Day 24: A song I want played at my funeral

I'm just going to go ahead and assume that absolutely everyone played this game at some point, so I'll skip over the likes of 'Highway to Hell', 'Another One Bites The Dust', 'Going Underground' and other, similarly-hilarious gems, and just get straight to the song.

On a tear-jerkingly self-indulgent note (and really, if you can't be tear-jerkingly self-indulgent when choosing a song for your own funeral, what's the point?), there's always be Warren Zevon's 'Keep Me In Your Heart', which I wrote about a few weeks ago. But that'd be senselessly cruel - if people are (hopefully) going to be pretty sad already, there's no need to push them over the edge. While I'd be less inclined to go with a "wittily" inappropriate song than I would have been a decade or so ago, I still suspect that the best choice would be something a little more upbeat, more positive. Funerals are a downer to start with, there's no need to pile on the misery. And since I've already written about the Rolling Stones, which according to my own arbitrary and self-imposed rules means I can't write about 'Shine A Light', which would probably have been my first choice...



It's a great song, obviously, but this version is particularly brilliant. I'd hope that I wouldn't need to explain why I love the Ramones so much - they're quite clearly one of the greatest pop groups ever formed - but this cover is a particular highlight of their career, for me. It may not be a blindingly-obvious funeral song (which is, of course, one of the reasons I'm choosing it), but it works better than it might initially appear. Like most of Dylan's songs from this period, the underlying meaning is buried under a slightly-purple lyrical overload, but at its heart, the song is a simple enough iteration of the "it's better to regret what you've done than what you didn't do" principle, and as such, perfectly-suitable for the occasion. Besides, the gloriously-simplistic guitar solo from 1:18 - 1:33 is about as life-affirming a musical moment as I can think of, and its presence would have substantially improved 100% of the funerals I've ever attended.


Yes, the deeply uninspired nature of this entry is part of why I haven't updated the blog in over a fortnight. But it's not most of it. Sorry, it shouldn't happen again any time soon.

Day 10: A song that makes me fall asleep

Honestly, except in the somewhat hyperbolic sense of "a song so boring it sends me to sleep" (in which case, Paul McCartney's 'Mull of Kintyre'), I can't think of any song which actively sends me to sleep. However, I do tend to listen to music in bed, so there's plenty of music to which I can fall asleep comfortably, which I suppose is close enough. Perhaps the album I listen to most often at night is William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, and today's video contains an extract from one of them.



I've just spent the best part of an hour trying to write a halfway-decent short essay about these eery, other-worldly recordings, and why they're among my favourite pieces of recorded music. Hell, I'd go further - I think they're among the most unique works of art I've ever encountered, in any medium. But I'm still feeling like crap, and the words just aren't coming together at all. It keeps coming out as either pretentious or banal, neither of which really does justice to the music, and while that's never really bothered me before, it's bothering me today. I didn't want to put this post off for another day, though, so I'm afraid this is all you're getting.

For the full story behind the creation of these loops, I'd recommend reading this review, which is actually the piece which persuaded me to listen to them in the first place. Basinski's own liner notes in the CD set are also enormously worth reading (yes, I just wormed my way out of actually having to write about something simply by linking to someone else who's done my work for me already. Sue me, I'm ill). If I'm feeling better tomorrow, I may come back and edit this to add a few more thoughts of my own ( EDIT : I didn't ) - in the meantime, sorry to anyone who turned up today expecting actual content.

But the history of how the music came to exist, while fascinating in itself, wouldn't mean much if the loops themselves weren't so powerful on their own. Repetitive without true repetition, violent without dissonance or ugliness, hypnotic without tedium - they're simply wonderful as music, entirely disconnected from their history. With that history, of course, they become something a little more profound - music which wasn't so much composed as carved into being by the passage of time itself, an audible demonstration of the power of entropy.

But on a rather less pretentious level, they're also a great soundtrack to fall asleep to. Hence my writing about them today.

BLOG POST DELAYED DUE TO ILLNESS: AUDIENCE SHOCKED, BEWILDERED

I was due to post a new 30 Days Of Music piece this evening, but I'm ill, so I'll be going to bed instead. So the Doctor Who review below is your lot for today, I'm afraid. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

In lieu of "a song which sends me to sleep", have a rather nice montage from Who's 40th Anniversary, back in 2003, set to an abbreviated remix of Orbital's version of the theme tune, as mentioned in my previous post. If Doctor Who had been on the air during the '90s (we do not speak about the McGann Incident, OK?), I'd like to think that this is what the music would have sounded like.