Music I like to listen to

This was originally written as an answer to the Quora question “What music does Issa Rice listen to?”

I mostly listen to mainstream Western music from a few decades back: Bob Dylan1, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Kinks2, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Velvet Underground (roughly in that order). I’ve also fairly recently discovered Fishmans3, Sidi Touré, Detektivbyrån, Jean Michel Jarre, Jean-Luc Ponty, mostly through my father.

I also like some simple Japanese songs like ゴンドラの唄 (Gondola no Uta), Aogeba Tōtoshi and 赤とんぼ (童謡) (Red Dragonfly).

I also like João Gilberto’s Chega de Saudade album (even though I’ve never bothered to look up any of the lyrics besides the title track’s) and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Stone Flower. I’m a huge fan of the Bossa Nova Japanification Project (ボサノヴァ日本語化計画).

I do sometimes wonder why I don’t listen as much to Japanese music. It may be that since I’ve spent all my teenage years (when I first got interested in listening to music) in the US, my musical tastes were influenced that way.

I’m open to suggestions (e.g. sometimes Kristin Lie will show me a song), but I feel I’ve mostly discovered what I like, so I don’t spend time actively searching for new things to listen to. Finding more Japanese songs I like would be especially nice though.

I should also mention that I can go for long periods (weeks) without listening to any music. It might just be that my collection is so small I get bored of it quickly, but can come back to it after some amount of time has passed.

Some others:

  1. “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, “Visions of Johanna”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, “Just Like a Woman”, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “I Want You”, “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, and many more.↩

  2. I really enjoy Ray Davies’ cynical worldview. See songs like “Sitting in my Hotel”, “Supersonic Rocket Ship” (I read this as an indictment of modernity’s populism/PC culture: “Nobody’s gonna travel second class / There’ll be equality / And no suppression of minorities”), “Celluloid Heroes”, “Waterloo Sunset” (okay, this one is just sweet), “Apeman”, “Autumn Almanac”, “Little Miss Queen Of Darkness”, “People Take Pictures of Each Other”, “The Hard Way”, “Afternoon Tea”, “Wonderboy”, “I’m On An Island”.↩

  3. “頼りない天使”, “バックビートにのっかって”, and also their later albums: 空中キャンプ, 宇宙 日本 世田谷, ORANGE.↩

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