March: Decades of Music

Image from the video of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean

We've got our monthly selection of music again, right under the wire. I always hate running late on this enjoyable feature. It seems stupid celebrating the sounds of one month in another.

Over the decades, the month of March has been full of good and interesting music. In fact, it was a bit hard winnowing my selections down to just nine songs. Some fun music was left to the side. So, we'll have to pass up on Snow's "Informer" from '93 and Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" from '98. Maybe we'll listen to them next time, in five years or so. ;-)

Another funny point about this month's post is that it would have been very easy to make it totally focused on Dance music. The whole reason why I changed the post titles, in January, from "Monthly Dance Party" was because it was too tough to put together a broadly enjoyable collection while just focusing on that genre. Well, it's all for the better; I can now honestly choose whatever sounds and videos catch my enthusiasm.

Interior art from Evanescence's album Fallen

Well, that's enough blather. Let's get to the music!!!

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.

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. ;-)