I am so bored with the indie music scene. Just saying that makes me sound snobbier than the indie snobs, but I spent yesterday morning trying to expand my musical horizons and while I found a few diamonds in the rough, overall I deleted a bunch of crap that all sounded the same. CocoRosie is like a bizarre dream sequence merged with The Neverending Story. Parts & Labor is... loud and chaotic, albeit contained. Butterfly Explosion wishes they were Explosions in the Sky.

I need new, exciting music. I mean, the Airfields are all right. I like Headlights. Malajobe kicked my ass. But sometimes I'd just rather listen to U2.

Yeah. Remember I love U2? I forgot for awhile. They got eclipsed by the majesty that is the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the power that is Low, the art that is the Velvet Underground.

I accidentally started playing "Love is Blindness" from Achtung Baby yesterday and suddenly remembered sitting on the floor of my high school hallway, leaning against my locker, playing the song through my headphones. I remembered putting Achtung Baby in my top five albums of all time... and I saw that since loading the album onto my computer, new as of October, I haven't listened to any of the tracks. At all.

So I listened to the whole thing. It's still great. Great? Amazing. Epic. A fantastic album. Why did I stop listening? Why did I get bored with it? Do I really need more new music?

Of course I need new music. Sometimes, though, I go on these new music rampages, listening to whatever the fuck I can get my hands on, and I completely forget about the music I fell in love with once upon a time. My favorites go forever without being listened to, letting the mp3s get metaphorically dusty on my hard drive.

So I dusted off my "Top Five Favorite Songs of All Time" to see if they still stand. Overall, they still do. ("Mr. Brownstone" has slipped off the list, replaced by a Tom Waits tune or a John Frusciante tune [I have to do some soul-searching before I land on one or the other], and I can't decide if "Easily" has been replaced by "Wet Sand" or not. I digress.)

I realized that "40" was kind of a hasty choice. I didn't think about it enough before putting it on there. And all of a sudden, I realized that the song I was listening to should be in its place.

"Running to Stand Still" by U2 is about a woman with a severe heroin addiction near the Ballymun Seven Towers area of Dublin. I don't know what the significance is, why the woman was placed here for the setting of the song (aside from the fact that the song comes from "The Joshua Tree," widely regarded as an album full of social commentary... and it is) but for me, it's really hard to focus on the actual message of the song. To be honest, I knew it was about a woman with a drug problem, but I didn't know exactly what it was about until I looked it up just now, because I can't look at it in a global sense, I have to zoom in and examine every line, because it's all so well-written, it's just poetry. THIS is lyricism, THIS is art through words.

Jesus. Jesus. Who writes like that? These are lines that push me to be a better writer. I cry a lot at this song because the power of words is incredible. It reminds me why I love music so much. It reminds me what real artistry is.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

So talk to me about music. New music. Your favorite music. U2. Lyrics you love. Music that moves you. Tell me about it.



PS: When I heard "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" by Big & Rich this evening, I got nauseous. Literally nauseous. What a fucking terrible song. Just sayin'.