It's a New Meme

on account of bloggers always need something to write about...

Not Clausewitz opens up with 5 music related questions.  Why not?  The questions are:

1.) What was the first song you ever bought?
2.) What song always gets you dancing?
3.) What song takes you back to your childhood?
4.) What is your perfect love song?
5.) What song would you want at your funeral?
6.) Time for an encore. One last song that makes you, you.

1.  I kid you not, the first song I ever bought was the 45 RPM version of the Monster Mash by Bobby Boris Pickett and the Crypt Kicker 5.   Link is to somebody's pretty decent sendup of it as a video montage.  (Note: kids, 45s were black vinyl precursors of CDs, with a long spiral groove in them that transmitted the music.  They were recorded and played back while spinning at 45 revolutions per minute.  What are CDs?  Later.)

2.  Maybe surprisingly, most anything.  I didn't say I was good, just that I don't sit still very well.  And, srsly, there's no group of artists I understand less than dancers.  "Now I will dance to spring" makes as much sense to me as "Now I will hum differential equations". 

3.  Groovin' by the Young Rascals always takes me back to about 7th grade, out on Miami Beach.  I suppose because it was my early teen years, first times fairly independent of home.  Other songs from 1967-68 take me to specific places: beaches, friends' houses, football games. 

4.  This is harder.  It has changed many times over my life.  After all, when we're kids, love is about burning passion.  As we age, it's more about devotion, commitment, and protection of our families.  Maybe today, Alan Jackson's Remember When? 

5.  Funerals are for the living, so as much as my inner egotistical wise a** would say Sinatra's "My Way", I think that something in a more classical feel like Amazing Grace or Ave Maria is more appropriate. 

6.  None.  No song is the definitive me.  I think Strauss' Blue Danube waltz might be the most beautiful song ever composed, but I sing along to almost everything on the radio.  I go back and forth between Chopin, and The Beatles; Mozart and Lynyrd Skynrd.  I think I have as many CDs by Tony Toni Tone' as Mozart. 

George Clinton, one of my musical influences.