The Greatest Song Ever Forever

I like music. Not like some people who like music. Not in the sense that I feel I need to collect random and obscure band names and titles as if they were Pokemon or froth at the mouth in defense of why my arbitrarily best music genre is better than your arbitarily best music genre. Aside from a firm belief in the universal distaste for jazz, music is relative and we all like what we like. I like music because of the way it can move and speak to you in ways that regular speech cannot carry, and many songs can do this in different settings, under different conditions, for different people. I guess that's part of why it is so transcendent. There is one exception, though, and that is the greatest song ever forever.

O Holy Night by Jewel. I do not say this because it's Christmas time and I just happen to be listening to Christmas music -- I admittedly listen to this song in the 100 degree sunshine of spring, summer, and fall just as often -- and I do not say this because I think Jewel is one hot mamma jamma -- though she is -- but because the lines are so stirringly written, the words are so beautifully sung, and the story so elegantly told. It is a song that, no matter what I am doing or where I am doing it, I cannot help but pause and take in. It is a song that has the unique ability to transcend us and our situation. Not a whole lot that can do that. And that's why I give it this year's first and only award for Greatest Song Ever Forever. First runner up? Ninja Rap by Vanilla Ice. Go buy your copies now!

Standing in Mud for a Song

Last week, complements of Ro, I went to Austin City Limits. Without exaggeration it was the hottest, sweatiest, and muddiest I have been in a good time. Which, coincidentally, makes for a pretty good time. The temptation to slip and slide about the muddy knolls was present but I remained dignified. Plus no one else was doing it.

Although the two bands I truly wanted to see, Dave Matthews and Flogging Molly, had played the day before, I still got to see a bunch of bands I had never heard of (David Garza, The Dead Weather, and Heartless Bastards) and two bands I had heard of but, really, never heard (The Toadies and Pearl Jam.) It turned out one of David Garza's band mates also apparently does hula hoop tricks? By the end of the evening when Pearl Jam finally came on for their two appointed hours we were shoulder to shoulder with countless thousands of other people in what was likely the greatest exchanging of germs the nation has seen in years. I may or may not have been standing on top of someone. I definitely got to first base with the back of the dude's head in front of me.

Despite knowing all of only three or four songs, Pearl Jam was still pretty great. There was not a whole lot in the way of pyrotechnics or special effects, just deafening music that gave me phantom vibrations and tinnitus for about three days afterward. Crowd surfing was attempted but resulted in the guy being thrown over a shoulder and promptly into the gack, and moshing was impossible due to the complete inability to shift one's body weight. Live music it seems is powerful stuff even if much of it is unintelligible. I suppose that's why any respectable nationalist uprising or religious revival always has a good chorus. Post concert we ate at Wendy's -- and I do believe even the food tasted better.