Music, makes the bourgeoisie...

I have to thank Steve Jobs a lot, really, for the following blog post. See, there was a time when I literally didn't give a shit about music. It all just seemed the same, kinda crappy stuff with the occasional song that I liked and I'd listen to it whenever it came on the radio. That all sort of changed back in like, 2004, when I discovered that, for some reason, my dad had got an iPod. The fact that he never used the iPod meant that I more or less commandeered it, and so began my obsession with music. Well, also my obsession with my iPods, because as many of you will probably know, I pretty much can't go out anywhere without my iPod. I have this need to listen to music, at least to be hearing something a lot of the day. I've developed the rather handy talent of being able to listen to my iPod with one earphone in, while still talking and listening with the other ear (something I proved to my great pleasure in Portugal last year). A lot of people question my music taste a lot of the time; to be fair, a lot of my taste in music is commercialised pop, but I don't care about that - I like it, that's what's important. I also have something of a female dominated musical taste: the only solo male performer in my music section on Facebook is Adam Lambert, which doesn't really say a lot (anyone who says Lady GaGa, that joke was barely funny this time last year, now it's just old and tired).

Music also has the ability to change my mood quite a bit. I also sort of have to listen to music that is relevant to my mood - so, for example, when I'm feeling oddly depressive or in some kind of relationship blue, I seem to end up listening to something like New York by Paloma Faith. For the uninformed, that song's all about her boyfriend having left her, which is a really positive thing you'd want to be hearing when something relationship-wise isn't going as planned. When I was walking around New York at the start of this year, I found myself having to actually put Empire State of Mind on repeat, because I kept on interrupting whatever song was on the iPod to change it back to ESoM. Sometimes it doesn't work, but most of the time it actually does and I end up feeling quite good. I have my "go to" happy songs too, the ones that are bound to cheer me up. There's GaGa, of course, but the main song in this category is "fairyland" by Ayumi Hamasaki. Oh yeah, I love my J-Pop, by the by. Well, to be exact, I love Ayumi Hamasaki. I have every single album of hers downloaded (the day I realised that her work was up on iTunes was a very, very happy day), but the one I inevitably end up listening to is (miss)understood, and inevitably it ends up being fairyland that gets put on. It's just a happy song, it always brings a smile to my face. Go figure.

There's a lot of music I can't stand - most rap songs and quite a lot of R&B, because I just...don't like it. I can't stand clubs and stuff that play crappy things like dubstep, which seems horrifically pointless and just tends to give me a headache. There's also a lot of bad remixes for a lot of songs that I like, so to have to suffer through them when I know the original is a far superior version is kind of annoying. The worst one was a remix of Halo which made it in to some really soulless electronic song that had nothing of the impact the original did. Of course, this may be slightly biased due to the fact that Halo helped me get through a particularly rough spot early on in 2009, when I found myself listening to a constant repeat of Halo, Run and No Floods (GaGa song for the uninformed) at night to try and keep myself going. This was also a period where I completely shut off from the world - I think there was in fact a couple of days where apart from sleeping, I just had my headphones in the entire time listening to music to try and keep my mind off much more negative thoughts.

So, yeah. Music is sort of awesome, no doubt it'll be something I talk about more in this blog as it goes on. Writing this is indeed quite...therapeutic almost, plus it gives me something to do whilst I'm trapped in Leeds on my own for the next few days >_>. For now, I shall end on the songs that I've been listening to most recently, which would be a mix of "Wavin' Flag" by K'Naan (the Coca Cola song for the World Cup), "Can't Be Tamed" by Miley Cyrus and "Popular" from Wicked, as performed by the awesome Kristin Chenoweth.