I love music.
When I say I love music, I mean I love listening to music. Thanks to my amazing parents, I can play every broad classification of instrument (the French horn, flute, piano, guitar, and bongos), but I'm not particularly virtuosic in any of them... Today, I'm a music enthusiast in the most pretentious, armchair expert sense. I've received flack since high school about my vocal commitment to exploring the most genres of music out there, but I ignore the haters (my friends) because I'll have amassed quite the collection of virtual records by the time I'm 60!
Music transports and heals. It carries memories and traumas of the past. It preserves our forgotten histories in the most authentic and evocative way, through the most human endeavor: creative and collaborative output from the soul and shared consciousness.
One of my favorite pastimes is falling down internet rabbit holes where I start from the Wikipedia entry for a musician, song, or album I've taken a recent liking to. Then I'll click any hyperlink that seems interesting: historical eras, record labels, fashion styles, places, or names associated with my original query. Suddenly, I've gone from reading about ska band the Specials, to learning about Chinese-Jamaicans and their influence on reggae in the 1960s. With my ska playlist blasting, I'm ready to find myself a pork pie hat and something checkered, and start skanking! It's an amazing time.
Anyways, that's why I'm starting a series of posts I'm calling Vibe Studies where I'll write about a song, artist, genre, collection of songs, or Vibe™️, if you will, and the adventure it's taken me on. Because music is my medium of choice, all of my Vibes originate from something musical.
Today, as an experiment, I put together a moodboard for "Lebanese Blonde" by Thievery Corporation, my favorite lounge song of all time.
Too low to find my way
Too high to wonder why
I've touched this place before
Somewhere in another time
Now I can hear the sun
The clouds drifting through the blinds
A half a million thoughts
Are flowing through my mind
A satellite recalled your voice
Sent me round the world again
All the night you've dreamt away
Sent me round my heart again
One touch upon my lips
And all my thoughts are clear
I feel your smoky mist
Up to the stratosphere
This is what I ended up with:
My Freeform moodboard.
Actually, what really happened was I tried to generate an image with Dall-E 3 to visualize my thoughts while listening to the song. The first paragraph was my attempt at a prompt. I wasn't very impressed or satisfied by the AI-generated images I got even after editing my prompt a few times, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and find pictures that resonated with the Vibe I had in mind:
007 movie Quantum of Solace and the desert hotel James Bond defeats villain Dominic Greene in Perla de las Dunas (Pearl of the Dunes), the album art for the similarly sitar-rich song also from the early 90s "Loser" by Beck, Katie Melua's Pictures album cover, book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by iconic gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, the movie Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp who also played Thompson's character in the movie adaptation) that has many allusions to the book, bohemian and 'free-spirited' desert festival Burning Man, Mad Max, and of course, Dune and its spice.
This Vibe isn't really historically significant in the way ska and its many revivals are, so I'm not elaborating much more. This Vibe is more of an aesthetic, so the images and visual aspects hold greater weight in communicating the "Lebanese Blonde" Vibe, whereas, you feel the energy and youthful attitudes behind ska, 2 Tone (I discovered ska when I saw the English Beat live two years ago!), rocksteady, new wave, ska punk, and Oi! through physical movement (see How To Skank). Through historical images and videos, you see the people behind the music and across subcultures from the Windrush generation to the mods, skins, and rude boys and girls.
Whoops, I guess this Vibe Study is a 2-for-1 deal. Some Vibes overlap, even the ones you don't expect to and in ways you least expect. Rocksteady hit "007 (Shanty Town)" by Desmond Dekker and the Aces (and produced by Chinese-Jamaican Leslie Kong) reflects the rude boy style influence from James Bond's sharp suits. I guess they liked Sean Connery in Dr. No's Vibe and made it their own! We're travelers of both time and space, of course. Hope you didn't get whiplash!