Deaf Havana - I'm A Bore, Mostly
The Blackout - I'm A Riot? You're A Fucking Riot!
Leathermouth - I Am Going To Kill The President Of The United States Of America
Panic! At The Disco - I Write Sins, Not Tragedies
Bob Marley And The Wailers - I Shot The Sheriff
Showing posts with label bob marley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bob marley. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Tuesday, 5 March 2013
Why I Love Bob Marley
That’s a somewhat pointless title, because everybody loves
Bob Marley. I love him, you love him, they love him. I would be willing to put
money on the Taliban listening to Iron Lion Zion after a long day of providing
the idiots of the world with a highly negative stereotype to apply to the rest
of Islam. My point is that everybody loves Bob. This is not so much a ‘you
should totally listen to him’ type post, so much as a ‘wow he’s great, it’s a
real shame he’s gone’ kind of post. Everyone would be so much more chilled out
if Bob was still here.
I personally have known about him growing up, mainly off my
mum, because she loves Bob (and I mean more than you do). She had to write
about a musician when she was at school and she wrote about Bob Marley. There’s
a framed jigsaw puzzle of his head in our living room, right above a jigsaw of
Che Guevara, and my family loves Communism (off-topic trivia: there are about 38
different bits of Cuban Revolution memorabilia scattered around the flat), so
that’s a place of honour. I failed to do well in Music before I dropped it (weird considering that I'm writing this on a music blog), in part because they expect me to have
an innate knowledge of how to play piano and compose music, and in part because
I managed to save most of Bob Marley’s best hits to my personal file on the school
system and just listened to those instead.
What I love about Bob Marley is that he manages to make
music about pretty serious issues like the slavery and racism in the USA, and
keeping true to his faith and stuff, but he manages to be really chilled out
about it – although, considering the weed, is that really surprising? If you’ve
ever seen the Channel 4 documentary about the recording of one of his big
albums (I can’t get google to give me a proper answer about what the doc’s
called), then you will know that Bob’s rasta teacher is the most stoned man to
ever walk the earth. They got him on to be a talking head and give some really
deep comment, and he just started going on about whipping people with his
dreadlocks. But yeah, he manages to make songs like One Love, about just
chilling out and recognising his connection to Jah (through weed, yes, but it
is a part of the Rastafari religion), and he manages to also make it not sound
like he’s claiming the moral high ground or suggesting that you’re only able to
feel that kind of happiness and content by following his religion – although,
yes, he does disagree with Abrahamic religions in songs like Get Up Stand Up, I
don’t think he’d be too annoyed about it as long as you stopped attacking
people for pointless things all the time (that goes for atheists, too, if you’re
going to leave your life down to your own morals then make sure you’ve got good
ones).
What’s also awesome is that his songs sound brilliant as
well. There’s no boring songs of his that I know of, and they all sound
distinctly different to each other – nobody’s going to confuse I Shot TheSheriff with Three Little Birds, are they? All brilliant, wonderful songs, even
if you can’t tell what he’s saying (I don’t care what he says, I still think it’d
be better if he was saying ‘jamming right straight from York’).
Here are my top five songs of his that I haven’t already
mentioned.
That should be enough proof as any that, if you don’t already
love Bob Marley, you should do. Come on, he has the face of a lion. An iron
lion, you might say. If not that, then love him because he can make you feel
really chilled out even if you’re not as high as a kite.
Friday, 22 February 2013
Songs You Need To Know To Live
There are certain songs that I think you need to know
nowadays to be able to live. No, I don’t mean songs that I really like and
think are awesome and everybody should hear, and I don’t mean songs everybody necessarily likes. It’s the songs you just need to know because they are the Songs That
Everybody Knows. I was thinking about this because I was considering making a
CD of some of these songs for my little sister, so that she will be able to
survive in the outside world, and I’ve been trying to work out which songs they
actually are. Here are ten (in no particular order):
Obvious. Everybody knows Thriller. Everyone knows the dance
. . . sort of. (God, I wish I could do the dance properly). Say what you like about MJ, but he could dance. It’s the default Halloween song, but it’ll come up at a lot of
other get-togethers anyway.
Come on, everyone knows it, and I bet you’ve got Tom Delonge’s
voice going round your head now (seriously, what on earth is that accent). I don’t even remember why, but my entire maths
class was singing this once. I think it was to cover up the sound of this one
girl who was trying to sing it as some warbly power ballad and was absolutely
murdering it. Anyway, pretty much everyone knows this one.
I don’t particularly like Oasis, but you can’t really deny
their ability to make very memorable songs. For me, this one brings back
firstly my Year 11 prom last summer, when, towards the end of the evening the
DJ put it on and everyone in the year got together on the dance floor and sang
along, and the teachers got really emotional. Secondly, it brings back one of
my friends who, back in Year 8 on an own clothes day thought it’d be a
brilliant idea to dress up as Noel Gallagher. I still don’t know his reasoning
for it. I've got it playing now and I automatically have this urge to sway and sing along in the broadest Manc accent I can manage.
I’m not sure how often this one comes up in the US or other
countries, but at probably every single family do I’ve been to here, there will
come a point in the evening, usually when everyone’s smashed, when they will
play this song and everyone will sing along and it’s just cemented in my head
as A Tune You Must Have At Parties. They played it at Aquatica for some reason
while I was there last summer, and you could see every single British person in
there pricking up their cultural ears and singing along (what on earth do
cultural ears look like?).
I don’t know, is this a bit of a random choice? Everyone I
know knows this one. They don’t know the words, but they know when to chime in
with ‘lalalalala, it’s the motherfuckin’ D-O-double-G’, and that’s all you need
to shuffle your way through any song.
Everybody knows Bob Marley (sadly not personally), and
everyone knows most of his major songs, like I Shot The Sherriff, which is what
I was originally going to put here, but Three Little Birds just seemed more
right. Everybody knows it, whether it’s people who just like reggae, people
like me who got made to sing it in primary school after they remembered they
weren’t a Christian school and stopped making us sing hymns, or if you happen
to listen to him because he’s the first thing you generally think of when you
heard the word ‘weed’ so you use him to show off your lifestyle.
(suggested by my friend Ryan)
This has been used for everything. Ever. I don’t know how
they created frantic deadline-meeting montages before this song existed. I don’t
know how they ever built up tension before this song. How does one count down
to a big event without The Final Countdown? It is THE final countdown. The
countdown of all countdowns. You just try to have any big event with some kind
of deadline and see if this isn’t used. I dare you. And if you don’t use it,
you will have that terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach that something
is very, very wrong.
Again, this is just what I see as essential songs from what
I know of the world, and from what I know of the world, with pretty much
everyone I’ve ever met, if you go up to them and say “And I’ve seen him with
girls of the night, and he told Roxanne to put on her red light. They’re all
infected, but he’ll be alright, ‘cause he’s a scumbag, don’t you know?” I can
pretty much guarantee that they will shout back “BUTHESASCUMBADDONTYOUKNOW” and
then start thrashing about. Arctic Monkeys haven’t been around massively long,
and their newer stuff’s not really that good, but everyone knows the singles
from the first two albums.
Come onnnnnnnn. I grew up watching this one on MTV, never
quite grasping the concept of ‘bootyliciousness’, but still knowing it was an
awesome song. I’m still not ready for the jelly. Just imagine if one day you
opened the door and it was Beyonce, and she was there ‘cause you’d offended one
of her friends. She’d beat the shit out of you. She would destroy you. I just
know that you should never, ever take on Beyonce in a fight. And that’s why
this song is here; to appease Beyonce and the other two.
I was considering putting The Smiths here, but then I
remembered this song. I love this one. It’s the one that got me into The Cure,
because someone left me alone on New Year’s Eve a few years ago with Singstar,
and I was just doing this song over and over. This one is just necessary. It’s
just a very needed song. I don’t quite know how to express how much I love this
song in words, aside from using the song itself. Aaaah, listen to it, it's lovely.
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