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Tag Archives: music

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Today I choose to edit an old post (TIC00046d)

The PolyBlog
September 6 2020

So my last two posts about choices have been somewhat inter-related. I’m working on a project that I started some 17 years ago. I’m now calling it “A PolyWogg Guide to Music”, just cuz I like naming my projects. And I didn’t want to call it Dave.

The intent is that I will look at the Billboard top 100 list each year, as well as some other songs from the year that maybe didn’t make Billboard’s sales lists, and see what I think “endures” past the year. There are lots of songs I listen to from the 1980s or 90s and think, “How the heck did that chart?”. The song was mildly entertaining, maybe a bit of a riff that was catchy, but after one year, pffft, it was gone.

And back in about 2003, maybe even somewhat earlier, I started looking at the idea of doing every year. I originally thought, maybe I’d start with around 1980. And I did 1980’s list, made some playlists from it, burned some CDs, and I really liked the result. But the more I messed around with it, the more I started to see “missing” links to earlier music. 1980 was an interesting year to start with, as I saw some songs from the tail-end of the disco era, some others starting into the big hair phase, early sounds of what would become things like Miami Vice themes, etc.

At the time, I was just doing it to see if maybe there was a good way to do up killer playlists for myself. Then, as I started to see trends crossing years, the analyst side of me kicked in. Later, I was listening to a couple songs from about 1955, the early days of rock and roll, and a couple of songs were almost post-40s swing, a bit of R&B, and pre-rock.

It’s kind of a thing with me, casting my eyes backward on what came before. I would love to review all the Best Picture Oscar winners, so I started with 1927 and Wings. I want to review some award-winning mysteries, so I start with the first year of the Edgars. For a current project I am doing on astronomy, I’m starting with the first issues of Sky and Telescope from 1941.

For my review of music, the first year for which I have a reliable set of lists of top songs is really 1943. And while there are lists for R&B, soul, country, classical, jazz, etc., I am focusing on the pop and rock charts (often together). But that wasn’t what my “choice” was about today.

Today, I decided to fix a post. Over the last two days, I’ve made choices about ways to do the formatting and layout, or more pointedly, choices about how much time and effort I want to put into getting the formatting and layout right. I wrote the first post 3 or 4 years ago, and reviewed 1943. There were 117 songs in my working list, and I don’t remember how long it took me to go through them. The point isn’t to rush through them, maybe I’ll do 2 songs one day or 20 the next, it is just that I have a list to work from and I can take notes as I go, marking down ratings or even if the song has some sort of audio glitch in the middle and needs to be replaced.

Yet even if I get the formatting right (which I did) and finally decided on a working layout (which I did), the prose was NOT hanging together. The main pieces were fine, but there was something off with the flow. It had always seemed incomplete to me.

You should know something, I guess, about my editing style. I edit as I go. I am not a writer that plunges ahead, does a whole draft and then goes back and fixes things, nor do I write to an outline usually. If I am in THIS paragraph, and I start to take it in a slightly different direction than I was thinking 2 or 3 paragraphs back, I might finish the sentence here, and then go back and tweak that other paragraph before going on. I tend to think of it as my “edit” window is the last three paragraphs. They are constantly in pencil, so to speak, and as I go, I will indeed frequently edit something several rows back.

But this was more than that. I felt like I had no consistent flow, no real message, kind of like I was lacking a storyline or narrative. Which seems silly for a non-fiction piece, until I realized what I was really lacking was my normal voice. I had comments here and there, other facts I dropped in, but what was really missing was “me”.

So I stepped back and did what I used to do at work when reviewing speeches for Ministers when the flow seemed off. I basically wrote a reverse outline of what I wanted to say, and the problem was obvious. I had 2 or 3 pieces that were linked, but I had separated them by several paragraphs, so it was jumping around. An easy fix. But once in the weeds, I let my inner editor go crazy. Lots of places in the piece were expressed a little too casually, while others were more formal. I smoothed them out, made them more consistent, made them more “me”.

I spent way too much time on a few headings, trying them in regular text, then in a table format, as a large header, as a small header, as a header with multiple colours, and finally as medium headers with one colour and some italics for the song names. Then when I got to my final comments, I grouped them in order with a common structure and feel to them, so it makes a better sense of what I was trying to convey about my review methodology. All of which was helping “me be me” in the piece.

Why am I fussing? Because generally speaking, if I do this for every year from 1943 to 2020 and beyond, I want the structure right before I start, as well as the general approach to content. I hesitate to raise it to the level of saying that I want to do a “professional job” of it, not the right nuance, more just that I have pretty high standards and I feel like it finally meets them. Am I going to have any amazing insights into music that will revolutionize the industry? Hell no, I know less about music than most 11-year-old piano students. But I have views about what I think endures and adds to the cultural collective and what should probably remain a footnote.

I spent a LOT of time editing one single post. And while it IS 3500 words, my edit:writing ratio was pretty high for this one. I don’t know if it was really worth it, but I’m pretty happy with the result. A PolyWogg Guide to Music: 1943 – Pop is the first of many posts about music, I hope other people like them too.

Today I choose to edit myself out the wazoo.

What choices are you making today?

Posted in Computers | Tagged computers, goals, music, music review, website | Leave a reply

A PolyWogg Guide to Music: 1943 – Pop (MUS00001)

The PolyBlog
September 5 2020

I have thought about a series of posts about music hits for a long time. At one point, I was envisioning the idea of “Billboard got it wrong” as the theme, the idea that listing by sales might be a good short-term measure of a hit in the year it is recorded, but ten, twenty, even fifty years later, is it still a song that holds up? Or is there some sort of historical “correction” that I could apply, albeit biased by personal subjectivity, that would be “my view of the musical hits for year x”. A PolyWogg Guide to Music, if you will.

As I started preparing for the project, a topic that interested me as far back as 17 years ago even, I was caught by the most basic question — what year would I start with? While Billboard really got going in the 50s, it had some lists as far back as ’46, and there were some other emerging lists even during the war years. I eventually decided to go with the first real list that I found with a credible methodology based on something resembling sales. That year was 1943.

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Posted in Music Reviews | Tagged music, music review, PWGM | Leave a reply

Today I choose to go down a musical rabbit hole (TIC00040d)

The PolyBlog
August 31 2020

I was tempted to include the full post I wrote about the rabbit hole that is “genres” for my music collection as a “Today I choose” post, but the reality is that it is more of a series of posts on their own. So the TL;DR version of The rabbit hole that is organizing a digital music collection is that while I am making great progress on storing, backing up, and playing my music collection, I still have work to do to make it more shareable and a TON of work to do in simply organizing it by genres. I’ll … Continue reading →

Posted in Goals | Tagged goals, music, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

The rabbit hole that is organizing a digital music collection

The PolyBlog
August 31 2020

I have a lot of digital music on my computer, and a subscription to Apple Music. So just about anything I want or need is available digitally. So we’re purging our CD collection. That’s a separate issue altogether, and while I’m happy to donate them wherever will take them (unfortunately the library is saying no to everything at the moment), it also gives me a small nudge to organize my digital collection. Putting the various pieces together Based on the various reading that I have done, having a well-organized and functional music collection involves five main pieces: Storage Backup option(s) … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers | Tagged goals, music, organizing | Leave a reply

Today I choose to listen to some nostalgia (TIC00039d)

The PolyBlog
August 30 2020

When I finished my post yesterday, I said I was going to take a break for a couple of days, but that was more about not being near a computer than it was about wanting or needing a break. I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m at for things, and blogging as well. I’ve got a small milestone coming up, and I’m looking forward to writing about it in my blog. But I was going to be at the cottage, or so I thought, so I had planned a short stoppage. Yet, morning came, and J wasn’t feeling well. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Goals | Tagged goals, music, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

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