Interim Note: We are Experiencing Authorial Difficulties, Please Stand By

To anyone who was planning on reading the post that I would normally have up sometime yesterday: Sorry, it's still being written. Since it's Father's Day weekend, I wanted to write a Very Special Post, and it turns out that it's really hard for me to admit possessing real human emotions, so writing this post is taking longer than I expected. It will be up sometime tonight, but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

Post 15 Part 3: ...And Celebrate The Night

   Greetings all! I've mentioned this already, but I am really excited for this post. I love the night. I love being awake in the small hours, I love talking to people long after everyone sane has gone to bed, I love the places my mind wanders at 3 in the morning. I am not Charles Halloway. But anyway, this is the final piece in my three vignettes, and I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed experiencing it.



The Night  

   How do you explain the night to someone who's never been there? It's not just a time, it's a place of mind; the fortuitous meeting between location and temperament, when the streetlights are burning cool sulfurous yellows and oranges and it becomes pressingly, urgently clear that you are more alive than you have ever been.It's easier to find in the summer than the winter, because the night is defined by its cold winds, and to the hesitant January pilgrim a walk into midnight can seem more like a burden than an invitation. But rest assured, the invitation is the crux of the matter. The night is a coaxing, lilting thing of shadows and tremulous edges, and you cannot simply walk out after sunset and find it.

   People fear it, because night time is the time for witches and lies, and fearful shapes at the edge of vision and thought. This is reasonable, but happily the night is at its best when it walks on the thin lines between waking and dreams, and pure reason is best taken with a grain of salt when you plan to journey there. The night is dark, but more importantly it is cloaked. People don't understand that it's the cloaking that comes first and the darkness that follows, and this is partially why so many are afraid to wander into it, and so never experience the shards of life that can only be found in dark midnight crevices.

   It is not safe. It will never be safe, not fully; that is not the point of nighttime; it is a time for secrets and lies. This is also a frequent turnoff for some. What the hesitant fail to realize is that it is these hidden states which form the the crust that separates day and the night are neither malicious nor negative. Errors in perception are a universal result of the human condition; what the nighttime does is slip a mask onto the world large enough to hide everything. When everything is hidden, the false assumption that everything is known disappears, and is replaced by acceptance of the fact that true knowledge is a dearly gained treasure, and it is a treasure that escapes most in this life. When you can admit ignorance, you are free to pursue truths that the known world refuses to let you believe in. 

   An unfortunate side effect of all this is that the night also tends to be populated with many less than friendly people. Avoid them, but do not let them steal what they do not own. The night is NOT evil, and it can never be evil. It can only have the evils of men imposed on it. When you fear to walk away from the sun, you give shadows to the people that abuse them. Like every other part of life, the only thing you can do is live as you wish others would live, and do what you can to help others go with you. 

  For those that do go out, the night blesses them with its presence. Just like you can feel the daylight strike your skin at noon on a day in July, so the night will coat you if you let it. It's the curiously dense air that settles on you like a sheet, until you can't quite tell you end and cloth begins. It is cool even when it's hot enough to scald you, and carries a faint hint of rain in the moist winds that gently trickle down alleyways when you aren't looking. It is, above all else, pregnant. Pregnant with the rain and sun of tomorrow, with possibilities, with hopes, and of course with lies. It is the lies that draw you out into it again and again after you've first allowed it to sneak into your heart and your skin. 

  They are mostly the lies you tell yourself. They congregate at night because that's when you have to stop moving, and they let you live and sleep and make peace with tomorrow. Some are malevolent, some benevolent, some simply exist: "I will be better tomorrow, I'll do it right this time. I can quit next week. Maybe dinosaurs are still here, and they've just gotten really good at hiding. I'll tell them it was me. She won't remember. She'll remember everything." They give structure and hope, and sometimes blame. Mostly, they let you get to know yourself. Most are not meant to deceive so much as to tell a story, and every story lets you know what kind of world you wish to live in. The night is made so you can live a hundred lives and put them all in a box that can get up in the morning and look around at all the things in all the other boxes. 

   The truth of the night is made from the same cloth as lies, but that does not make it false. This is the time when the worst thing that could happen has already happened, and the best thing that can happen is still hours away, but creeping inexorably closer. The world ends with the sun and is reborn with the sun, and in the hours between everything falls together and happens, disappears, and then comes again in a hundred thousand shattered mirror lives and stories. Is it any wonder that you can't tell the night to someone who hasn't been there?

Playlist:

Rebellion (Lies), by Arcade Fire. If I lived my life by any anthem, this song would be a strong contender. This was the first song I ever heard by Arcade Fire, and it's still one of my favorites. Also, like many of their songs it describes the night better than I can, and it's beautiful.

You are the Blood, by Sufjan Stevens. This is actually a cover of a song by band called Castanets, and while the original is good I prefer this version. For me, it encapsulates the feeling of murky frantic movement that takes over when you've spent the whole night awake and still can't sleep. 

Wolfmoon, by Modest Midas

I Am The Antichrist To You, by Kishi Bashi

Post 15 Part 2: Music To Welcome Rain

    Before I show you guys this post, I want to explain a little bit about my feelings toward summer. I'm pretty vocal on the subject, especially during the actual season, but I'm not a huge fan of summer. I like many of the things that occur as a result of it, and I appreciate symmetry and beauty that the seasons impress upon the world, but during the actual, physical phenomena of summer I tend to exist in a sort of miserable, haunted ghost state. The heat absolutely ruins my capacity for thought and activity, and in particularly hot muggy weather I'll often have a sort of cascade shutdown, where my inability to handle the heat causes me to lose sleep, which makes me irritable and then I have a harder time dealing with the heat. Typically, this cycle ends with me sobbing like a small hungry child at some point in the middle of August, and then things start to cool down and I can become bitter about how cold it is.

   Anyway, when I'm in the middle of my annual breakdown, one of my favorite aspects of summer is the experience of watching a storm come in. I have loved the rain for as long as I can remember;  it is hands down my favorite type of weather, and when I get the chance to watch a storm front come in over a hot, sunny, sticky day in June it always helps me remember that there's a reason I haven't tried to move to Nova Scotia yet (well, a reason in addition to not really wanting to live there).

The Storm

  My favorite place to watch it is the backyard of my parent's home. It's a sprawling open spot lined with trees and hemmed in by other old houses that are slowly sinking into themselves and falling apart, that I've been exploring since I was two years old. I know and love every tree and most of the rocks back there, and when the storm starts to announce itself they all begin to sing. 

  

   It starts with the wind, and a slight shifting of the sun. The winds start losing heat and gaining speed, making a light susurrus, and as that starts up the light changes subtly, from glaring, angry goldens to a slightly cooler white, edged with just a hint of blue. The leaves, which have been baking the scent of chlorophyll and dust into the air since 10 this morning go from blinding, shifting emeralds to a green so deep it almost seems black in the shadows, and finally you can look up into the sky and back at the ground without going blind. 

   At this point the sky is still largely blue, but there have been puffy, pure white cumulus clouds drifting across it all morning, and it becomes increasingly evident that they were simply precursors to a gathering mass of belligerent cumulonimbus. Generally, this front has been hovering on the edge of vision for most of the day, a dark grey smudge spread across the bottom of western horizon, but as the winds pick up the front edge can be clearly seen over the crowns of the trees. The noise of the wind picks up from a susurrus to something more akin to a conversation at a country club: clearly audible, with crisp vowels skipping from branch to branch, but contained nonetheless, and far to polite to raise a voice louder than would be acceptable. The light goes darker still, and the sky shifts to a murky grey that spreads out in every direction. In the shadows that play through the crowns of the trees, you can almost see infinity, fading out to a calm blue-grey at the edges, and promising as sublime an escape as anyone could wish for.

   The stage is set, and the only piece missing now is the moisture. The air becomes dense with anticipation, and the trees start rattling branches impatiently. A single fat drop appears on the sidewalk, and disappears almost immediately; sucked away by heat, dry air, and thirsty concrete. Somewhere between eternity and two minutes pass, and nothing at all seems to happen. A few more drops scatter contemptuously across across the sidewalk and parking lot, but disappear within seconds. The air becomes suffused with a smell of wet baked dirt and hot rocks being rapidly cooled. A heady, indescribably vital feeling fills both the air and the soul, and the drops start coming down more rapidly.

  The first drops are unbelievably fat, each a full swallow that somehow managed to keep itself together until finally slipping its bonds in a headlong suicidal rush to the earth. They land with a sound like snare drum underwater, not just tapping into the ground, but beating into it repeatedly as peripheral beads rise up from the impact and get pulled down again almost immediately, giving a small back-beat to the main rhythm. They come quicker and quicker, until finally the trigger releases and the sky collapses in on itself like a cracked aquarium, spewing out water so fast that even the parts of you that are already wet become fully submerged. It's a frothy mix of water and air, and for the first fifteen minutes it seems to be leaning more towards water than air; looking up, you get the impression that if you could just figure out the right angle to dive in, there's enough water up there for you to swim up into the cloud.

   But it's neither a steady nor sustainable mix, and it ends almost before it registers. There's a slight slacking, the winds die, and then it drops from a downpour, to a shower, to a sprinkle, and then into a memory. The sun jumps out treacherously, and somehow manages to start steaming the life out of you even as the last drops are landing. Even before the flash-flood in the driveway has time to die down, summer has started again and cut away any hints of cool breath before they have time to settle. A few stray maple leafs stir on the ground, knocked down by the watery avalanche. Mosquitoes start buzzing around hesitantly, then gain confidence and begin circling with a speculative whine that darts around the edge of hearing.

   In the spite of the twilight that encompassed the whole world minutes ago, the sun is still a few hours away from setting, and continues its leisurely slide into oblivion, slicing through the dripping branches to poke a few orange rays into whatever spots it can find. As the clouds continue slipping away, it becomes clear that tomorrow will be even hotter than today was, and muggy to boot. Certainly, it's going to be a punishing experience, and you're already regretting wishing for the rainstorm.

   BUT. For fifteen minutes, you were absolutely free. As the wet seeps in between your toes, and your feet start sloshing back into the house, you can't really regret it. After all, supposedly it's better to have have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And even if it didn't stay you can know, with absolute clarity, that while it was there the rain loved you back.

Playlist:

Like the dawn, the songs that remind me of rain tends to be both optimistic and melancholy. It's a time of both celebration and loss for me, and that's what these songs mean to me

Summer Song, by Chad and Jeremy. Like New Slang and the dawn, this is kind of the seminal song for my idea of rain; the two are inextricably connected. Also as a side note, this song inspired one of the only poems I've written that I feel legitimately proud of, so that's a thing.

Love Always Remains, by MGMT

Pieces of What, also by MGMT

Click Click Click Click, by Bishop Allen (I know I mentioned this one like two weeks ago, but it captures the feeling of being just out of the storm perfectly, and it has one of my favorite stories told in musical form, so y'all can just go listen to it twice)

Manchester, by Kishi Bashi (this one's for the moment of clarity after the rain, just as the sun's coming out)

Once again, I don't have a bonus song for this, but I will be putting up one last piece in the same vein as this one and yesterdays on Monday. I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty pumped about putting it up, I think it's going to be good. Hope you all enjoy it to!

Post 15: Music To Greet The Dawn With

   Today's post is going to be a bit different, mostly because I didn't feel like writing another list. This is actually the result of an idea I've had poking around in my head for a month or so, which was catalyzed in a conversation with my brother earlier today. Instead of my usual format, I'm going to be putting up three different short... writings,  vignettes if you will, about summer, along with a playlist of songs that, in my opinion, capture the mood I'm trying to pin down. I have no idea how this will turn out when it's finished, but I can guarantee this much: I probably won't be sleeping as much as I'd like to this weekend.

Dawn

  Generally speaking, I am not a morning person. Specifically speaking, I'm also not a morning person. In my experience, mornings are frustrating, headache-inducing events that leave me with a sense of lingering disappointment and a desire to go back to bed. Given my preference, my sleeping habits tend to drift slowly forward until I start going to bed as the birds begin suggesting I wake up, and waking up as polite society gets ready for lunch. Frankly, it's not great for my health or wellness, but that's a problem for tomorrow me. He seems much more qualified to handle my problems than me, overall.

  Anyway, one happy side-effect of these sleeping patterns is that since I feel into my current rut, I don't often have lingering contact with the rising sun. Typically I get ready to eat breakfast as the shadows are getting ready to disappear under the light of noon, which means that if I do see a sunset, it's liable to mean that I'm approaching it from wrong direction, giving it a polite nod before I prepare to pass into a near-coma state. I like it this way; the sun seems much more endearing when it's simply nodding a polite "hello, good-bye" than when it's screaming at me to get up, and suggesting that I need to stop sleeping in until 6 am. Admittedly, this may be because I seem to be physically incapable of either happiness or intelligent thought when I wake up before 8, but my assertion still stands.

   Summer sunrises, in particular, have a personality of sorts that makes them endearing when you're watching them after not sleeping for at least the last 16 hours. In winter, the sunrise creeps into your room, shines furtively around your window, and then settles over your shoulders, leaving you hunched over with a unique, bone deep chill that promises nothing more or less than the final, crushing embrace of mortality. Summer sun, however, being a rather thoughtless, carefree sort of sunlight, simply teases you for a half hour or so with the prospect of dawn, and then tosses a coat of buttery yellows and and salmon halftones on everything, then launches straight into the business of daylight.

   The thing that makes the sunrise so lovely is the coolness of it. You know full well that before you can possibly hope to be prepared for it that sun will be directly overhead, scorching you with the kind of punishing heat one would normally associate with a sadistic 10 year old, a magnifying glass and an anthill. But  at dawn, there's a brief window where you can simply see the beauty of the thing without having to worry about the consequences of the daytime. Is it any wonder that it's at its best when you can simply watch it, smile, and run away to a bed that offers another few hours of cool sleep before you have to actually face the day?

Playlist:

The dawn, when seen from behind, is a time for optimism and resignation. It strikes a fine balance between the feeling that everything will eventually be okay, and the acceptance that maybe they won't, and that's all right too.
In my mind, the absolute to ring in the dawn to is New Slang (by  The Shins, of course), which captures the mood of things more perfectly than I suspect I'll ever be able to write down. For me, New Slang is the dawn and vice versa. If I run into one without the other nearby, things feel twisted and off-kilter.
Also worth listening to:
America, by Simon and Garfunkel
El Condor Pasa, also by Simon and Garfunkel (really, most of their stuff is perfect for this kind of mood)
Road Trippin, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Manchester, by Kishi Bashi

And lastly, I don't have a bonus song for today, but I will be posting a companion piece to this tomorrow, so whoever's reading this should come back again for seconds. Hopefully they will be delicious.

Post 14: Songs To Watch Your Mutually Doomed Romance Fall Apart To!

  After the last post I wrote, it occurred to me that it's been quite a while since I wrote a post based on a idea, as opposed to talking about genres. Well, it turns out that genres are boring and I don't like talking about them, as is clearly evident in my records, so instead I wanted to write about how terrible love is, and how we should all flee from it. That is a lie; what I really want to write about is how great music about twisted and destructive relationships is. To aid in this endeavor, I have therefore created a playlist of music to listen to when your love life is in a tail dive. As a quick side note, I haven't even gone on any dates in the last several months, so following my advice is probably a terrible idea. Let me know how your journey goes!

  So, first things first, here are some warning signs. If anyone ever shows any interest in you, and then  proceeds to make you a mixtape with Every Breath You Take on it, you might want to take stock of the situation. Is it offered in the spirit of irony? If so, congratulate them on their mastery of the form/excellent taste in music. If not, consider researching restraining orders. If they offer you a Barry Manilow tape, the odds that they're a stalker are much lower, but you should still avoid dating them. The only thing that came close to being a good song he wrote was Mandy, and it barely places at a high mediocre when it's covered well. And it's almost never covered well.

  So anyway, let's assume that you're already in the relationship, and things aren't working. Maybe your man is obsessed with trivial matters, or constantly sings infuriatingly catchy disco singles. Maybe your lady (incorrectly, by the way) doesn't think Fields of Gold is fantastic, and you therefore have difficulty respecting her opinion in other things that actually matter, because you are a fundamentally bad person. Maybe you're a filthy, sniveling coward trying to escape commitment, but you don't know how to do it. I'm not here to judge, I'm here to help (but incidentally, I will be judging you pretty viciously). If you want to break it off with class, I would personally recommend Forget You by Cee-Lo Green. If you're looking for a bit less class, the uncensored version of Forget You is even more effective at getting the message across, but I try to keep this blog relatively clean, so you'll have to find it on your own. Sorry.

  On the flipside, maybe you got beaten to the punch. Maybe you got dumped hard, and you're trying to figure out what song you send the dumper to properly convey just how over them you are. If they're richer than you, consider either Common People (I'm personally very fond of the William Shatner cover, which is actually really good, amazingly enough) or Like a Rolling Stone, because it's the best song. If you're richer than them, what are you doing reading my blog? I didn't realize I had rich friends (also, would it be OK if I borrowed some money). However, if you're not feeling either of those, the absolute best possible option is No Children by The Mountain Goats. No Children is the single most bitter breakup song I have ever heard, and I love it. In the scenario, it's roughly equivalent to bringing an orbital cannon to a knife fight, except when you get to the fight it turns out everyone's already dead, your parents never really loved you, and Santa isn't real.

  If you decide you don't want to alienate everyone you know without your breakup, however, there are somewhat less abrasive options. By which, of course, I mean more Bob Dylan. I'm sorry, I swear I try really hard to talk about music that Bob Dylan didn't write, but he's insidious. Also, he wrote really great sad breakup songs, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention Don't Think Twice, It's Alright. It's basically tailor made for these situations. However, if you feel that listening to Bob's whining rasp would not be good for a sense of closure, there is OF COURSE a Peter Paul & Mary cover, and it is of course great.

  Lastly, if you're past the breakup stage and just feel like remembering the bad old days, I've got just the thing! The Old Apartment by Bare Naked Ladies is both a great song and a perfect description for the joys of post-breakup woes. Listen to it when you're in the kind of mood where calling your ex to blame them seems like a good decision (pro-tip: no, it's not, don't do it).

  And most lastly of all, here's a bonus song! We all need more psychedelic in our lives, right? Yeah, that's right.

Post 13: Soulful Indie Bands Singing Quietly About the Trials of Being White And Middle-Class, Part 1 of 264

   Hello people! Before I get into the meat of my post, I just want to mention that I finally got around to getting Spotify, and I'm planning to start compiling playlists for posts as I go along, so that people can listen to all the songs without having to chase down all the links I so dearly love to pepper throughout these posts. I have no idea how people who read this like to listen to music (or even if you guys actually listen to the songs I talk about at all, or just read  the posts), so I'd appreciate it if y'all could let me know your preferred listening method, so I can tailor delivery to meet demand. Here's the link for today's playlist.

  Anyway, today I wanted to talk about something near and dear to my heart: indie music. Once again, like apparently everything else I talk about, it's an ill-defined genre. Technically (to switch out my pretentious snob hat for my pretentious pedantic snob hat), it's not even a genre at all; 'indie' just means that it's independently produced music. But come on, we all know what I'm talking about. If the band you're listening to has four guys all playing instruments, the lead singer is doing anything that could come close to being described as crooning, and more than half the guys have beards/stubble and enormous horn rims. We all know where I'm going with this.

  And naturally, to start things off I'm going to talk about the Shins. I mentioned them once before, but they're one of my favorite bands, and I won't be shutting up about them anytime soon. They've got several really good albums out, all of which are worth listening to, and other than that there's not much to say. They make good music with solid harmonies and nice, shimmery guitar noises, and you should listen to it. Personally, I'm particularly fond of the songs Saint Simon, For a Fool, Phantom Limb, and Simple Song. They released a new album last year, Port of Morrow, and while it's not as good as some of their earlier stuff, it's worth a listen. Both Simple Song and For a Fool came off of it, and they're two of my favorites Shins tracks.

   After The Shins comes Bishop Allen. Bishop Allen is one of those bands that make me feel both smoothly urbane and mildly dickish when I talk about them. This is the type of band you mention when you want to prove you 1) have musical taste; 2) have more of it than the person you're talking to; 3) found these guys back when they were underground, and 4) are a fundamentally better person than every other person you talk too (incidentally, talking about them like this guarantees the amount of people you talk to will get much smaller very quickly). That being said, they do make good music, and I like them a lot. They make (or possibly made, I think they may have broken up) light, fluffy songs that are about love and missed connections and how things are gonna pretty alright, probably (and also sometimes civil war ironclads). It's good stuff to hear when you need optimism and guilelessness. I think my favorite song by them is Shanghaied, which literally has a chorus that goes "La, la la, la la la la la la shanghaied", and is just as delightful as it sounds. Also worth checking out: Dimmer, Like Castanets, and Click, Click Click Click. And yes, the chorus of Click, Click, Click, Click does involve the word 'click' being repeated four times. They really like their repeated chorus lines.

  BUT, moving away from groups of twenty-something guys singing about love and stuff and playing their guitars together, my next pick is Matt Costa, a twenty-something guy who sings about love and stuff and plays his guitar BY HIMSELF (not counting his backup band). Frankly, he's pretty much a slightly less mellow Jack Johnson with a higher voice and a small infusion of surf rock. Fortunately, I like Jack Johnson and I love surf rock, so I'm a pretty big fan of his stuff. My favorite song of his definitely Sunshine, because it's simply wonderful. It's probably a metaphor for how he has a furious drug addiction or something, but I couldn't care less. It's great, and I won't let you spoil it for me. Most of his stuff does tend to blend together somewhat, especially if you listen to it all at once, but I still like it. My favorites are Mr. Pitiful, Acting Like a Fool, and Witchcraft. Witchcraft is particularly interesting; it's not my favorite song by him, but it's an almost perfect reproduction of the kind of song you'd hear on a mid 60's surf compilation, and I have to give him kudos for making such a flawless tribute.

  And lastly, I would feel ashamed if I failed to mention Death Cab for Cutie. I'm not a huge fan of them, but they're one of the icons of indie music, and they do have some great songs. The only two that I've really gotten into are Soul Meets Body and Crooked Teeth, but man. Those two are rock solid. Well worth taking a listen.

  And of course, last but not least, here's a bonus song! Apparently, before Jack White married Meg and they became the White Stripes, he apprenticed as an upholsterer and had a band with his boss. They made an album, which includes the track Pain (Gimme Sympathy), and I love it. It's loud, and kind of terrible, and not technically good at all, but it pulses with pure, unadulterated Jack White, and as a consequence is somehow very enjoyable in spite of that.

Post 12: WUBWUBWUB or: A Gentleman's Guide To Dirty Synth Bass

   So I was looking back at some of my earlier posts, and noticed that other than a few brief mentions of Daft Punk, I've almost completely ignored electronic music. That's not exactly earth shattering, I've ignored a lot a of different genres (I'm as aware as anyone that I've made a glaring omission of Mongolian throat singing, and I fully intend to rectify that at some point), but I do tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and so I wanted to spend some time this week and talk about this stuff, because it interests me.

  One reason that I haven't spent a lot of time talking about this stuff is that electronic is just... just a freaking huge subject, you guys. It's a genre like "oldies" is a genre, but somehow even more vaguely defined. ...HOW. I mean, I know I complained about how genres tend to be very vaguely defined in my post on New Wave, but 'electronic music' is one of the single worst offenders, because all that word means is that it's made using electronic tools. So, technically at this point a hefty majority of music that's professionally produced, not to mention almost all pop music since the mid 90's has, at the very least, electronic elements even if it would not be considered electronic per se. It's a mess.

   Conveniently, however, there are a ton of sub-genres (and sub-sub genres, yea, even unto the seventh generations), so if you like this kind of thing you can get a fairly solid grasp on the electronic scene with relative ease.

-FAIR WARNING- I both find this stuff really interesting, and have only a moderate grasp of the underlying principles, so the next paragraph or so may be excessively obtuse for many readers, and might also be wildly inaccurate for all readers. You know the risks.

   What I'm mostly going to be talking about in this post is the stuff that's referred to overall as "Electronic  Dance Music", or EDM. This is, again, a pretty catch all term, but it refers to stuff that most people think of a electronic: entirely synthetic instrumentation, big, repetitive, driving bass and drum loops, and typically not a lot of vocalizing, if any. EDM breaks down into a lot of other things, but I'm going to ignore most of them and focus in on the two types of electronic that I tend to listen to most often: house and dubstep. Both of these are frequently reviled, and there's a very good reason for that; namely a lot of the music produced under those umbrellas sucks hard.

  I personally believe that's one of the reasons why stuff like dubstep is so constantly and ferociously reviled; it's not just because only a small segment of humanity finds that kind of music at all appealing (although that's definitely a factor), but also because bad EDM composes a huge quantity of EDM as a whole, even more so than you'll see in most genres, and crappy EDM is even more annoying than crappy music in general.   When you hear a crappy pop song, it's typically boring, asinine, and/or forgettable (generally: and). When you hear a crappy EDM song, it tends to be all of those, but also horrendously unpleasant, and a lot of the time they're also ferocious earworms that get stuck in your head and are impossible to dislodge. I won't be linking to any examples, for reasons that should be obvious. You are all welcome.

   Anyway, I have a lot more to say about this, but if I let myself get really truly started on the topic I may never get around to actually mentioning specific song, so I'm going to save that frankly enormous tangent for an addendum post that I will eventually write whether or not people care, because this stuff's fun to talk about. So without further ado, let's start off with some deadmaus! This is pretty much classic house, which is to say it's a 4/4 beat at right around 140 bpm, with a structure that starts out relatively simplistic but builds with increasing complexity throughout the song until tapering off and fading out on the drum loop. I promised myself I wouldn't talk about the mechanical aspects of this stuff but it turns out I'm bad at it.

  In case that description of house music was as incoherent as I suspect it may have been, tough. I don't have  have the technical understanding to describe it in a more user friendly way, so here's a Wikipedia article on it, and best of luck to those who are interesting in finding out more regarding the mechanics. For any remaining readers, here's another house song. Like most of the house I like, I know basically nothing about the music or musician, and found it by the recommendation of a friend. If you feel dubious about the genre, just listen until you at least hit the 45 second mark, because it has a fantastic break.

   And on the subject of fantastic breaks, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to segue into dubstep. Yes, I like dubstep; haters to the left. I feel like I have to spend just a little bit more time talking about the musical protocols of dubstep, because it seems like most people have no idea what dubstep is, including those who make it. It's a rather contested genre; different people want to describe it in different ways, but as a general rule dubstep has about the same beats per minute range as house and most types of EDM (135-142 BPM, generally speaking), but is distinguished by not having the drums hit on every measure, which creates the very hollow, nervous feeling that makes dubstep so distinctive. I'm not sure how to properly explain this idea, so let me give an example: Gizmo by the artist Datsik. This is actually just as fast as both the house songs I linked to earlier, but the drums don't hit on every beat and it has much more distorted bass, which makes a very visceral effect on the listener. Listening to dubstep makes you want to flail violently and headbutt things. In case that description didn't make it obvious, it also tends to be very polarizing. People either love it or hate it, but they rarely feel ambivalent.

   Frankly, I'll be a bit surprised if many of the people reading this ending liking a lot of the music that I recommend today, as it has a considerably narrower appeal than most of the stuff I talk about, but I like it and want to share some of this stuff with people who would generally skip it, even if I don't end up converting anyone to it. Therefore, let me share just a couple more songs.

  Obviously I have to mention Skrillex, if only because he's the only dubstep artist that many people have heard of. I personally like quite a lot of his stuff, but I've found that he tends to be rather hit-or-miss. When I like his stuff I like it a lot, but when I don't it's just incredibly annoying. That being said, my favorite tracks by him are definitely Slats Slats Slats, Reptile's Theme, and Scatta. His stuff is much more melodic and in some ways more easily listenable than a lot of 'classic' dubstep, which means he gets a lot of hate, but honestly the songs are good. They're fun and silly, and would be good to headbang to, except trying to headbang to these songs is a great way to get whiplash really fast. Keeping time with breaks is not conducive to vertebral health.

   And lastly, here are two of my all time favorite electronic songs: first, Winter Winds by Fytch, who's some random guy in the Netherlands who makes music that I really like. This is my favorite song of his, mostly because it's awesome. Second, this one is technically more of a mashup than a song, and also it's a seven 1/2 minute dance routine. WATCH IT. WATCH ALL OF IT. I promise it is well worth the time spent. The song(s) is(are?) fantastic, and the choreography and execution are both perfect. You will not regret it, unless possibly you have brain problems.

And most lastly of all, here's a bonus song. I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I have a very soft spot in my heart for classic surf rock, and by far my favorite surf group is the Ventures, because they were great and had fantastic steel guitar riffs. Walk Don't Run has been a favorite of mine for as long as I can remember (literally. I learned about them because my dad had one of the records and he played it constantly when I was growing up).