{"id":160,"date":"2006-01-16T21:18:07","date_gmt":"2006-01-17T02:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=160"},"modified":"2007-09-03T21:18:44","modified_gmt":"2007-09-04T01:18:44","slug":"catching-up-on-my-listening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=160","title":{"rendered":"Catching Up On My Listening"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the help of the U.N.C. library and a helpful student, I&#8217;ve been catching up on (a) music I haven&#8217;t listened to in <s>years<\/s> decades, and (b) music I&#8217;ve never gotten around to checking out. Brief verdicts so far:<\/p>\n<p>Category A:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Beatles:<\/strong> Since selling off the records many years ago I hadn&#8217;t missed much. The early, unpretentious stuff is not bad, but what was all the fuss about? Their best stuff seems roughly as good as Buck Owens, and he&#8217;s a lot more consistently good.<\/li>\n<li><strong>John Lennon:<\/strong> Ditto, only more so. Ho hum.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Yoko Ono:<\/strong>  Not as bad as I had remembered, which isn&#8217;t saying much. To put it another way, I probably have worse things on my iTunes, though I can&#8217;t think what. On the other hand, when one of her tunes comes up in shuffle play, I don&#8217;t immediately recognize it as trash: it&#8217;s more a gradual dawning of comprehension that this (oh no!) must be Yoko.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Category B:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Beach Boys: <\/strong><em>Pet Sounds<\/em>. Everyone says this is such a great album, and I rather like the relatively few BB tunes that I couldn&#8217;t avoid hearing over the years, but this album?  A total bore.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Ella Fitzgerald:<\/strong> Wow! Why hadn&#8217;t I gotten around to checking her out (in more ways than one) before? I&#8217;m just annoyed that U.N.C. only gave me disc 1 of <em>Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter Songbook<\/em>, so I have to go back and get disc 2 &#8212; assuming they even have it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Frank Sinatra:<\/strong> I thought I hadn&#8217;t really heard anything by him except &#147;New York, New York&#148;, which is annoying and annoyingly ubiquitous, but one tune on <em>Frank Sinatra Sings the Select Sammy Cahn<\/em> was totally familiar: the theme for <em>Married with Children<\/em>. Somehow I hadn&#8217;t connected that performance with anyone famous or talented. Despite my aversion to anything that could conceivably be classified as &#145;Easy Listening&#146;, I&#8217;m finding all three Sinatra albums (the other two are <em>Songs for Young Lovers<\/em> and <em>Swing Easy<\/em>, combined on one CD) worth hearing and even rehearing. Am I turning into an old fart, or just showing my good taste?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Having now gone through Terry Teachout&#8217;s recommendations in his four-part article &#147;The Great American Songbook&#148; (<em>Commentary<\/em>, February-May 2002), I was disappointed to find that U.N.C. has no only four or five of the fifty albums named, and only one or two can be checked out. Oh well, I guess I need to get a full-time job and buy them myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the help of the U.N.C. library and a helpful student, I&#8217;ve been catching up on (a) music I haven&#8217;t listened to in years decades, and (b) music I&#8217;ve never gotten around to checking out. Brief verdicts so far: Category A: The Beatles: Since selling off the records many years ago I hadn&#8217;t missed much. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-what-ive-been-listening-to"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}