Who's Your Audience

I heard a Fresh Air interview with Esperanza Spalding on NPR one day on my drive home. She has a voice that fluctuates like a songbird and plays the upright bass at the same time. The complexity of her synaptical activity must be phenomenal! I took up listening to jazz just a few years ago, studying the greats at first. Now I'm branching out. This form of latin jazz is inspiring bath music...or listen to it while you're reading a book!

I had a hard time choosing between "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here" to add to this list of progressive musical favorites. In the end, though, the dark side prevailed. "Wish You Were Here" was Pink Floyd's lament to lost band leader, Syd Barrett, whose mental illness drove him from the band. "Dark Side of the Moon" touches on those themes of insanity, proving that Barrett's tortured mind bewitched the minds of those he knew for years after their relationship ended. My favorite song on this album...and indeed one of my favorite songs of all time is "Time." Some musicians are simply musicians. Some are just crap fed to us as business ventures created to generate income. These musicians, however, are simply poets. And what's a poet if he doesn't reveal to us the profound sadness of our own mortality.

I met my husband right when the CD set was released. And because I was falling in love while I was listening to this CD, many of the studio-released songs remind me of his energy and drive: "Can you hear me/Hear me screamin/Breaking in the muted sky. This thunder heart/Like bombs beating/Echoing a thousand miles!" Such the dichotomy that my husband is, so is this compilation. For, on the second CD of the set is burned a darker acoustic session of songs on which John Paul Jones guest stars. And this side was the soundtrack to the darker moment in our relationship—just before the sun broke through and we moved past our former selves. Dave Grohl said at that time that he hoped this would be the album for which Foo Fighters is remembered. He may have changed his mind now that their latest endeavor is on the charts but "In Your Honor" will forever be the bittersweet soundtrack of my relationship's genesis.

"Kid A in Alphabetland" is a trading card set developed around the thoughts and ponderings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan believed that the unconscious is structured like language instead of a collection of repressed desires. According to Thom Yorke, though, the album title was not derived from any Lacanian reference. Beyond jazz, beyond progressive rock, beyond hallucination lies Kid A's textured auditory experience. Subliminal in its presentation, this mirror of modern day anxiety lulls you into a false sense of peace with Yorke's haunting vocals then attacks you with the senseless realities of global capitalism. The Lacanian card deck shows a modern day kid skateboarding through capitalist propaganda. Coincidence?

Who doesn't like The Beastie Boys? I received this CD from my friend Nathan way back when. He doesn't even remember giving it to me. Yet, its layered cacophony is relevant even 14 years later. Instrumentally intricate hip hop libations suited for a party, a long drive, or a work out routine.