Not What I Planned

My plan for Monday blogs was that I would take something from the Sunday papers and write an opinion piece of sorts.

I read quite a lot of papers, yesterday. Nothing interested me. In fact, by the time I’d read the papers, yesterday, I was ready to convince the husband that we should sort out and re-jig the kitchen, which is, in the end, what we spent the afternoon doing. It was terribly satisfying, but if that’s what the newspapers generate the desire to do, you can guarantee they weren’t full of anything much worth reading.

The problem with this weekend’s papers was that they were full of obituaries for Baroness Thatcher, and then, on top of the obituaries there were pull out sections dedicated to her life, her memory (forgive me, but hadn’t she lost that by the end?), and her legacy. Several newspapers had further pullout sections for the order of service for the funeral. So... that’s millions of pounds of public money British taxpayers won’t ever see again, then. I wonder what the policing bill could escalate to?

Anyway, I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to say anything about La Thatcher, which only proves that I’ve already said too much. I was that child, aged between seven and eleven, deprived of my free school milk by Thatcher the Milk Snatcher, and, as a political animal, I never forgot. Although, according to Wikipedia, it turns out that wasn’t actually her fault.

Anyway, if you haven’t yet read the weekend papers, and you still fancy a browse, read Stewart Lee on Baroness Thatcher in the Observer. Oh, and AA Gill was good, I thought, on the subject of Art on Trial, in the Sunday Times. I won't talk about that, either, though. I was going to blog about paedophiles the other day, but the husband warned me against it.

So, with Baroness Thatcher and Operation Yewtree off the agenda, I’m going to talk about Social Media, and, in particular, This is My Jam!

I bloody love This is My Jam! Honest to goodness, of all the social media networks that I know of or am involved in, which is really only the big two: FaceBook and Twitter, in addition to This is My Jam, the music network is my absolute favourite. I’ve talked about it before. In fact, you’re probably bored with me talking about it, but that isn’t necessarily going to stop me talking about it this morning, because a couple of a days ago I had a brand new This is My Jam experience.

This is My Jam is pretty simple. The Jammer chooses a song, imports the link for it from YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Bandcamp, HypeMachine, Official.fm, or an mp3 on the web, follows a couple of steps, which includes being able to caption the song with a comment, and then sends it out into the World, advertising it on other social media networks they belong to, which, for me, is FaceBook and Twitter. I can listen to my own jams, and I can listen to the jams of the people I follow. I can ‘like’ jams, although they could have used ‘dig’ in my opinion, this is, after all, music; and I can ‘rejam’.

When I post a jam, a nice little list comes up of similar things, or other things I might like from a range of music. For example I just posted “Long Distance Love” by Little Feat and my ‘related jams’ included “Willin’” by the Black Crowes. 

This is where it gets interesting, because this is part of the fun. Sometimes the list will only include songs I know, and sometimes there will be songs I don’t know, so it’s fun to find them and play them on YouTube, obviously broadening my horizons. 

What a Natty Album Cover!

Last week I posted a song by Trevor Sensitive and the Locals. The song is Called “I’ve Read Finnegan’s Wake” and it makes me smile. 

When I posted it, however, no list of ‘related jams’ appeared underneath. Instead, I got the message, “This must be very special!”

Clearly, the website is imperfect, but I like how it covers its tracks, and, actually, this song is pretty special, as are all the songs by these very clever people. Somehow, there’s always something special about pop music that comes from proper poets and real musicians. I know that sounds like snobbery, but I’m not a music snob; I just can’t think of a better way to express a thought on a Monday morning, and I really do have to save my brain for some very serious writing chores today. Anyway this stuff is always clever, funny apposite, and uses all the tropes and clichés of pop music intelligently and with a sense of humour; there you are, I could put it better, after all.

So join This is My Jam, and go listen to anything by Trevor Sensitive and the Locals on Bandcamp.

I’ll be back tomorrow with real bloggage, I promise.