Here goes. (note that I haven't exactly mirco-managed my music library on this computer yet so I'm going to skip songs I don't know)

20 SONGS
(artist - song)
Put your media player on shuffle. Write what songs come up and any thoughts you have about them.

1. Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out
I have a non-scientific suspicion that iTunes favors singles on shuffle over other songs. Anyway, Franz Ferdinand used to be one of my favorite bands but I simply listened to them too much. And for the record, the first part of this song is the best... the other parts can get repetitive. It could use a solo.

2. Spinal Tap - (Listen To The) Flower People
When I first heard the Spinal Tap soundtrack (inspired to do so by Guitar Hero 2)... I didn't really get it. It makes a little more sense now. Songs like don't exactly have laugh-out-loud lyrics but they are a fairly entertaining parody of the musical style. Then again, 60s pop songs are so ridiculous from a modern-day perspective, it seems a little unnecessary.

3. Queens of the Stone Age - Misfit Love
Probably the ONLY song of I know of that incorporates a vocal riff into the rhythm section without being annoying. The way the two rhythm guitar parts play off each other is also pretty remarkable. Maybe it's the pot? Nah, couldn't be. The line at the end of the chorus ("It's a god damn sick thing...") gets stuck in my head frequently for some reason. QotSA are great with confusing, poetic lyrics. ("Just a dead man, walking through the dead of night")

4. The Beatles - Blackbird
Holy crap, beautiful. I can't think of any other way to describe. It's only 2 minutes long, has one instrument, the sound of a hand hitting against something (like a leg?), and a multi-tracked vocal. And somehow, it's more moving than the entire Beach Boys discography. (random jab, don't take it seriously)

5. Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence
Another wonderful song. Depeche Mode has a long of songs that harness a strange, apocalyptic beauty, and this track is right on target. Coincidentally, it's also one of their only popular songs. (The others being Personal Jesus, Just Can't Get Enough, and... People Are People? I'm not sure what was actually popular at the time.) It also stands as solid evidence that a song can be both danceable and moving.

The post-outro's friggin' weird, though.

*ding*
....
....
....
(slight synth pad)
(eerie bassline)
(slight melody enters)
CRUCIFIED!
(airplane going off, then coming back, then going off again)
(continue until fade-out)

6. Ween - The Golden Eel
Ehh... Strange, and kind of interesting, but it crawls like a slug. Those reverse cymbals are the only thing keeping up the tension. The drums (synth drums? sampled?) sound awesome in the chorus, though. ...Man, I forgot this song had a guitar solo. Oddly epic! Pumpkins-esque?

7. MC Frontalot (feat. Brad Sucks) - Livin' at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe
The Front's always an interesting rapper. His odd stuttering and hesitation have the potential to be really annoying if you're not interested in what he's saying, so he's guaranteed to deliver the goods. Besides that, these lyrics are amazing. ("...not just in death, but in after-that / like the bat out the h-e-double-vertical-slat / but inbound in the case of this rodent, /like when he got peeled-out on and ‘sploded,") Apparently this song is based off a webcomic?

8. The White Stripes - Little Acorns
I've never even heard this song before but I had to put it on the list just because it's so strange. It starts off with a newscaster of some sort talking about a woman who managed to get out of poverty after being inspired by a squirrel. The instrumentation shifts suddenly from an ambient piano, to heavily distorted guitar. And what would the White Stripes be without Meg's awful drumming? I'm not entirely sure if the song's fit for regular listening, but it does have some interesting guitar tones.

9. Binarpilot - Goof
This is a song I found on the Internet! It's pretty free-form electronica, sort of like Ratatat except a little faster. I'd imagine this is something like what the video game music of today would sound like if we still had use hardware synthesizers on the console. (Though I guess the Megaman and Zelda samples help...) It's pretty hard to say stuff about an instrumental track. Then again, this journal box isn't very large horizontally. I can pretend that I'm writing a lot because it keeps scrolling downwards! If I can fool myself, it's good enough. One thing I don't like about this song is the part where it completely stops then starts again. A song that does that just betrays your expectations, like a friend that hangs out for too long.

10. Machinae Supremacy - Rogue World Asylum
MaSu! I'm going to be honest here. I like this band a lot, but feel like their second album is far superior to the rest of their output. I understand that their lineup changes a lot but it's still worth mentioning. On album 1, Tomas (is that his name? the singer, I'm not sure) nordlander (real name Robert) hasn't quite perfected his style of singing. The upper range of his voice interrupts the flow of some otherwise very decent songs. On album 3, (possibly due to the circumstances surrounding its release? Guessing here) the songs feel a little bit watered down, even at best. Their Britney Spears cover is EPICEPIC though.

11. DEVO - Out of Sync
I like DEVO. I'm not sure why. It's hard to point a finger on exactly what makes their music worthwhile. It's electronic, but doesn't usually feel like dance music. More than any other band I know of, they deserve the label synthrock. Of course it's 80s rock so it's cheesy as heck, but still. They seem to be more popular among musicians than the general public; you can see their influence in strange places. (Like Pearl Jam's Backspacer!) Anyway, back to the song... I like the vocal effects, plus the melody itself. The harmony during the chorus is particularly exciting. The rhythm section's kind of a bland rhythm but the arpeggiation keeps it from being too tiring. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the drums. I mean... even in this dark dystopic future, when mankind devolved into a race of spud boys, I think drummers are still going to want to play fills.

12. The Pixies - Something Against You
Anybody who doesn't think this song is interesting probably doesn't like the Pixies. It's very, very short, yet manages to capture a comically violent fit of instability perfectly. Plus, it feels a tiny bit like surf rock! The Pixies are great about writing songs that are ridiculously simple yet compelling.

13. Faith No More - Land of Sunshine
FNM is a hit-or-miss band. This is frustrating to the casual listener, the more devoted listener's friends, and possibly even the band themselves. Luckily, this one's a hit! Mike Patton is literally insane, playing a detached psychiatrist, a television commercial personality, a patient desperate for aid, and the voices in said patient's head, all in a single verse without overdubs! It's rare when a song feels more like a drama production than heavy metal, but if there's a personality that can pull it of, it's FNM's frontman.

14. Beatallica - Garage Dayz Night
Beatallica is not musically brilliant. Half the entertainment value is just reading their song titles. Their best songs to listen to pick at more obscure songs from the Beatles (ala "Justice for All My Loving" and "Got to Get You Trapped Under Ice"). However, their singer is very suspiciously good at impersonating James Hetfield. Every now and then you get a glimpse of brilliant instrumentation, even if it's the least serious band around.

WAT. NEW ALBUM. MASTERFUL MYSTERY TOUR. *distracted*

15. (a good half-hour later...) Sublime - Paddle Out
God, what an awful song. It fits in an interesting place on the album, but by itself it's really hard to listen to. It's really fast and aggressive, but the guy's voice just doesn't fit it. Nor does the semi-clean guitar solo.

16. The Beatles - Yer Blues
The Beatles goofing off. It's kinda funny by itself, but doubly funny because it's the Beatles. Come to think of it, a lot of songs on the White Album are just parodies of other musical styles... Whether that diminishes their value is one for the music historians to answer. It's also interesting to note the (very blatant!) cut near the end of the track. It kinda makes you wonder what was so awful they had to remove.

17. Death From Above 1979 - Going Steady
I wish I could say I consistently enjoyed listening to DFA. After all, they've got a crazy instrument line up: drums, a moog, and a distorted bass. No guitar! But the reality is that their lyrics are so mind-bogglingly awful that they jump out punch you in the face. Repeated listens only make it easier to understand them. It's an all-too-common problem in music where a single mistake can totally ruin a song.

18. The Beatles - I Want To Hold Your Hand
I wish pop music still sounded like this... Sure it's got pretty shallow lyrics. But it's clean, heartwarming, sincere, and written specifically to appeal to Americans.

19. Sonic Youth - Hey Joni
Sonic Youth is normally too pretentious for my tastes, but Daydream Nation is a pretty sweet album. In this track they combine whatever noisy distortions they've invented with interesting clean riffs. The lyrics don't make any sense but they're still pretty involving. Poetic in the same way a carefully arranged jumble of words is. 1963, 1964, 1967, 1962...

20. Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast
You can't really say a lot to describe 80s heavy metal. It's epic, it's awesome, it's... for the lack of a better word, metal. Sometimes I wonder if being impossible to describe in intelligent terms is a good thing. Maybe the genre is less meaningful than it first appears to be? Who knows. I'm just getting really tired at this point. I used to like Bruce Dickinson's voice a lot but recently I've noticed that it loses the melody a lot. (Spoiler warning: you'll never look at Iron Maiden the same way again after you listen to a live recording. ) On the contrary, however, I grow more fond of the band's basslines every time I hear them. Why can't more kinds of music have a stronger bass presence? It drives me crazy. It's a good third of the average rock band's instrumentation and it's ignored WAY too often, excluding a novelty "this is the song with the audible bassline" single.