THE MUSIC IN MY MIND

...decides to stay there, eternally, (as in I'll be loving you...), for music, in my case, is an elemental thing: like earth, like wind, like fire, even if not necessarily by Earth, Wind and Fire, and definitely not by Air Supply. I may have said it before but I'll say it again: the house I grew up in was a house of music, and the music was varied, never vapid, even if some of us who lived there can't carry a tune or read a note or play a chord with sufficient accord.

My childhood bud once asked me to choose between television and stereo, and I told him, You can have our tv, and I'll throw in the ref, too, but don't you dare touch the stereo with a 10-foot pole. For in that little corner of the living room where the vintage stereo sat was where I developed these qualities I now possess: the love for music, the ear for poetry, and the perpetual kabag due to lotus-sitting on the floor while listening to my records, hours and hours on end.

But let us say I'm so fixated with cliche (I really am) and felt the strong pull of doing a best list. Very well then, I'll do it with music, verily, on my mind. And so, with all the music I've listened to all these many years, I may have found a schtick to select my best, my greatest, albums of all time.

1. Rubber Soul (The Beatles) - I once heard a music mogul say he knew of great artists who spawned entire careers out of this one Beatles album. I may not know any of them, but I did not doubt him. Beatles music, after all, encompasses generations and geopraphies, as if, in the creation of music, the musical god said "Let there be Beatles music", and there was Beatles music, the first day. But of all their wonderful albums, I choose this one because I consider it their most definitive, and best representative of their - poetry (Nowhere Man); melody (Michelle); eccentricity (Girl); and over-all musicality (In My Life).

2. The Dark Side of The Moon (Pink Floyd) - The quintessential trip album, there are many facets in this recording worth mentioning, including the cleanest record engineering known to me, if not to man (Alan Parsons, of the Alan Parsons Project, was its record engineer). Here's a little story: one day in college when I was having booze with friends and listening to the track Great Gig in the Sky which begins with a narration "I have a friend who died...", a classmate came to us and said a girl-classmate died. We were all so stunned, then looked at each other forlornly, and from that day on till many months later this Pink Floyd album became our grief companion. The Dark Side of the Moon also happens to have some strange parallelisms to the movie Wizard of Oz.

3. OK Computer (Radiohead) - the most complex cd I have ever listened to, this one, I think, resonates more anti-establishment sentiments than Pink Floyd's The Wall cd. I get a different kind of sensation, and entertain a different kind of thought, each time I listen to the songs in this album, and these are, I must say, the precise reactions to music that ultimately ends up as classic. No Suprises, no surprises there, happens to be my favorite Radiohead song, even if the lyrics do not seem to contain the loneliness of the melody.

(to be continued)