Current Top Ten Most Played Songs on iTunes

1. "Days" The Kinks (42 plays since October)
2. "New Amsterdam" Elvis Costello (37 plays since October - currently playing on repeat again!)
3. "No Children" The Mountains Goats (36 plays - let's assume that they're all since October)
4. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" The Smiths (31 plays)
5. "You Glued My Broken Heart" Mumpsy (26 plays - most recently added)
6. "Yeah! Oh Yeah!" Magnetic Fields (24 plays)
7. "High" The Cure (23 plays)
8. "If Looks Could Kill" Camera Obscura (21 plays)
9. "Song for Myla Goldberg" The Decemberists (21 plays)
10. "You've Got the Body and I've Got the Brains" lo-fi is sci-fi (21 plays)

You all need to hear more work of the "brains" behind lo-fi is sci-fi, who now only goes by his legal name, my good friend Chris Zabriskie.

myspace.com/chriszabriskie

Myspace is not the greatest invention in the world, nor do I use it, but it makes it a LOT easier for all musicians (local, legendary, classical, non-legitimate, etc.) to upload things and post a lot of music. And when you're a musician, that is how you get heard.

This list of the top ten is still obviously influenced by relatively recent, less happy times in my life, but I think it's pretty representative. Is it wrong that I will put certain songs on repeat just to get them on this list?

Sometimes I think that my taste in music is fairly insular, focusing on mainly 80s songwriters and current "indie rock" bands, but I believe I have a very broad spectrum of musical tastes. There are just certain things that I enjoy repeatedly. My overall favorite band is Sonic Youth, but I have only listened to that 20 minute version of "The Diamond Sea" once. I think it to be an absolutely stunning work, but it's one of those things better enjoyed sparsely - it's a special occasion sort of thing. I also received a vinyl copy of my love Erik Satie's Vexations on vinyl, ordered from somewhere in Europe, for my birthday last year. I have not yet listened to it. Granted, repetition is the essence of the piece, but it has just not been the right time to listen to it as of yet.

"New Amsterdam" by Elvis Costello (currently at no. 2 on the list), however? I can listen to it on repeat for hours. So much so that in the course of writing this blog entry, I think Mr. Costello has overtaken the Kinks for my most played song on iTunes.

About having limited tastes in music, as well? The fellow who most recently edited the New Grove Dictionary of Popular Music (which I look forward to one day pouring over for hours and hours) is a very interesting quandary. My friend Kate, a former musicology grad student, and I looked up this editor fellow (whose name I can't remember now) to find out his academic background. There was no Wikipedia article on him oddly enough, and all we could find on Google was an article he had written for either Spin or Blender Magazine about the 100 Best Albums of All Time. And we couldn't believe it. At the top of the list were three Beatles records, but shortly following that was The Smiths, which I don't take great issue with, but following that, we had several Oasis albums on there. Yes, the BritPops of the 90s were heavily represented on the list - nearly every Oasis album, Blur, Pulp - and it was obvious that this list had no objectivity to it at all. It was just stuff he loved, with no real rhyme or reason. Like most "best of" music lists written by caucasian fans of mostly rock and pop music, there was a strategic smattering of hip-hop and jazz, but it was about as far from a comprehensive and meritorious list as I've ever seen. The folks at Rolling Stone, the masters of awful and contrived "Best Of" lists, tried harder in many of their past efforts. I would say there is much more merit to the list Paste Magazine came up with a few years ago of the Top 100 Living Songwriters, and yet this guy with his adoration of English late 20th century songwriters gets to edit the Grove Dictionary of Popular Music.

Seriously. Enough of this current rant. I'm listening the crud out of the songs listed above.

And currently? Charles Mingus, "Bounce." For my smattering of jazz for the evening.