Monday, April 18, 2011

My Music Monday


There is usually an anonymous person who comments on some of my music choices.  They do not care for my selections.  That's their prerogative, of course.  Make no mistake though, I do know who it is.

I have mentioned my friend, Josh, thinks there is no such thing as bad music.  While I will not completely agree with him, I am trying to get into the mindset that at least my music choices are not bad.  (insert snarky/smiley emodicon here!)

Maybe some of my choices are predictable or milquetoast - but I like what I like.  If you catch on to something that you enjoy, great.  If not, at least you can say you tried it and moved on.  That's my take away with a lot of music.

It's quite sad, but lately most new music I hear is in Spin class.  Commercial radio plays the same 18 songs and most of them horrid. Satellite isn't that much better - being me, I notice patterns.  If the "new wave" station plays a Pet Shop Boys song, it's the same one over and over.  Eventually they'll switch to another one and then play that to death.  But if you want to hear Guns N Roses, Steely Dan or America, there is always one of their songs on XM.   I'm not saying this is a good thing.

I thought XM would bring me more choices of new stuff.  Not so much.  So I get it from Spin.  The problem there is, I might only pick up one song per week, since Andy loves his selections from the previous week's Glee episode.  I love the man, but oy....there is only so many times you want to hear Gwenyth Paltrow sing a mash-up of "Singing in the Rain" and "Umbrella".  The appropriate amount of times for that?  ZERO.

This week's selection may throw some folks off - like 'anonymous'.  And it threw me a bit too.  I'm not a big rap fan at all.  And by big, I mean, I'm not one at all.  But something about Dr. Dre's "I Need a Doctor", I really like.

Dre, if you might remember, was a member of N.W.A., and the force behind such rap artists as Snoop Dog and Eminem.  Mostly now, he's making his fortune off of new headphones that retail for $399 a pop.  I will give him this, they sound amazing!

Same with this song.  There are two lines of sung lyrics (repeated), I'm assuming possibly sampled from another song (ala Dido with Eminem a few years back), but the majority is rap.

Make no mistake, while credited as Dr. Dre, the majority of the rap is provided by Eminem. Dre raps at the end.  And yes, the Doctor in the title refers to Dre himself, as Marshall Mathers raps about how Dre is/was his mentor.

The song is like 5 minutes long; the video about 2:45 minutes longer.  I'd say skip the first 2:45, but some of the images of the Pacific are quite cool to watch. There is no music in that first 2:45.

Yes, this is the explicit version.  F-bombs are dropped.  As is the gay F-bomb, once by Dre.  At first I took a little bit of offense to it, but you know, I can't complain about it when they drop every other derogatory phrase too.  Do I wish he didn't say 'faggot'?  Sure, but I'm not gonna cry over it.

I totally get that most of my readers will skip this. And while rap still isn't my thing, now and again, I'm impressed by Slim Shady and how he just rolls his words out so effortlessly.  I can see there is an art to it, even if I don't always care for the message.  And when they bring in the singing part to offset the rap, they knew what they were doing on the timing aspect.

And the song is really good for Spin class too - especially on a heavy resistance hill. 

...and maybe, just maybe, by putting "I Need a Doctor" in here, I'll get some street crud cred with 'anonymous'.


5 comments:

tornwordo said...

I agree with your friend Josh. When you call music "horrid", I bristle. It's not horrid, it's not your cup of tea. Not the same thing.

Synonymous said...

Woe to the man who tries to impress anonymous.

As a frequent anonymous poster on your blog I’l admit I usually like your music selections. Except when you called “Baker Street” one the worst songs of all time – wasn’t really feeling that call. But what can I say? There will be one day when–

“you wake it’s a new morning
the sun is shinin it’s a new morning
your going
your going home”

;)

Anonymous said...

You are Dr. Love in my book.

Ur-spo said...

Pay no attention to doctors.

david said...

They should have just done the duet with evanescence. It is so lame. M had such talent and Dre, well, a visionary but this is like ice dancing music.