BitchyVeganSoundtrack

Look kids! We made it to the next letter of the alphabet. I blame this mainly on my lack of sleep (blame Ra Ra Riot and a grueling early teaching schedule) for my inability to “like” most everything today. At one point today I told a student, “You make me so mad sometimes I want to tear off your limbs… I want to go T-Rex on you”. The student laughed, assuming I was joking. I was not.

Not having a minimum of 8 hours of sleep does weird things to me. It also created an urge to purchase and learn the violin, until I learned how utterly complicated that is and how utterly old I am. Blerg.

For today, we are left with two bands that had to overcome my shitastic mood. It’s apparently possible which is uplifting, if only to me. At this point even a unicorn holding a baby laughing wouldn’t do the trick, so I am impressed.

California Wives are anything but. They are instead a group of boys hailing from Chicago that make delicious pop music and deserve all the recognition that they will surely get at this years SxSW. Try and tell me that you don’t enjoy it and watch as I tear your limbs off… or something.

Then we have someone who manages to trump my own language barrier. True, I have NO idea what she’s singing about unless she says, “Quero” or “Me llamo es Amanda”… which is all that I have managed to retain from 3 years of Spanish. What she does is that good. The fact that she makes all this noise, alone, and live… makes her my heroine. She could be singing about dogs eating sticks… I don’t care, it’s lovely.

If I survive to see tomorrow, and still retain employment, it will be a miracle. I am officially too old for going out on school nights. Guess I better just propose to the boyfriend of one month and buy a moomoo.

First, let me go off into a little tangent here. I got to talking yesterday with my friend who operates PhillyMostlyVegan.com (read it, she’s lovely)… the discussion quickly went to music and blogging, weird, I know. Needless to say that we got into a somewhat philosophical/hilarious conversation about how to properly review a show. It seems she and I both share the common ground (and honestly, it’s common ground for everyone whether you like it or not) that you can only describe art in a way that you experience it (which for both of us went something like, “it was soooo- fun…. because… it was fun!”).

It seems so weird to me that we spend so much time reading the words of film reviewers, food critics, CD reviewers… it’s so… personal. Art in general seems to be something so finely tuned into someone’s DNA. Yes, you can become more aware and learn about more in whichever realm of it you choose, but it does little to change your tastes, it only expands existing ingrained likes, no? I will agree that they change over time, but isn’t that also following along a route of taste? It becomes so muddled that we can’t determine why we like what we like… we just do.

Which is why I find it so hard to go to a show and pick it apart. All I can do is state, I liked it, because… I liked it. It seems so elementary. It also seems so contradictory to pick something apart when I know so little about WHY I enjoy it so. Do I know how to make every musical instrument and play them? No. Do I know the chemicals in hummus that make my mouth water? No. Do I know why Franz Marc’s Blue Horses is my favorite painting? Not really.

In a world of art and human free will… it all seems to come down to the 3 year old argument of, “Because!”

So as to the show last night, I liked it. I liked it because it made me happy. The music in my own ears sounded like what my ears like to hear. I am sure there are people who had a poor time, or who thought the singer looked too much like Ben Folds (like, whoa) but I am just as sure that there are people who had one of the best nights of their life last night. This might just be my last time reviewing a show… I think I am best at just stating which bands I like lots and lots without a whole lot of justification, instead of trying to be a connoisseur of live performance.

Ra Ra Riot made a group of late twenty-somethings dance in their pants. That is what I know. Just… because.

Now onto today’s exploration of my SxSW collection Expect a lot of, “Because!”…