Mi Mi Mi

I'm suspicious, frankly, of my Walkman's ability to select songs with anything resembling actual randomness.

Usually I'm too much of a control-freak to listen to music on shuffle mode in case a song I don't like comes up (although as you'd probably expect I'll listen to such songs all the way through if they come up in the correct play order on an album, because skipping them would be wrong).

On my way home from work today, though, it occurred to me that I had no strong feelings about what I wanted to listen to. Then I realised that, if I shuffled the contents of my Walkman, I could use the experience to generate a spurious blog post in the manner of those LiveJournal <air-quote> memes </air-quote> where the poster posts the lyrics of the first 25 songs selected randomly from their playlist, and their friends try to outcool them in the comments by identifying all the songs in question and sneering politely at them all. Given how little work this would be, and how much I've been neglecting this blog lately, this seemed appealing.

Admittedly my Walkman's memory, while not remotely approaching the trenditude of the LiveJournalling community, is somewhat catholic in scope, and in order to pick tracks with actual lyrics I had to skip past various instrumental pieces, Karl Jenkins's ravishingly beautiful but untranscribable choral gibberish, scenes from lost black-and-white Doctor Who stories released by the BBC on CDs with idiotically intricate indexing (just one of the five-disc The Daleks' Master Plan set contains 76 tracks), one of the quotes on the Life on Mars soundtrack album and that bit on Made in Heaven where Freddie Mercury says "Yeah".

Even so, the resulting edited list shows a disturbingly heavy bias towards the stuff which even I'd admit to being embarrassed about liking, rather than the stuff which was, at least, pretty damn cool during the late '80s. It also contains two separate instances of three songs coming from the same album. Some of the entries appear to have been carefully selected for their crashing obviousness.

Minimal amounts of kudos, therefore to those who guess artist, title and the album I found the song on (not always the one it was originally issued on).

1. "I have a dream, a song to sing to help me cope with anything."
2. "I returned a bag of groceries, accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date."
3. "Here I stand, looking out to sea, where a thousand souls have prayed and a thousand lives were laid on the sand."
4. "Robin, the hooded man."
5. "One, two three four... Oo-ooh, oo-ooh..."
6. "Life's a bitch then you die, black Hell."
7. "My life goes on in endless song..."
8. "Yo; el otoño. Yo; el vespero."
9. "Well, I was born an original sinner..."
10. "It was upon a Lammas Night, when corn rigs are bonny..."
11. "Eurus, Afer Ventus..."
12. "If you change your mind, I'm the first in line..."
13. "Much has been been said of the strumpets of yore, of wenches and bawdy-house queens by the score..."
14. "He's a hypnotist, hypnotist of ladies."
15. "I work all night, I work all day to pay the bills I have to pay..."
16. "Toe to toe, dancing very slow..."
17. "What is there left for me to do in this life?"
18. "When the ship runs out of ocean and the vessel runs aground..."
19. "Why is the world in love again?"
20. "Another red-letter day..."
21. "Bright the light through my windowpane. Shield my eyes from the beam."
22. "Monday finds you like a bomb that's been left ticking there too long..."
23. "I spy a boy, I spy a girl..."
24. "Wasted youth! Wasted youth!"
25. "Tell me that you've got everything you want, and your bird can sing..."

I imagine all of these can be guessed by at least some of my readership without illicit googling. My tastes may be eclectic, but they're hardly original.