Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there!

the sound of music

No, it's not about the movie :)

The last couple of days I've been working a lot and as usual I fall into patterns. Patterns allow me to forget about whatever (example, food) since you do them sort of automatically when the time comes and it's one thing less to think about. A good example: I can listen to music most of the time while I'm coding except when I have to figure out a relatively complex set of correlations and events between classes. I've been counting and it's usually when more than 20 objects are involved in the event loop, reacting to each other, when I have to stop humming to the music for a while until I get my bearings again (Example: an event is stopped by the user, the panel has to update, notify its listeners, the listeners react and trigger other listeners and stop or start threads and so on). Weird. Anyway. Even when I am listening to music, I need to be listening to music that I already know very well, well enough so that it doesn't distract me), something along the lines of being able to hum along to the song unconsciously while I am debugging an algorithm or things of that nature. The only exception to these two rules is Beethoven or Mozart, which for some reason have no interference whatsoever with my brain activity when I'm thinking but still let me enjoy the music.

The result of this is that through different periods I end up listening to the same few playlists over and over. I imagine that if a neighbor can hear they must think I'm nuts, since I probably listen to the same song maybe three or four times a day. My current two favorite playlists are:

One: The Hard Rock/Hip Hop/Rap/Grunge playlist

• Happiness is a Warm Gun (The Gun Mix) Cover by U2 of the classic Beatles Song
• Sympathy for the Devil
All my Life (Foo Fighters)
• My Generation (Limp Bizkit)
• Take a Look Around (Limp Bizkit)
• He Got Game (Public Enemy)
• Sing for the Moment (Eminem)
• Stan (Eminem Ft. Dido)
• Lose Yourself (Eminem)
• Heart-Shaped Box (Nirvana)
• The Man Who Sold the World (Nirvana's Cover of Bowie's song)
• Pennyroyal Tea (Nirvana)
• Lithium (Nirvana)
• You Know You're Right (Nirvana)

Two: The Depeche Mode playlist -- nearly all songs live from either the 101 album or the In Your Room EP:

• Death's Door
• Barrel of a Gun
• In Your Room
• Policy of Truth
• World in my Eyes
• Never Let me Down Again
• Strangelove
• Stripped
• Somebody
• Just can't get enough
• Everything counts

Three: The Beethoven playlist:

• Piano Sonatas No. 14 and No. 21
• Symphony No. 5 in C Minor Op. 67

I hadn't listened to Depeche Mode in quite a while. I like rediscovering things. Their lyrics are a lot deeper than many people think, particularly since they were branded as "music for dancing" at some point, but they're quite dark (which I like) and they show true expression. If nothing else, I deeply respect any artist whatsoever that truly talks about what's happening to them, more so if they can do it in a way that allows others to contextualize it within their own experience. All great artists have this, and the best of them can even survive the machinery of marketing and mass consumption that inevitable snaps into action when something becomes sucessful or connects with people (By "survive" I mean their art survives. Sometimes the artist doesn't survive...). I find that all the bands I keep listening to, all the writers I keep re-reading, all the movies I see more than once, all of them have this deep element of personal subjective truth.

In closing (?) :-) a verse from Public Enemy's He got game that feels as it fits here for a number of reasons:

It might feel good
It might sound a little somethin'
But damn the game if it don't mean nothin'
What is game? Who got game? Where's the game
--In life behind the game behind the game?
I got game
she's got game
we got game
they got game
he got game,
It might feel good
it might sound a little somethin'
but fuck the game if it ain't sayin' nothin'Yeah!