Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I especially want to call out "Don't Fear the Reaper", "Dust in the Wind", and (not on this collection, but I heard it earlier tonight) "The Grand Illusion" by ELO, for making pop music from death and mortality, not just bullshit about love.
Backwards from their peak seems to be the best way to hear Queensrÿche.
Why can't they see they're just like me? I'm not the one that's so absurd.
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?
—Jackson Browne, "Doctor My Eyes"
David Arkenstone's oeuvre is hilarious: "Pure Sleep", "Fairy Dreams", "Journey of the Whales", etc. newage tinkly noises… and a couple World of Warcraft albums.
One album a year (a couple of these are more hard rock, but I steered it away from hair metal mostly):
I started off today with Sound System, by The Clash, but quickly dumped it. Aside from their top 40 hits, they all sound the same and their lack of singing talent and failure to discover anything past three chords on the guitar, really gets on my nerves. They're like the worst caricature of "punk" you'd do as a joke, but carried on for a decade and roughly 500 "best of" albums. You can't listen to any '80s playlist without 25% of the songs being Clash, 25% being teeny little Prince (or whatever he called himself as he crawled further up his tiny butthole), neither of whom I want to hear more than one track a day from ever. And I suppose my Anglophobia doesn't help; English wankers preening about English mob politics. I ain't even mad right now, or this rant would go on longer.
I already have most of this ripped, but until now that was the only way to get it.
"I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are
All I can feel"
—The Cure, "Pictures of You"
