Blogging is strangely like an old senile man sitting in a corner of a crowded room, talking endlessly to himself. There is the same tragic element of wanting to be heard, and the remote possibility of that actually happening.


There was a teutonic shift in my value system yesterday when I surprised my self by bying the new album Ringleader of the Tormentors by the brit pop grand old man Morrissey. For as long as I can remember, I have hated brit pop in general, and Morrissey in particular. It represents non-musical singing and campfire-type guitar playing at its worst. However, a the phrase

And I just want to

I want to see the boy happy

With his arms around his first love
Is that too much to ask

kind of caught me off guard. I downloaded the album from iTunes and find that all of a sudden, I could relate to the music, brit pop and all.



It's funny how musical tastes develop. My taste usually works by accepting a foreign element when it's presented among familiar elements. For instance, my introduction to jazz, my current greatest musical love was through prog rock, my greatest musical love when I was in my teens. The drummer of both Yes and King Crimson, Bill Bruford is basically a jazz drummer, and his first solo album, Feels Good to Me - still a brilliant album after all these years - seemed to present many of prog rock's finest elements in the context of a jazz fusion album. When I had gotten used to the sound of the album, I started to introduce myself to the Biches Brew -era Miles Davis and slowly started my journey into jazz.



I guess the brit pop thing is the fault of a terrific neo-prog rock group called Porcupine Tree, the music of which I have listened to quite a bit lately. Their masterpiece In Absentia integrates heavy metal, prog rock and melancholy brit pop into a strange soup.

The problem with Morrissey is that there is less and less music that I hate. This is a problem, as I have always valued disidentification as a nice way to build one's identity. We are who we are by knowing who we dis.