My Life In Music

Music is my mood-altering drug of choice. Even in school, when a teacher would occasionally assign students to memorize and recite a poem. I found the poetry boring by itself, and would take the poem home, come up with a tune to go with the words, then go to class the next day and sing rather than recite it.

I wanted to somehow express all this music in my head. My parents were generous enough to provide piano lessons. I didn’t do very well though partly due to lack of practice. I wanted to play my music and not Beethoven or Chopin. I was also too naive to realize that once you properly learned to play the classics, you could later write and play your own music.

The teacher was an Armenian named Vahee, and he would sing the notes out loud while we played, but he was an albino (the disease where skin/hair are completely devoid of color making someone resemble a ghost), and this scared me at the time. So began my whistling stage.

Some time in the 80s, I went to England for the summer, and Madonna’s (Like a prayer) was at the top of the UK charts at the time. I had a chance to hear it, and also to listen to Elvis and the Beatles for the first time. Both would continue to inspire me.

A few years later, I headed for Montreal with my family. I realized that I had started to appreciate a lot of the music I couldn’t tolerate as a child. At first it was classical music (Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky), but I also listened to legends like Abd Il-Halim, and Fairuz. It helped that I was home-sick, and needed anything to try to hold on to my identity. I still couldn’t appreciate Um Kulthoom though. The only contemporary Arabic singer I liked was Majida Al-Roumy mostly because of the album Kalimat (Words) in which she sang the words of Nizar Qabbani.

Abd Al-Halim and Fairuz weren’t exactly good looking (see above), but then again without video clips to film they didn’t have to be. Rather than watching video clips, I liked to listen to a popular radio show called KC’s Countdown in which KC Kasem would list and play the top songs on the Adult Contemporary (AC) charts as well as some older music listing interesting facts about the songs and artists along the way. On this show, I heard the song that would mark the first time I was in love (Please Don’t Go by KC & The Sunshine).

I also started doing a lot of karaoke. I used a Korean software called real orche that would play a format called .kar which is essentially a midi file containing the music behind a popular song, the words are embedded in the kar file as text. Real Orche highlighted the part you should sing. At the end of the song, it would rate how well you sang. I even bought a 10 band Equalizer Stereo deck to use for voice cancellation. This was fun for a while, but both the software and the kar format lost their popularity, and the trend died.

	As I started to acclimate to my surroundings in Quebec, I became fond of Celine Dion who had just released her first popular English Album (The Color of My Love). She was discovered at age 12 by Renee Angelil who became her manager. When she turned 26, she married Renee who was exactly twice her age at the time.

By 1996 I began building up a CD collection of various genres. I didn’t care how old or unpopular an album was. The only problem was each CD cost $12-$25, and on average had 7-12 songs with 1-3 good ones. This hardly seemed fair, but there was no alternative. It was on this year that I first heard and admired Diana Haddad. This would only last 4 years between her Saken (1996), and Shater (1999) albums. After that, she pretty much sold out her Lebanese roots and started singing in Khaleeji (gulf dialect).

By 1997 an mp3 software called Winamp was released. I liked it so much that I converted all of my CDs to MP3s (Fraunhoffer codec) keeping only my favorite songs of each album. I then gave away all my CDs to my brother.

In 1998 I purchased the first (popular) MP3 player on the market (the Diamond-PMP 300). The music recording companies sued the manufacturer almost instantly and lost! Around the same time, my cousin introduced me to Jewel Kilcher’s music. Her (Foolish Games) song would mark the second and last time I fell in love!

The next major development was in 1999 when Napster was released. My song collection was now in the thousands, and unlike the CD collection where most of the songs on each CD were lousy,  I liked every single one. I looked up the song charts for every year from 1930-2000, and got every top 10 song for each year (700 songs in all). My favorite are the 60s.

The worst thing about the 90s (musically) was that rap and hip hop became mainstream. What a shame that black musicians moved from beautiful eloquent Jazz to ugly violent hateful Rap. The first time it hit me. I was in a movie theatre with a friend waiting for the movie (a romantic comedy) to start, and suddenly the speakers started blaring (I’ve got my bitches, I’ve got my guns, I Got my homies by my side).

Not only isn’t that music, it’s a stretch to even call it poetry. If that wasn’t bad enough, they were shouting the words out. The dancers “shaking their booty” next to the rappers made the sleazy lyrics even worse. I remember discussing this with a rap music fan once, who insisted that there are Rap love songs. Although I dislike Heavy Metal (the creepy vocals, not the skillful guitar playing)  just as much, it just never became as popular as rap, so it didn’t matter.

Today in the CD/DVD stores of old Amman, you could buy the entire discography of a Fairuz, or Abdul Halim on a single DVD for 1JD. It seems that the news of the plan to close these stores down was greatly exaggerated. It’s staggering that someone’s entire life’s work can be broken down to less than $2. The artists must be shaking in their graves.

I have never been to any concert. I made a list below of the 100 concerts I would want to go to. An exclamation mark (!) designates the ones that are off limits due to death, old age, retirement, expiry, etc.

Diana Krall: I became fond of this Canadian Jazz-Pianist in 2001 when I first heard her cover of the song (The look of love) in a TV commercial. I got the album of the same name, and have been a fan ever since. I will be attending Diana’s concert in Amman within 2 weeks. This will be my first concert ever.

! Abd Il-Halim Hafez: His music will live forever, but he died of Schistosomiasis in 1977.

! Barbra Streisand: De Facto Retired, but still does a concert for charity every now and then.

! Billie Holiday: The greatest female Jazz Singer ever, but she was penniless when she died of liver cirrhosis in 1959.

! Bob Marley: His music is more spiritual to me than any Gregorian Chant or Quran Recitation I’ve ever heard. He died of cancer in 1981.

Celine Dion: At the height of her career, she temporarily retired to manufacture babies. When she was done, she became just another Vegas act. Still her talent shines anywhere.

! Dalida: Committed suicide in 1987. What a waste of a beautiful voice.

! Elvis Presley: Died in 1977 due to abuse of prescription-drugs.

! Fairuz: Still does concerts occasionally but I couldn’t bare to listen to her voice now and would rather remember how perfect it used to be.

! Frank Sinatra: His last concert was in 1995. He died in 1998 at the age of 82. His tombstone inscription says “the best is yet to come”.

Jewel Kilcher: Her first 3 folksy albums (Pieces of you, Spirit, This Way) were original and inspiring. Then she realized corny music doesn’t sell well in this millennium. She sold out to commercialized pop with songs like Intuition (supposedly a parody). To make things worse she then released a country music album. Still I adore her.

! John Denver: Country roads or not his voice will always “take you home”. He died in a plane crash in 1997.

! Luciano Pavarotti: Some say there were 3, others 4. To me there can only be 1 and now he’s gone. He died of cancer in 2007.

! Madonna: Although she is known for re-inventing herself across 3 decades, the Madonna I know and loved sang between 1984-2000, and should have retired rather than try to keep up with the talentless Britneys out there.

Pink (Alecia Moore): Still touring, and M!ssundaztood as ever!

! Queen (Freddy Mercury): Died in 1991 twenty four hours after releasing a statement confirming he was HIV positive. I mourn him to this day.

Shania Twain: Hasn’t released anything new in 4 years although she said she will this year. It’s too bad she made it singing country music first. Her voice is lovely in any genre.

Sheryl Crow: She’s approaching 50, but even if she just sings her oldies, it’ll make me ecstatic.

! The Beatles (John Lennon): They will never be equaled. No one can quite get away with the flowery lyrics they sang, and still make it sound really cool. John Lennon was assassinated in 1980.

! The Corries: Roy Williamson, one of the two singers in this Scottish duo died of a brain tumor in 1990.

The Cranberries (Dolores O’Riordan):The band broke up in 2003, but aside from a brief interruption due to illness in Winter 2007, Dolores continues to tour solo.

! The Doors (Jim Morrison): Jim died at 27 years of age of a heroin overdose in 1971.

! The Eagles: Released their last album in 2007. It was the only album they released in 28 years. Although the 2 original vocalists (Don Henley and Glenn Frey) are alive, they’re nearly 60 years old. So I’d rather listen to the recordings.

The Pretenders (Chrissie Hynde): Chrissie is 56 and the pretenders last hit was in 1999. Still I’d love to hear her sing (Back on the Chain Gang) one more time.

Weezer (Rivers Cuomo): If anyone can take the corny type of lyrics the Beatles used to sing and make them rock it’s weezer. They’ve released their latest (red album) a couple of weeks ago.

! Whitney Houston: Although she’s still trying to “come back”, her career and brilliant voice was destroyed by drug addiction.

Here are the other 74 in alphabetical order: