seven Hundred And Sixty-Six Seconds)
2. (1:57) Snow Patrol - Chocolate (Final Straw)
3. (5:06) 18th Dye - It Feels Like I’m In Love (Left)
4. (8:00) The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together (Picaresque)
5. (11:05) Broken Social Scene Presents… Kevin Drew - F-ked Up Kid (Spirit If…)
6. (16:12) Wheat - Don’t I Hold You (Hope And Adams)
7. (20:01) Badly Drawn Boy - Degree Of Separation (Born In The UK)
8. (24:24) Ash - Girl From Mars (1977)
9. (27:48) Athlete - Half Light (Tourist)
10. (31:30) M. Ward - Look Me Over (Duet For Guitars #2)
11. (35:34) Beirut - A Sunday Smile (The Flying Club Cup)
12. (39:15) Alexi Murdoch - Song For You (Time Without Consequence)
13. (43:55) Bloc Party - I Still Remember (A Weekend In The City)
October 8th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
so which special person is this playlist really for?
November 9th, 2007 at 11:04 am
> one can always write a nice long email whenever.
.. a crabbed short email is more likely though ..