Mental Notes & Random Musings

Ok, can we get one thing straight right now. Will Smith hasn’t crossed the point where he should put himself out there yet. To be clear, Tupac's girlfriend’s cuckold husband really should just stay in the basement until his very presence doesn’t remind us of his failed parenthood, and fake marriage. Yes, he was very talented in the day, and he may even still be talented now, but the slap heard round the world where he tried to be a bully instead of a cuckold, is still fresh in our minds. The vision of him talking about his wife’s affair with his son’s friend on his wife’s podcast is still fresh in our minds. The vision of his son walking around with a black foam castle wrapped around his head is still fresh in our mind. His newest music video reminds us that we haven’t been throwing tomatoes at him lately.  The fact that his video is one of those traditional 90s style videos with the girlies dancing around, dressed like club hos, while Will da Pimp bounces in and out of the frame. ...

First day back to work and I was expecting a pretty hectic day catching up with my backlog of work as well as all the month end paperwork. It was slightly more complicated because I was going to be spending four hours of my day in the classroom training a new employee on how to be safe. You would think that this would be the perfect day to not get music stuck in my head but that would make you wrong. My age fatigued brain and decades of impressionability can get all the background music in the horrible safety instructional videos. Most of which are bad after school specials probably made by a government agency. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some indoctrination tactics in the music to begin with.  No matter which class I leave I always have that dopey piano tune from the heat stress video stuck in my head. The video itself talks about someone dying after falling off a roof with a drawing of a foot hanging out of a body bag with a toe tag in it, but my head just has “dum du...

My cell phone split in half this week. It was strange to see what a Pixel 6 looked like with the screen detached from it. It still worked but the battery was getting so hot that it burned off all the glue, which means I was basically carrying a firebomb in my pocket, so I shelved it. This means that I had to grab my old Motorola 5G Ace that I keep for times like these. Unfortunately, it no longer is supported by the Xfinity Mobile Network, meaning, no phone. It’s times like these when I realize how dependent I am on my cell phone for my musical needs, and how it is vital for getting songs out of my head. I’m impressionable after all and with the new algorithms that the streaming companies use to target ads at me, I can tell you it picks a lot of tunes that get stuck in your head and suck at the same time.  Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of songs that get used constantly in commercials that are sometimes a welcome change to your mood. “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls (Ma...

I finally noticed something on YouTube that has become a new addiction. I mean it has been there for quite a while now but somehow it evaded me until lately, and I am making up for lost time. Hot women playing heavy metal on the piano. This would have given me a profound need to learn the piano in my teens and may have led to a valuable skill going into my adult years had there actually been a world wide web and had I not grown-up poor. At least that is what I tell myself while I am perving on women half my age that are banging away at piano keys. To be fair, I did add most of these tunes to a playlist that I can listen to while I work out, where I can’t see the pretty women in the videos, so the music itself is that good and I am only half a pervert, because it does stand on its own without the eye candy. I happen to listen to classical music a lot mostly at work or on an odd workout day when I need something different. Classical music is just heavy metal before electricity if you thi...

For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is constantly stuck in my head at work, mostly because I am impressionable, but partially because there is a ringer that goes off for both ends of the line to communicate with each other. Now I came to this conclusion after days of whistling this song, not whistling this song, getting the song out of my head by any necessary measures, just to find it back in there again. I was leaving a meeting and walked past the line when I heard the bell and then started whistling again. I was so proud of figuring this out I was telling everyone about it and most of them reminded me of my looming senility. I of course work with someone named Jean, who anytime I start entering paperwork with her name on it in the system the song Billy Jean gets stuck in my head and more than once I have had someone walk into my office when I was making Michael Jackson sounds. Those are the looming senility by an obviously dirty old pervert moments, that forces me to use Smooth Criminal (Th...

Gym playlists are one of the most shared streams on music streaming services, and there was a time when I had my gym playlists on my MP3 player all set for when I went to the gym. Yes, my experience of gym playlist goes back to pre-streaming era when I had to go to Plan-NOT Fitness, and it was all I could afford on my single father salary. My experience today is as an empty nester that started building my home gym several years before the covid-apocalypse out of garbage picking and Craigslist finds. The entire scene here gets more casual as I set up a screen to listen to and watch my podcasts (usually Megyn Kelly or Sara Gonzalez) but I do make a habit of listening to the 80’s rewind Top 40 every week too. It’s not the usual power metal or symphonic metal I listed to on the old MP3 player, but this brings me to the topic at hand, with a little background.  Of course I have playlists on my YT Music, and I base them all on the decade. I have the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s,10s, and am working...

If you look over the years, the styles have changed - the clothes, the hair, the production, the approach to the songs. The icing to the cake has changed flavors. But if you really look at the cake itself, it's really the same ~ John Oates

I genuinely don’t have any issue with today’s artists, or any artists for that matter. I can see the good and bad in just about anything and I have an honest criterion for music. If a tune is catchy, aka gets stuck in your head after you hear it, then it is good. At the very least at that point I can say, I understand why people like it. I’m not a Taylor Swift fan, per se, because her music doesn’t appeal to me, or I don’t seek it out, but “Blank Space” will stay stuck in my head for a while when I come across it in my travels. The same can be said for most of what Lady Gaga did, and a Katy Perry song now and again, regardless of how insufferable I find those two to be. It is what it is, but I usually make a joke about how I never appreciated someone else when I was a kid. My own taste in music generally has tempered itself over the years, as I am now listening to the stuff, I would have been listening to in my teen years if I had been a little more normal, I guess. The heavy metal, I ...