Michael Jackson's voice was wasted on pop music

[disappointed_lesbian]

post-format: "html" post-tags: music, shopping, money post-mood: rushed

*Since I can't afford five+ dollars for a box of ibuprofen that'll last me only one menstrual cycle (I use the ibuprofen for cramps), I ventured into town today, that is, the next town over, which is larger and has cheaper goods/a lower cost of living.

I went to this wonderful/horrible thing called a dollar store, where nearly every thing for sale costs just one dollar, and almost everything but the food (which is mostly junk food) is a Chinese import. I was a little surprised to find that the ibuprofen there is more expensive than I remembered, but one dollar for ten gelcaps is more affordable than five or six dollar for a twenty (which is what the item costs in my town), so I bought it anyways.

I have to have the gelcaps, which are more expensive than the regular pills, because they are easier on my stomach given the number I need to take to get rid of the pain. I tried to be cheap and go with the regular ibuprofen pills once, and blood came out in my stool. My cramps were so bad at the time that I was taking two or three times the recommended dose. I've been happy to find that my cramps aren't as bad this month.

Posting about this has brought back to me a horrid memory of my dad basically telling me to suffer when I had menstrual cramps as a teenager because he was going out to do whatever criminal things he did for money rather than stop to buy me painkillers. Such a piece of shit. I had those cramps for hours. All day. Needless suffering. They were so intense, I couldn't do anything else but lie in bed and suffer. I'd recently gotten my period, and no one had taught me anything about it, so I didn't know I could ease the pain with a hot water bottle or anything. I'd even been completely surprised when I first got my period, the day of my half-sister's wedding. No one had prepared me for it. Garbage family.

Since everything costs only one dollar at the store, and I had ten bucks to spend, I got some other itmes as well: a bottle of melatonin and a bar of soap. I still have a bottle of melatonin that the VA sleep medicine department had sent to me, but it's the goddamned delayed-release kind I guess, because I have to take it hours before I go to bed or it won't work. Yet it makes me sleepy for those hours before bed...so maybe it isn't delayed-release? All I know for sure is that it doesn't work like melatonin I've had before.

The soap is for my face. I normally buy facial soap from an Etsy dealer I've been using for a year or two now because there are no weird chemicals in her soap and it's one of the few offerings on Etsy that isn't made with pore-clogging oils (most of the soaps are made with coconut oil and/or olive oil), which give me skin problems. Even most of the acne soaps on Etsy are made with those oils. What are the makers thinking, selling THE most comedogenic oils as acne treatments?

The soap I got at the dollar store has only one strange ingredient: Tetrasodium Etiridone or something. That is the last item in the list of ingredients, and I learned in seventh grade home economics class that ingredients are listed in order of decreasing proportion of the whole (and I'm assuming that applies not only to the food items about which we were taught this rule), so I'm hoping that there isn't much TE, as I'll call it, in the soap and that whatever weird effect TE might have on the skin is therefore minimal enough for me to use the soap until I can get some more of my regular soap. My Etsy seller is on vacation until next month, but I want to put off another purchase from here until later than next month because I'll have a lot of expenses next month.

As I listened to Michael Jackson's song Butterflies for the millionth time, I was frustrated with the simplicity of the music, as I very often am when it comes to pop music, and I thought to myself that MJ's voice was wasted on pop music. Pop music is pretty much invariably BORING: repetitive, predictable, formulaic. There isn't much variation in dynamics (that's volume), rhythm, or keys. This is why I hardly ever listen to pop music and tend to be super discerning about the pop songs I bother with. On occasion, I come across a song that has a pleasing melody, but the other aspects of the song usually bore me, and I deliberately avoid listening to the song too often to manage my frustration and boredom.

Imagine Michael Jackson singing jazz or even some old-school R&B, something backed by a full band of real instruments and musicians (not electronics) like the accompaniment on the album Supafly. Such a beautiful and talented voice put to beat machines and shit. The sound of a beat machine cannot hold a handle to the sound of real drums, at least not for the kind of stuff MJ sang (I guess beat machines are great for industrial music). Beat machines sound fake and dead to me when juxtaposed with a melodic human voice. I wonder what MJ thought of his genre and the types of music he sang. Did he write any of his own material? *