Tear It Up

This morning was banner when I left the house. It was fair outside for once, there were no tantrums or storms of emotion on the part of myself or my children, and I was listening to some very fine rockabilly music. I often start my morning with something that shakes or rolls; it just puts me in the right frame of mind for the perils of the day. Anymore, though, my brilliant beginning is stopped dead in its tracks when I walk into work. There are a lot of things my boss and I agree on; music doesn't always happen to be our common ground. Sometimes, like this morning, I'll have spent a good fifteen minutes feeding my head with reverb and thumping bass lines only to get to work and be subjected to electronica from Pakistan or something similarly disconcerting. This was the case this morning; I was rolling along pretty good with the boogie-woogie piano and the hot saxes, and then... Well, imagine the screeching of a tone arm yanked off a phonograph. There were ululations. And something plinky that might have been a thumb piano. And a throbbing, undulating electronic bass. It was also sort of ballad-y. It was the bb piercing the helium balloon of my mood. It ended soon enough, I suppose. There was another one a lot like it just after, and another, but it was only ten minutes or so. It was bearable. Then the CD changed.

My friends, I find reggae tolerable under very specific sets of circumstances. A very hot day, a fence or a wall that needs painting, very cold pale beer - these are acceptable reasons for reggae. Friday morning at a busy coffeeshop with customers barely treading the jagged edge of reason: not an appropriate time for reggae. And, though I may lose friends over this statement, I will stand by it: unless you are very fond of the maryjane, or are in a college dorm room, or BOTH, the Bob Marley Extended Greatest Hits, including the entirety of Legend, as well as FOUR remixed versions of songs off Legend, is never, ever, EVER acceptable. Not a single minute of its 1.5+ hour running time.

Bob Marley makes me fucking homicidal. I spent the remainder of the day fuming and snapping and glaring at people. I thought briefly about stabbing someone, but was on the wrong side of the room from the knives.

I had to come home and listen to the Sex Pistols just to clean out my brain. Now that I have had a nice punk-rock sorbet, I am going to smooth over the whole ugly incident with some Hot Club of Cowtown and possibly wash it all down with the lovely dessert wine known as the Johnny Burnette Trio. That man's shouting makes me shiver in the best way.