Art vs Commerce vs Who Cares?

Do you have music that you hold in reserve for specific occasions?

Long car journeys are fundamentally incomplete without a windows down, top-of-the-lungs rendition of Living On A Prayer. When I'm running, I prefer something languorous like Adele or Radiohead - because pop music encourages me to go faster, giving me bigger stitches than Frankenstein. If I forget the iPod on a run, my brain automatically plays Nena's 99 Red Balloons on an endless loop. Welcome to my nightmare.

The obvious conclusion is that musical choice is dictated by mood and circumstance. That's why I'm puzzled by people who claim to only like one type of music (for reasons I cannot fathom, that one type of music is usually punk).

As if by magic, I had two separate parts of my musical brain tickled this weekend. On X Factor, Rihanna gave an atypically smiley performance of We Found Love that stimulated the "going down slides and bouncing on trampolines" part of my cranium. She was also wearing Fuck You shoes, in some sort of mishandled tribute to Germaine Greer.

Rihanna - We Found Love (X Factor


Meanwhile, the "ooh that's very clever, how did they do that?" side of my cerebral cortex, was on the receiving end of some heavy flirtation from art-rock outfit Field Music.

Their polyrhythmic new single (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing has a twitching energy that sounds like an R&B groove after a nervous breakdown. It'll make you want to dance, but you'll dance like Thom Yorke pissing on an electric fence.

Field Music - (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing


Both of these pieces of music get me excited in very different ways - so I'll never understand why anyone would close themselves off to either. Mind you, I wouldn't listen to Taio Cruz even if he was standing next to me, threatening my dog with a rusty knife*, so it turns out I'm as big a snob as anyone else. Tsch.

* Except I don't have a dog so the joke is on you, Cruz. The joke is on you.

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