Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[abdelalim]

for my sweet Dreams by Marylin Manson.. im whit you by Avril Lavinge.. Big girl dont Cry, where is the love, are one of the 3 most beautiful songs in the entire history of humanity

for you? What songs marked the course of your life?

[Sy Borg]

In term of influence, the correct answer would be hymns, national anthems and patriotic jingles. Personally, I don't relate to them, although I enjoyed ELP's version of Jerusalem.

[LuckyR]

Don't forget "Happy Birthday to You".

[Pattern-chaser]

What songs marked the course of your life?

"She loves you", "Eleanor Rigby", and "I am the walrus", by The Beatles
"Eve of destruction" by Barry McGuire
"Alright now" by Free
"Won't get fooled again" by The Who
"Voodoo Chile" by Jimi Hendrix
"Careful with that axe, Eugene" by Pink Floyd
"21st century schizoid man" by King Crimson
"American pie" by Don McLean
"The lunatics have taken over the asylum" by Fun Boy Three
"We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel
"Baghdad" by Patti Smith

[JackDaydream]

What songs marked the course of your life?

"She loves you", "Eleanor Rigby", and "I am the walrus", by The Beatles
"Eve of destruction" by Barry McGuire
"Alright now" by Free
"Won't get fooled again" by The Who
"Voodoo Chile" by Jimi Hendrix
"Careful with that axe, Eugene" by Pink Floyd
"21st century schizoid man" by King Crimson
"American pie" by Don McLean
"The lunatics have taken over the asylum" by Fun Boy Three
"We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel
"Baghdad" by Patti Smith

I do like your list, even though it goes beyond 3. It would be so hard to narrow it down to 3, and it is so subjective and changeable. I might go for:


'I Still Haven't Found What I Am Looking For' by U2

'Heaven(Is the Home of All Hearts' by The Psychedelic Furs

'Every Grain of Sand', by Bob Dylan

[JackDaydream]

I actually got it wrong and it is 10 not 3, so I will have another go:
'I Still Haven't Found What I Am Looking For' by U2
'Every Grain of Sand' by Bob Dylan
'Heaven (is the Home of All Hearts' by The Psychedelic Furs
'People Are Strange' by the Doors
'This is the Sea' by the Waterboys
'The Dark Side of the Moon' by Pink Floyd
'Get Lucky' by Daft Punk
'Under the Bridge' by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers
'Beautiful Freak' by The Eels

[Pattern-chaser]

Oh yes, the Doors. How could I have left Jim and the boys out? The problem is that even 10 songs is a tiny proportion of the music I have enjoyed during my life, much of which has had a genuine influence on me. My hard-disk music collection would last over 62 weeks if you played it 24/7. And I have quite a few CDs too, maybe 700? How can or could anyone exist with only 10 songs?

[Thomyum2]

The most important song in the world should always be the one you’re listening to right now.

[JackDaydream]

10 songs to live with would be a bit restrictive, especially as I mostly listen to albums. As soon as I had written my 10, I realised I had left out Paul Weller's 'Wild Wood' and hadn't including any Bowie.

Yes, the most important song or music should be what one is playing currently. My today's selection has been 'Surrealistic Pillow' by Jefferson Airplane, 'Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the Psychedelic Era', Employment', by the Kaiser Chiefs and Lewis Capaldi's 'Broken By Desire to be Heavenly Sent', albums.

[Sy Borg]

Hmm, what songs changed my life? Very different question to what somgs mattered the most per se.

* Telstar by the Tornadoes. There was something about the melody at the time that made me cry and it started a lifelong love of instrumental music.

* Sgt Pepper (I was young and thought of it as one long song) helped me become a bit of a hippie. Probably not a great influence in hindsight haha

* Larks' Tongues in Aspic Pt 1 by King Crimson.
* Birds of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Each of these shocked me to the core. I did not know such music existed, or could exist - or that I would grow to love it.

* Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water was the first song I played along with on drums, and was the the first song I ever played in a band.

* Osibisa's album Black Magic Night brought me a love of African rhythms. The Dawn was especially perfect to me, and great fun to play along with.

* Frank Zappa's Son of Orange County segueing into More Trouble Every Day - what can I say? It simply blew me away. Just brilliant.

* Pink Floyd's Time. I cannot say how many times I have recalled the lyrics:

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

That's one hard truth bomb. Ouch!

* Joni Mitchell's live cover of Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Transcendent. Music cannot get much better than this.

* Steely Dan's The Royal Scam for perhaps the greatest lyrics ever, about Puerto Ricans coming to the US, "the promised land" - poignant, poetic, incredibly economical:

They are hounded down
To the bottom of a bad town
Amid the ruins
Where they learn to fear
An angry race of fallen kings
Their dark companions
While the memory of
Their southern sky was clouded by
A savage winter
Every patron saint
Hung on the wall, shared the room
With twenty sinners

* Fools Overture by Supertramp ... tingles every time.

* Focus's La Cathedrale de Strasbourg - a sublime piece that I'd want played at my funeral.

[Pattern-chaser]

10 songs to live with would be a bit restrictive, especially as I mostly listen to albums.

So do I. I think nearly all serious music-lovers do.

Pop music has its place, but part of its nature, and its charm, is that it is ephemeral. Only the best pop music survives even one generation. The rest does its thing, and disappears, as it should. So I think Sy Borg was right to list albums, as we used to call them when they were still pieces of embossed black plastic. I listed singles, and one or two album tracks, but I have always listened to albums. If I heard a single I liked, I would buy the album and listen to all of it.

Sy's choices brought back many memories. "Birds of fire" was a revelation to me too, even though I was already familiar with "Inner mounting flame"!

King Crimson have always been faves of mine, so yes, Sy, "Shark's tongues in Lemsip" (we were schoolboys when it came out ) was an immediate favourite.

I could go on and on, and perhaps I will, if this topic continues to prove popular...

[Sy Borg]

Ten songs is not ideal. I have about 600 albums. I have a music-shaped hole in my soul that must be refilled regularly.

Not surprised about the memories, P-C, we are of similar vintage, but in Australia, most people had never even heard of King Crimson. Even most musicians I knew weren't much interested. Until the internet ... and suddenly I found thousands of others who liked the same weird music as I do.

My first exposure to Larks Tongues in Aspic was thanks to a prank by a friend who lived up the road. I was at his place and he decided to freak me out with his older brother's weird music. It worked too, and he gained much pleasure at watching the effect it had on me. I hated it. The music actually scared me.

Some years later, after being exposed to Birds of Fire, I began to appreciate music with nonstandard tonality and chord structures, like a child might acclimatise to curry. I had never forgotten that strange album that my friend dangled in front of me like a spider all those years ago. My tastes had changed and I loved LTIA so much that I went out and bought all of King Crimson's albums (now knowing they had broken up), and even bought bootlegs and the precursor, the Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, which was hard to get hold of because it only sold 600 copies worldwide in its first year of release.

I could go on and on about this too ...

[Pattern-chaser]

Not surprised about the memories, P-C, we are of similar vintage, but in Australia, most people had never even heard of King Crimson.

And yet Australia, I assume, claims to be a *civilised* country?

My first exposure to Larks Tongues in Aspic was thanks to a prank by a friend who lived up the road. I was at his place and he decided to freak me out with his older brother's weird music. It worked too, and he gained much pleasure at watching the effect it had on me. I hated it. The music actually scared me.

Some years later, after being exposed to Birds of Fire, I began to appreciate music with nonstandard tonality and chord structures, like a child might acclimatise to curry. I had never forgotten that strange album that my friend dangled in front of me like a spider all those years ago. My tastes had changed and I loved LTIA so much that I went out and bought all of King Crimson's albums (now knowing they had broken up), and even bought bootlegs and the precursor, the Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, which was hard to get hold of because it only sold 600 copies worldwide in its first year of release.

In school, at a younger age than you, I was approached by a member of my class who decided (I have no idea why) that my music tastes needed expanding and educating. [He was quite right, of course.] So he lent me "In the court of the Crimson King", "Saucerful of secrets" and Jimi's "Smash hits". That one, apparently random (?), act changed my life forever.

By the time LTIA came out, I was already a confirmed KC addict.

I have all of King Crimson's studio albums, a few bootlegs, and quite a few examples from the 'King Crimson Collectors Club" (of which there are *loads*!). I also have Giles, Giles and Fripp, and the "Brondesbury tapes", of course.

[Sy Borg]

Not surprised about the memories, P-C, we are of similar vintage, but in Australia, most people had never even heard of King Crimson.

And yet Australia, I assume, claims to be a *civilised* country? 😱

My first exposure to Larks Tongues in Aspic was thanks to a prank by a friend who lived up the road. I was at his place and he decided to freak me out with his older brother's weird music. It worked too, and he gained much pleasure at watching the effect it had on me. I hated it. The music actually scared me.

Some years later, after being exposed to Birds of Fire, I began to appreciate music with nonstandard tonality and chord structures, like a child might acclimatise to curry. I had never forgotten that strange album that my friend dangled in front of me like a spider all those years ago. My tastes had changed and I loved LTIA so much that I went out and bought all of King Crimson's albums (now knowing they had broken up), and even bought bootlegs and the precursor, the Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, which was hard to get hold of because it only sold 600 copies worldwide in its first year of release.

In school, at a younger age than you, I was approached by a member of my class who decided (I have no idea why) that my music tastes needed expanding and educating. [He was quite right, of course.] So he lent me "In the court of the Crimson King", "Saucerful of secrets" and Jimi's "Smash hits". That one, apparently random (?), act changed my life forever.

By the time LTIA came out, I was already a confirmed KC addict.

I have all of King Crimson's studio albums, a few bootlegs, and quite a few examples from the 'King Crimson Collectors Club" (of which there are *loads*!). I also have Giles, Giles and Fripp, and the "Brondesbury tapes", of course. 😉

You're as bad as me. I have the Brondesbury tapes too. Funny thing, I don't think they have only ever made one consistently good album, Discipline. On the other hand, if you took away the title track, the ConstrucKtion of Light album would be a total dog's breakfast. There's usually some failed experiments in there, though, rocks and diamonds. I always liked their unpredictability - you would have no idea what a new album might be like.

My ten "most important" Crimson tracks reflect the fact that I now have less patience for their experiments in cacophony:

Epitaph
In the Court of the Crimson King
Pictures of a City
Cat Food
Starless
Lament
Elephant Talk
Sartori in Tangier
Dinosaur
The Power to Believe Pt II

If you asked me this every year, I'd probably have a different list, and I expect that it would be the case for many older KC fans.

[Pattern-chaser]

You're as bad as me. I have the Brondesbury tapes too. Funny thing, I don't think they have only ever made one consistently good album, Discipline. On the other hand, if you took away the title track, the ConstrucKtion of Light album would be a total dog's breakfast. There's usually some failed experiments in there, though, rocks and diamonds. I always liked their unpredictability - you would have no idea what a new album might be like.

Yes, although I've liked everything they've done, but not liked all of it the same amount.

My ten "most important" Crimson tracks reflect the fact that I now have less patience for their experiments in cacophony:

Epitaph
In the Court of the Crimson King
Pictures of a City
Cat Food
Starless
Lament
Elephant Talk
Sartori in Tangier
Dinosaur
The Power to Believe Pt II

If you asked me this every year, I'd probably have a different list, and I expect that it would be the case for many older KC fans.

I tend to favour the oldest stuff, when Michael Giles was their drummer. He is not the most technically capable drummer I've ever heard (Billy Cobham???), but his drumming is more poetic, and his amazing rhythmic phrasing more wonderful, than any other I have come across, and for that reason, he will probably always be my favourite drummer.