My husband has this really irritating thing where he thinks the order in which you say words doesn’t really matter. He likes to say “it’s just semantics” which is really fucking annoying because I’m a professional wordsmith so it’s NEVER just semantics with me.
But he’s never been particular about words, is my point, so it was kind of weird the day I called Rob Thomas a “poet” and it somehow sparked a twenty minute discussion on the difference between “poet” and “lyricist.” My position was that the word “poet” encompassed “lyricist” because lyrics are a recognized literary genre that is a subset of poetry.
In my defense, this was before I learned that a canoe is not a boat.
My husband was VERY insistent that you could not just substitute the word “poet” for “lyricist” in a sentence. “They aren’t the same thing,” he kept repeating.
He followed up the discussion by sending me a very interesting interview where Marshall Mathers explained to Anderson Cooper how to make things rhyme with orange. My husband knows I’ve had mad respect for Marshall Mathers ever since some guy took me to see 8 Mile on a date. I don’t listen to his music, because it’s not my thing, but I respect the fuck out of the man and I think he’s an absolute genius with words. And Anderson Cooper is Anderson Cooper so all in all it was a very good video.
And Mathers’ whole thing he’s trying to explain to Cooper is that there’s a ton of words that rhyme with orange, depending on where in the word the beat falls. He said it better than that, but that was the basic idea, and it really broke things wide open in my head.
I downloaded a few Eminem albums and spent two days listening to them. I determined that it is most definitely not for me, but also it is every bit as good as I suspected because something can be GOOD and just not be to my taste. I did keep a couple of tracks and add them to my main playlist. The one from the movie and the one where he says “Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his rap to sell records. Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you, too” because that is seriously one of the best things I have ever heard.
So now I’m thinking about the relationship between the sound and the words and I almost get it but not quite and I’m wondering who else I could listen to and Fallout Boy pops into my head.
Fallout Boy is one of those bands that I’ve always been aware of, because lots of people I know really love them. And back in the days when I listened to the radio, I wouldn’t change the station when they came on. It was fun music, bouncy happy shit that made me want to move around. I had never really listened to the words though. So I decided to really listen, to pay attention to the lyrics and see if they matched the feeling the sounds gave me.
Turns out…sort of.
Timing is everything in life.
I downloaded a few Fallout Boy albums to listen to on the drive down to Portland for a continuing legal ed seminar the first weekend in March.
But I’ve never been good at listening to albums straight through, even though I know they are arranged in an certain order for a reason. There are only two bands that I have made it through an album start to finish: Matchbox 20 and Paramore. Weirdly, I cannot listen to those bands on shuffle. I can put random tracks in a playlist, and that’s fine, but if I’m just listening to Paramore I start at the beginning of an album and I play it in order to the end. I might skip a track or two, but I don’t shuffle. I don’t know why. It’s kind of weird.
But trying to listen to Fallout Boy albums straight through was a bit intense, so I downloaded this Amazon Music playlist called “Rediscover Fallout Boy” and listened to that instead.
I didn’t know they had a new album about to come out.
I didn’t know they released a single in advance of it.
I didn’t know “Love from the Other Side of the Apocalypse” was a new song when I stood in the rain on a dark Portland street corner looking at homeless people shivering on the sidewalk in front of empty fucking buildings covered with signs about how much Jesus cares.
And when it rolled into “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” and I got this image in my head from Supernatural when they would cast out a demon and the human vessel would throw its head back and the thick, evil smoke would pour out and the dude with the Muppet voice is screaming “I’m on FIRE” in my ears and I pulled out my phone and googled Oregon criminal statutes to see exactly what penalties I would face if I picked up that chunk of broken concrete at my feet and hurled it through the brightly lit plate glass window of the Scientology Headquarters of the Pacific Northwest. I may be a bit of a maniac myself.
I didn’t get very far in the playlist on that trip. I stuck those two songs on repeat and walked around handing five dollar bills to homeless people until I ran out and then I went and sat in a conference room and watched lawyers discuss the fate of the very homeless people they spent so much time trying not to see while huddled in their hermetically sealed hotel rooms eating room service and frantically typing into the wee hours.
I didn’t hear “The Phoenix” until I was back home, sitting on my own beach, trying to figure out what it is about these songs that make me want to burn the fucking world to the ground.
We can take the world back from a heart attack
One maniac at a time we will take it back
I’ve spent decades trying to fight being labeled crazy. I know for a fact a BIG part of why I love Big Bang Theory is because of all the times Sheldon Cooper says “I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested.” No one had me tested. I probably am crazy.
Pete Wentz makes me feel like that’s a good thing.
In my Lit program at UNO there was this guy. A poet. He carried a guitar everywhere and played Green Day songs on the quad in front of the library and the girls just swooned.
One year after spring break he was holding court in the back of a classroom before the lecture began about the monumental journey he took through The Oddessy during break. It was getting on my nerves, so I laughed at him.
When I had his attention, I said something along the lines of how sad it was that he only managed to read one book in a week because I read eight and I worked two jobs.
If I had had a penis, I would have gotten punched that day.
If he had been a bass player, he might have gotten laid that day.
But neither of those were true so he just glared at me and I just laughed again and eventually the professor showed up and life went on.
For all that I loved tormenting him, that guy wasn’t actually stupid. He was pretty highly ranked in our program. Probably the second best in our year.
Second best.
That guy drove me nuts, but he kept me sharp. Staying one step ahead of him gave me something to work for, made me a better writer, a faster thinker.
Pete Wentz makes me think of that guy. Fallout Boy makes me feel like all I need to do is get the words to fall into line and I could change the world.
The problem with being a lawyer is there are so many rules about what you can say and how you can say it and when you can say it. And I’ve always thought of myself as a rule follower, someone who lives by the book and does things the “proper” way.
But doing things the proper way doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything.
And the world is slipping further into despair with each passing day.
There’s a presidential election coming up and there isn’t a single acceptable candidate up for grabs on either side and everyone is miserable and no one believes in anything and there’s a pretty good chance most people I know won’t even bother voting the next go-round.
And I’m just so damn tired of holding my tongue and saying the right words.
I never got to do the activism thing in college, because I was too busy trying not to starve while I got my degree.
But now I’m going back to school.
And I’m much, much louder than I was the first time around.
Perhaps it’s time to go shout at some politicians and the rich people who pull their strings.
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One Maniac at a Time…
Dammit Pete Wentz, get out of my head
My husband has this really irritating thing where he thinks the order in which you say words doesn’t really matter. He likes to say “it’s just semantics” which is really fucking annoying because I’m a professional wordsmith so it’s NEVER just semantics with me.
But he’s never been particular about words, is my point, so it was kind of weird the day I called Rob Thomas a “poet” and it somehow sparked a twenty minute discussion on the difference between “poet” and “lyricist.” My position was that the word “poet” encompassed “lyricist” because lyrics are a recognized literary genre that is a subset of poetry.
In my defense, this was before I learned that a canoe is not a boat.
My husband was VERY insistent that you could not just substitute the word “poet” for “lyricist” in a sentence. “They aren’t the same thing,” he kept repeating.
He followed up the discussion by sending me a very interesting interview where Marshall Mathers explained to Anderson Cooper how to make things rhyme with orange. My husband knows I’ve had mad respect for Marshall Mathers ever since some guy took me to see 8 Mile on a date. I don’t listen to his music, because it’s not my thing, but I respect the fuck out of the man and I think he’s an absolute genius with words. And Anderson Cooper is Anderson Cooper so all in all it was a very good video.
And Mathers’ whole thing he’s trying to explain to Cooper is that there’s a ton of words that rhyme with orange, depending on where in the word the beat falls. He said it better than that, but that was the basic idea, and it really broke things wide open in my head.
I downloaded a few Eminem albums and spent two days listening to them. I determined that it is most definitely not for me, but also it is every bit as good as I suspected because something can be GOOD and just not be to my taste. I did keep a couple of tracks and add them to my main playlist. The one from the movie and the one where he says “Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his rap to sell records. Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you, too” because that is seriously one of the best things I have ever heard.
So now I’m thinking about the relationship between the sound and the words and I almost get it but not quite and I’m wondering who else I could listen to and Fallout Boy pops into my head.
Fallout Boy is one of those bands that I’ve always been aware of, because lots of people I know really love them. And back in the days when I listened to the radio, I wouldn’t change the station when they came on. It was fun music, bouncy happy shit that made me want to move around. I had never really listened to the words though. So I decided to really listen, to pay attention to the lyrics and see if they matched the feeling the sounds gave me.
Turns out…sort of.
Timing is everything in life.
I downloaded a few Fallout Boy albums to listen to on the drive down to Portland for a continuing legal ed seminar the first weekend in March.
But I’ve never been good at listening to albums straight through, even though I know they are arranged in an certain order for a reason. There are only two bands that I have made it through an album start to finish: Matchbox 20 and Paramore. Weirdly, I cannot listen to those bands on shuffle. I can put random tracks in a playlist, and that’s fine, but if I’m just listening to Paramore I start at the beginning of an album and I play it in order to the end. I might skip a track or two, but I don’t shuffle. I don’t know why. It’s kind of weird.
But trying to listen to Fallout Boy albums straight through was a bit intense, so I downloaded this Amazon Music playlist called “Rediscover Fallout Boy” and listened to that instead.
I didn’t know they had a new album about to come out.
I didn’t know they released a single in advance of it.
I didn’t know “Love from the Other Side of the Apocalypse” was a new song when I stood in the rain on a dark Portland street corner looking at homeless people shivering on the sidewalk in front of empty fucking buildings covered with signs about how much Jesus cares.
And when it rolled into “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark” and I got this image in my head from Supernatural when they would cast out a demon and the human vessel would throw its head back and the thick, evil smoke would pour out and the dude with the Muppet voice is screaming “I’m on FIRE” in my ears and I pulled out my phone and googled Oregon criminal statutes to see exactly what penalties I would face if I picked up that chunk of broken concrete at my feet and hurled it through the brightly lit plate glass window of the Scientology Headquarters of the Pacific Northwest. I may be a bit of a maniac myself.
I didn’t get very far in the playlist on that trip. I stuck those two songs on repeat and walked around handing five dollar bills to homeless people until I ran out and then I went and sat in a conference room and watched lawyers discuss the fate of the very homeless people they spent so much time trying not to see while huddled in their hermetically sealed hotel rooms eating room service and frantically typing into the wee hours.
I didn’t hear “The Phoenix” until I was back home, sitting on my own beach, trying to figure out what it is about these songs that make me want to burn the fucking world to the ground.
We can take the world back from a heart attack
One maniac at a time we will take it back
I’ve spent decades trying to fight being labeled crazy. I know for a fact a BIG part of why I love Big Bang Theory is because of all the times Sheldon Cooper says “I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested.” No one had me tested. I probably am crazy.
Pete Wentz makes me feel like that’s a good thing.
In my Lit program at UNO there was this guy. A poet. He carried a guitar everywhere and played Green Day songs on the quad in front of the library and the girls just swooned.
One year after spring break he was holding court in the back of a classroom before the lecture began about the monumental journey he took through The Oddessy during break. It was getting on my nerves, so I laughed at him.
When I had his attention, I said something along the lines of how sad it was that he only managed to read one book in a week because I read eight and I worked two jobs.
If I had had a penis, I would have gotten punched that day.
If he had been a bass player, he might have gotten laid that day.
But neither of those were true so he just glared at me and I just laughed again and eventually the professor showed up and life went on.
For all that I loved tormenting him, that guy wasn’t actually stupid. He was pretty highly ranked in our program. Probably the second best in our year.
Second best.
That guy drove me nuts, but he kept me sharp. Staying one step ahead of him gave me something to work for, made me a better writer, a faster thinker.
Pete Wentz makes me think of that guy. Fallout Boy makes me feel like all I need to do is get the words to fall into line and I could change the world.
The problem with being a lawyer is there are so many rules about what you can say and how you can say it and when you can say it. And I’ve always thought of myself as a rule follower, someone who lives by the book and does things the “proper” way.
But doing things the proper way doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything.
And the world is slipping further into despair with each passing day.
There’s a presidential election coming up and there isn’t a single acceptable candidate up for grabs on either side and everyone is miserable and no one believes in anything and there’s a pretty good chance most people I know won’t even bother voting the next go-round.
And I’m just so damn tired of holding my tongue and saying the right words.
I never got to do the activism thing in college, because I was too busy trying not to starve while I got my degree.
But now I’m going back to school.
And I’m much, much louder than I was the first time around.
Perhaps it’s time to go shout at some politicians and the rich people who pull their strings.
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