All They Want is Energy

Music. I love music. My taste in music is a little odd. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to characterize it. I usually just tell people that I listen to "a little bit of everything", but that's a blatant lie. I'm ridiculously picky about my music, but for a long time, I wasn't entirely sure what the deciding factor was in whether or not I would like something, and then it hit me: sincerity and/or energy. Wow, that sounds pretentious. Let me start with an example.

As anyone that I've talked to in the past few months will tell you, as a result of The Voice (freaking Jermaine Paul), I've been going through a bit of an Automatic Loveletter phase. This song isn't really representative of them at all, but it gets at the reason that I love them in a very pure manner. In every objective manner, this song is terrible. The lyrics are incoherent, the music is generic, and her voice is very technically bad here. That being said, there's so much power here, and you can practically taste the passion. There's a rawness there that I can't really explain, and that's what makes this song one of the most played songs in my iTunes library.

Ke$ha. A lot of people have reservations about this crap, and I understand why you might, but I'm here to tell you that those are stupid. The objections that people generally have are that she's indicative of everything that's wrong with pop culture today. Those people need to understand that that is the point. Ke$ha's entire purpose with her "music" is to be irreverent and fun and to not take anything seriously, and damnit, she does that better than anyone that's ever claimed to do such a thing, musically. That being said, she makes the list of things that I love because her songs epitomize that kind of unadulterated ridiculousness that you just don't see enough of.

What kind of blog post about music would this be if I didn't mention musicals for at least a brief moment? I really don't know how this ties into any of what I've been talking about, but having these songs with characters telling a story is just one of the most fun applications of music that there is, and I love it. Especially the fairly trashy ones. Chicago, Rent, Mamma Mia!, Wicked... The list goes on. I picked this song to represent this overarching category because... well, it's fun.

Ahh, P!nk. She is a tough bitch, and you don't fuck with her. She's kind of a badass, and despite the apparently contradictions in the message she puts out there with her music (see: 'Cuz I Can and Stupid Girls), there's one common denominator: she does not give a shit about what you think, and she's going to do whatever the fuck she wants. Love it or hate it, you have to respect that.

Last but not least, Paramore. This song is... this song. I love this song. You may recognize a line from it as the title of this blog, and that's because I fucking love this song and this album. Really, so do most of the people here. Brand New Eyes is definitely my favorite album of all time. Why? Well, it came at a point in my life where it was particularly poignant. The band that I was in was falling apart, and I was working through trying to be friends with my psycho bitch ex, and there was other stuff going on that I'm not going to get into here, and it sounds really stupid, but this album really helped with that.

Anyway, I'm not sure that I actually made a point with any of that. To sum up, a song needs to address some kind of realistic emotion in a way that's sincere in order to appeal to me. Hopefully there was at least one thing here that you hadn't heard before that you like. This week's been fun, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I have.