Paideia: January: Decades of Music

Thursday, January 31, 2013

January: Decades of Music

The Bee Gees kicked off their Saturday Night Fever success with "How Deep Is Your Love"

I stopped writing the old "Monthly Dance Party" posts a while back because of two reasons. First, although it's fun to look at different musical trends over the decades, contrasted in five-year intervals, I didn't feel as if my writing was giving anything special to the topic. My posts were little more than a couple pictures and a list of videos.

Second, I got lazy. Feeling as if these music posts were just list-compiling drudgery, I couldn't muster up the energy or enthusiasm to write about the songs or my experiences of the music. Yeah, with a little effort, I could have addressed my first concern, but that very problem broke my morale and sapped my will, creating a vicious cycle of negative feedback. My posts were vapid and that drained my enthusiasm, which, in turn, kept me from improving upon my posts.

That's kind of stupid, but that's how it went down. But, with a new year, I'll try to start the project up again and try to make things more interesting. We'll see.

Duran Duran, Ordinary World, Wedding Album

Artwork for Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" from the interior of the Wedding Album

This month, I went easy on the selections with nothing too far from the mainstream. I didn't hit many Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers, but they all probably made good chart positions. Sure, I could have dug a bit deeper into the music, turning up forgotten gems, but there's nothing wrong with mainstream music.

After all, we're here to have fun. ;-)

Let's get to January's list:

"Some Velvet Morning" by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood