So, the Oscars were presented last night...

... which means that it's time for everyone who thinks he knows something about music (hi!) to make fun of the musical nominees/performances. Ironically, the Best Original Song tends to be the one category for which originality is not rewarded, which usually results in a handful of unmemorable and similar-sounding tunes being nominated (I remember Roger Ebert commenting one year that you could switch songs around between the movies and it wouldn't really make any difference). This year, we had three songs from Enchanted that all kinda made my head hurt (though, given that the film is a kind-of-sendup-sort-of of Disney fairytale movies, maybe that's what they were supposed to do), a gospelish vamp from August Rush that I gave up on trying to find a melody in after about 30 seconds, and a relatively inoffensive ballad from that movie Once, which I haven't seen but is supposed to be really good and it was low-budget and the people who wrote it and ended up winning seemed pretty nice, so, you know, yay.

Do you remember?

Lately I've been going through a nostalgia craze for the music of the 1980's... more specifically, the music I bought and listened to during those musically formative years. Most of it was purchased on cassette, so I've taken it upon myself to replace as much of it as I can afford on shiny new (and used) CD's. It's been a lot of fun scouring Amazon, eBay and various used music stores, hunting for the cheapest prices on albums by the Replacements, R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, the Minutemen, Husker Du, etc., etc. One thing that's struck me is that I used to listen to music almost exclusively on a Walkman, owing as much to convenience as to the fact that my mostly "alternative" tastes weren't shared by my peers or my family. It's been oddly exhilirating to be able to listen to these songs (most of which I haven't heard in close to twenty years) turned all the way up in my own home.



More reviews (and stuff like this) to come. Promise!