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Soul Music by Terry Pratchett
Soul Music
Jeff was right. It is a great book, and a great introduction to Discworld. It includes almost all of my favorite characters in a fun story about an Imp who moves to Ankh-Morpork to follow his dream of being a musician. He ends up inventing “music with rocks in.” It includes satire that smells a little like Spinal Tap and a little like The Blues Brothers.
If you like the characters of Death and Susan, or if you like CMOT Dibbler, or if you like the orangutan librarian, or if you like music or if you’ve ever liked any Discworld novels at all, you’ll probably like Soul Music. And if you’ve never read anything by Pratchett before, this is a fantastic place to start.
alanaisreading replied to your post: This is probably going to get me a butt ton of hate.
You’re too young to understand.Then explain to me please how I, a 22 year old, don’t understand, yet I seem to follow youngsters between the ages of 16-18 who do understand. :P
My point is, you only know Kurt Cobain second-hand from what the media reports after his death. You were, what, 4, when he died? I was 17. The same week that he died, there were two car accidents and a triple murder at my high school, so it was an emotionally raw time for me.
Have you studied his life beyond just “drug use and suicide”? To start with, he had a huge impact on music. You don’t understand what music at the end of the 80’s was like, and how Nirvana changed everything.
But beyond music, Kurt was a kind, generous and gentle person. He loved people and hated inequality and bullies. He was a straight man, posing in a dress on the cover of gay magazines in the early 1990’s. Do you even have any idea how ahead of his time he was? No one was standing up for the LGBT community in the early 90’s except Nirvana.
Yes, Kurt Cobain was mentally ill. He suffered from severe depression, and possibly bipolar disorder, which was never properly treated. But to see him as less of a person because he was mentally ill is an insult to all mentally ill people.
I’m not saying you have to love his music, or even love him. What I am saying is that I lived in Seattle. Some of my friends actually knew him. Like, in real life. Like, they hung out with him and talked to him at cafes and people’s houses. He was a real person. Forget his cartoon character of a widow. Forget that he used drugs. Forget how he died. He was a human being who cared deeply about other human beings. For that alone, I will always respect and miss him.
(At the same time, I don’t post pics of Kurt Cobain on my blog much. He was a huge influence on me personally and musically - back when I was a musician - but his death is still the death of a friend to me. I can’t casually post my dead friends between Benedict Cumberbatch and a cartoon about vegetables.)
Closing Down by Poor Old Lu
(Someone make sure this is played at my funeral. By the actual original band, if possible. They know me, and the lead singer owes me a favor.)
I need to talk about my family.
There are things about my family that I rarely discuss with people outside my family. They’re not things that the family is ashamed of necessarily. Just oddities.
I bring this up now because it is Thanksgiving later this week and I was thinking about the thanksgivings and Christmasses of my childhood, and how they bear little to no resemblance to the holidays of my friends or family now.
My family sang. A lot. When I was a tiny little kid back in the late 70s and early 80s, my grandparents had a painted school bus and they used to travel around Minnesota giving concerts in churches on the weekends, like some kind of Christian Partridge Family. I performed in these concerts. I was the cute tiny kid singing a duet with my mom.
At holiday times, we sang more. Grandma played the piano and we gathered around and sang ridiculous old-timey songs like “Mairsey Doats” and “Maharaja of Magador”. My cousin can tell you a story about how her high school graduation party degenerated into the whole family singing a song about “Lamplighting Time in the Valley” in a variety of musical styles, including my aunt Ruth beatboxing.
Most of this stuff ended (or at least slowed down) after my grandma died when I was in college. If I talk about it now, people don’t believe me that as recently as the 1990s, my family used to have singalongs around the piano. That was something that died out a century earlier. But not in my family.
Now if you’ll excuse me, thanksgiving is Thursday, so I have to brush up on the lyrics to “I’m My Own Grandpa” and “The Three Little Fishies.”
(Source: girlalive.com)
(Source: girlalive.com)
