RAMH@11: The Tendency of a Body in Motion to Remain in Motion (and a Playlist)

[Image: cover of While You Were Chasing Your Hat, a children’s book written by Lilian Moore and illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger, published in 2001. Kirkus Reviews said of it: “The simplicity of the words, coupled with the uncomplicated yet beautiful illustrations, offers a soothing look at the natural world.” I’m ready for some soothing!]

You probably know of the Q-and-A site called Quora: post a question there, and get answers — sometimes over the course of years — from people with a whole range of credentials. An answer’s worth, of course, can be evaluated by referring to the answerer’s credentials. But further validation comes simply from the number of upvotes the answer gets, relative to other answers to the same question.

If you’ve answered a question there, you get various notifications about other Quorans responses: comments, up- and downvotes, requests to answer similar questions, and so on.

A few days ago, I got an upvote on a question I’d answered back at the start of the year: “What is the best instrumental opening to a rock song?” My answer was no great shakes, and the gods know I have no authoritative musical credentials (even just as a listener) to brandish. But re-reading the answer got me thinking of a playlist here, for this year’s anniversary post…

As a child of the ’60s, I am naturally a fan of what we might call “hook-y music”: no, not music to skip school by (er, do they still call that “playing hooky”?), but music springing from a hook, an instrumental hook. (There are hook-y lyrics, sure, but I’m not talking about lyrics. Hell, I’m not even auditorily equipped to talk about lyrics!)

So, to the point: this year’s playlist consists of hook-y songs featured (at length or glancingly) on RAMH since 2008. (Well, not all of them were actually featured; some were just mentioned, or featured in posts which never (yet) saw the light of day.) From their opening notes and throughout, they continue to hook me — and I recognize them within the first few seconds of playing time. As with many such lists, this one could have grown to ridiculous lengths, but I’ve opted to follow the standard anniversary practice here: taken together, they’ll all fit onto a single audio CD. Vocals, most of them, and by and large rock or pop songs, but the list opens with an instrumental-only number whose first notes pretty much says to me: This is how a songwriter hooks a listener.

As with many such lists, this one could have grown to ridiculous lengths, but I’ve opted to follow the standard anniversary practice here: taken together, they’ll all fit onto a single audio CD. As usual, there’s a certain logic to their sequencing here — but as (almost?) always, I think the best way to listen to these is in “shuffle” mode — happy accidents, all that… and some of them may even be soothing.

I don’t have much to add to the annual RAMH status report today; you know how blogging has gone in the last few years, even if you’ve never before come here to chase after my hat (or your own) with me. If anything, blogging has been pushed even further aside by behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the podcasting mini-industry,  and so on. (At least Medium remains close to a general-purpose blogging site; Blogger and wordpress.com do, too, but it’s really hard to find stuff there — even if you’re sure it must be there, somewhere.)

I’ll just add today that daily life has gotten a bit… complicated over the last few months: The Missus and I are preparing to downsize; and even though I’m nominally “retired,” I continue to work around 40 hours/week at the same job. So even though I’ve thought about blogging more, it just hasn’t been feasible.

When will I pick up the pace a little? Like the Magic 8-Ball says: “Answer hazy/Try again later.” Like, say, sometime in summer!

Thanks as always for stopping by. I hope you (continue to?) get value from Running After My Hat, and I’m looking forward to running after it for at least another year!