I have been totally abandoning my blog for twitter lately, and I feel bad... By the way, a stretch goal / resolution next year is to ban "totally" from my vocab. It's a bad habit, I use it about 40 times a minute. It's filler and probably worse than "um", but I've grown so accustomed to it. I'm thinking most of you wouldn't recognize my voice without it, but it's time for it to take a hike. Totally. (Sigh).
There are some things that are just too long to twitter though, and here's one of them (unless you have a 140 character suggestion):
A few weeks ago I visited Monterey and since rental cars don't usually have iPod adapters, I brought along some cd's, which is always an interesting change of pace. Who listens to full albums all at once anymore? It reminds you of all the tracks you forgot about that your iPod doesn't lean toward frequently.
Since I was visiting high school friends, I brought some cd's that remind me of those olden days (92 - 96) including Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion I & II, which if I had to pick just one album that brings back memories, it would be... well, I still can't pick one. It would be UYI 1 & 2. Alanis Morrissette was the album of my senior year whether anyone liked it or not, but before that, I was hooked on G n' R like any rightful angst-ridden teenager in the 90's, and I can't remember ever being tired of listening to them. I didn't give up appreciating G n' R as road trip music over the years, but for some reason in the transition to iPod-dom, I only uploaded about 3 songs from each UYI cd (possibly the reason was storage space, my 30 Gig iPod nears capacity every time I add something) so listening to the cd's in full in the rental car while doing 90 on the highway (wondering why everyone else was driving so slow) was great, and I was really taken aback by a few things:
1) I still know most of the lyrics by heart, having not heard these songs in at least 10 years, especially the F-laden ones ("Double Talkin' Jive Get the Money Muthafucka 'Cause I Got No More Patience" just comes right back to me like it was "Row, Row, Row your boat").
2) The songs seem just as good and in fact, as relevant as they were then (I truly expected they would seem lame, dated, and overindulgent now)
3) Axl sure had a hell of a lot of anger built up. Not just one album's worth, but two full albums and 30 total tracks of hatred, bitching, cursing at, and dissing people behind their back? It's a testament to his (now forgone) artistry that he was able to translate that into 30 tracks of decent music, in fact, at least 20 tracks of amazing music instead of buckling down and killing someone.
It's no wonder G n' R will never top these. I personally was not looking forward to Axl's "comeback", Dr. Pepper induced or not, since he was always 4 hours late for concerts. Although Velvet Revolver (Guns n' Roses without Axl) kicked ass, I somehow doubt Axl without Guns n' Roses would be worth waiting 4 hours for.
Anyway that's my non-twitterable musing about music that's probably not seen the light of day, let alone a flash of airwaves, for the past 10 years. In fact it's nearly 20 years since the albums were first released!! Now that, I must say, is the most $#%&*! shocking of all.
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