vodka ed

music, music, music. it's my passion and obsession. my mom said, when i was a small little baby i even had a word for a record, "plak!" (short for plaka which is record in tagalog). i would hold my hands out and and yell "plak! plak!" and she would give me a 7" and i'd just crack it in half. i'm a lot more careful now-a-days since i'm a full-on collector. i've got tons of music. boxes and boxes of CDs, cassettes, LPs, 12"s, 7"s... i make weekly trips to my local record stores and come out with a nice little stack. i would take home these musical jewels and listen to them intently and read all the liner notes and memorize band members, producers, record labels... memorize everything for my next mode of attack when i again encounter the racks and racks of music at the stores. with any new band, i would look at their discography and actively seek out everything i could buy from them. within a few weeks, i'd have everything. what i love buying most are singles. this is where you find b-sides. some people say these are the tracks that were left off the album because they weren't good enough or were hastily put together to fill the other side of a single but they can be something more. these are tracks that were created in free thought. there was no motivation to make it catchy enough to sell a million copies or polished enough to round out an album. they were tracks in the rough or as siouxsie sioux recently put it, tracks with "the initial spark and energy of the idea". don't get me wrong, i still love my poppy catchy a-sides but these gems on the flip side are songs with a bigger sense of freedom of expression and isn't that what great art should be?