Feature archive
Songs that I love, A-Z



I've been meaning to write about the songs that have most influenced me for ages now, but as with many things in my life I've lacked the drive necessary to actually get up and do it. I mean, where to start, anyway? There are so many tunes, and I love so many of them, that the whole thing would just become this shapeless "Oh, and here's another thing that I like!" mess.

And then I was reading Charlie Brooker's recent column in The Guardian about how his feelings for Macs have changed over the past few years, including Apple's now ubiquitous iTunes:

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ".docx" Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

And I think that's pretty accurate, although I'd never really thought of it that way before. iTunes is just a big spreadsheet, and it's part of the reason why downloaded music, added to your big ol' list of other music, can never replicate the physical package: the atmosphere and mood that artwork can convey, or the very fact that you own that package. But I digress. This isn't a piece about how digital music sucks, because iTunes being a spreadsheet does have one major point in its favour: it means that I can easily track down the songs I want to include. And, if I'm going to be using a spreadsheet, what better way than in alphabetical order?

So, yes. A to Z, with A coming later in the week. It's faintly conceptual. But since 'conceptual' continually runs the risk of being 'arsey', I think we should probably kick off with a nice bit of Ace of Base...





Other things made recently.

Journal
Print
Film & TV
Music
Hearing about my hometown in context of, y'know, a murder is pretty strange....
"It's too exciting and distracting online... There's always some button that wants you to click to cat porn. You try to read something, and it's flashing, it's telling you to go somewhere else." — Dave Eggers, in praise of print...
So the film where the guy hacks his arm off, that apparently caused people to faint when it was shown in the cinemas back in 2010, got a terrestrial airing last night. Whether it was because I was tired after an excellent weekend in the country,...
I didn't write about Radiohead's King of Limbs at the time of its release a couple of months ago, mainly because I didn't have much to add beyond what seemed to be the critical consensus of 'Nice, but nothing amazing'. I can't say that the album...


Colophon.
© 2009-12 Matt Elton | Creative commons.
Created using 100% recycled pixels | Fonts by Typekit | Email matt@mattelton.com | Enjoy a decreasingly attractive site by using, in the following order: Safari / Firefox / a drawing you've done in crayon / IE6