More about that in a moment.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music on my headphones lately. You see, for almost all of my twenty-three years at Yale I had my own office. That ended in January when the Writing Center was relocated and all of us were herded into cubicles. Worse, my cubicle is among ten others where half of the prisoners work together; all of them are far younger than I.
The noise level is, to be polite, noteworthy. Hence the headphones.
I’ve long been someone who knows what I want to hear and simply listens to it. Lots of other people, maybe most other people, turn on the radio and enjoy being surprised by what’s next. I do that sometimes with classical music on public radio but I absolutely hate the screaming DJs on rock or pop radio (and the commercials!), so I avoid them completely.
But wearing headphones eight hours a day means making a lot of choices, so, tiring of that, I’ve stuck my toe in the radio waters of late, in the form of Amazon Music Unlimited. They seem to have virtually EVERYTHING. Often I will search for and listen to something specific – all Mahler’s symphonies for example -- but I’ve also enjoyed being surprised by their various playlists. Earlier this week I listened to all 99 songs on the list 100 Greatest Rock Songs – don’t know what happened to number 100. Great, great songs; not surprised by what was there but the order of each was a surprise. A real delight.
100 Greatest 70s Rock Songs featured a lot of duplication, but also brought me ear to ear with Go Your Own Way (Fleetwood Mac), Who’ll Stop the Rain (Creedence), Tiny Dancer (Elton John), All the Young Dudes (Mott the Hoople) and 95 more, some terrific, some less so.
But back to Pauline Kael up top: just before starting this ramble I read the N Y Times obituary (here) for Jonathan Demme, the film maker who died yesterday. Most of us know him for Silence of the Lambs or Philadelphia but those classics are eclipsed for me by his documentary Stop Making Sense, perhaps the greatest concert film ever created. (Yes, yes, I know, The Last Waltz. Watch them both and you decide). If you don’t know Stop Making Sense, go to your local library and get a copy. If you wanna say, “but I don’t know the Talking Heads,” go to your local library and get a copy.
I only knew two songs from Stop Making Sense the first time I saw it, but I was completely blown away by every minute. As Kael says, the film's intensity builds and builds and what started with David Byrne alone on stage becomes loud, exciting, high-energy, tightly controlled, choreographed, kick-ass rock and roll.
I’ve seen it four times. I own it. I will watch it again soon.
RIP Jonathan Demme; long live rock and roll and long live your contributions to it!
