Monday, February 6, 2006

SEVENTEEN THOUGHTS ABOUT "THE" (PART 1): Idiosyncratically, iTunes does not ignore the words “the”, “an”, or “a” at the beginning of the title of a song. As it turns out, that means that I have 24 songs on my iTunes list that are grouped together because their titles all start with the word “the.” Let me tell you about 17 of them (the other 7 are classical pieces that I suspect are not all that interesting to this group).

  1. The Bottle by Gil Scott-Heron. Gil Scott-Heron is an important figure in music history. The Allmusic Guide calls him “one of the most important progenitors of rap music.” His spoken word, jazz-influenced R&B from the 1970’s certainly blazed a trail, as did his lyrics, full of anger at various forms of injustice. Many of his LPs and CDs are now out of print, but this greatest hits compilation is a good one and includes The Bottle, as well as Winter in America and perhaps his best known song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

The Bottle was his biggest hit, peaking at #15 on the R&B charts in 1978. It’s a catchy song about a serious subject -- alcohol abuse:

“See that black boy over there, runnin' scared
His old man's in a bottle.
He done quit his 9 to 5 to drink full time
So now he's livin' in the bottle.”

  1. The Bricklayer’s Beautiful Daughter by William Ackerman. A new age guitar instrumental by the founder of Windhan Hill Records, this song appeared on the album Passage. As the amazon review notes, Ackerman really has a way with the elegiac and the moodily majestic. I often listened to this piece to dial down the stress of law school.

  1. The Coventry Carol by Alfred Deller & The Deller Consort. I’d recommend this to anyone seeking classically themed Christmas music. From the famous album The Holly and the Ivy, this song was perhaps played more often than any other at Christmas when I was a lad. Listening to it now calls to mind the joy of those happy holidays, tempered with a certain measure of sadness that some of the important people from those days are no longer with us.

No comments:

Post a Comment