Sometimes My Musical Evolution is affected by sheer random chance. Such is the case of B.o.B.. It was my daughters first semester away at college. I know that because of the second random chance of B.o.B.. A guy who worked in sales resigned and a few days after he left, I was tasked with reformatting his workstation in preparation for his replacement. Standard procedure.
After blowing out the accumulated dust with compressed air, I set up his old workstation on my desk to begin the procedure. I opened up his CD tray in order to insert the Windows XP Pro install disk and found that it was already occupied with B.O.B. The Adventures Of Bobby Ray.
Being musically curious, I played it in my machine while I worked on his. I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised. It goes to show you that we really need to fight our prejudices. I had never heard of this guy but if I had seen the cover. I probably would not have given it the chance.
This is not my fault though. It is instinctual. Millions of years of evolution has developed us to discriminate. Of course the word discrimination in this country has been erroneously associated with ethnic aspects but in reality, discrimination is an important tool for our survival. You know when you pull that half full ju
g of milk out of the fridge and take sniff before you drink? You are discriminating. You have learned that milk that has a particular odor is not good to drink. You have learned to discriminate to your advantage. When you see that snake that is red, yellow and black, you back away because of discrimination. You know that not all snakes are poisonous but the red, yellow and black ones are. Of course the animal kingdom discriminates too and in some cases they depend on us discriminating. That black, yellow and red snake really isn’t poisonous but is similarly marked to the Eastern Coral Snake which is!
OK so we got way off track with Snake Discrimination. The point that I was trying to make is that over the course of My Musical Evolution I have discovered that I’m not a big fan of Rap music. I have a dozen or more rap albums that I have accumulated over the years but I’ve been disappointed by rap music more often than not. Add to that the Parental Advisory label and my whiff says the milk is bad, don’t drink it.
It really is judging a book by it’s cover and as unpopular as that sentiment may be, it works in more cases than it doesn’t. If it didn’t we would not have evolved the way we have. However, like everything, there are exceptions and in this case, the album cover does not accurately reflect the contents of the Compact Disc. Yes there are some raps songs that do but the best stuff plays against that type.
The second piece of random chance was that my daughter had discovered this while she was away at college at the same time as me. She played Don’t Le Me Fall for me and I played Satellite for her. She and I have gotten into this routine of sharing music that we discover with each other. she plays stuff for me when she comes home. I burn mix CD’s and send them to here. We’ll discuss that in more detail a few posts from now.
Don’t Let Me Fall
Nothin’ On You
Airplanes
Ghost In The Machine
Satellite