'I bet your ass is darker than a Mobb Deep track'

Huh, I think Axl just said 'tangible'. How about that.

Oh, the ways that list would be upset, though, if the computers knew about the songs I had burned to disc. Why does the world have to be so imperfect?

'Breathe' and 'Yeah' have suddenly broken into the top five this week in my most-played songs on iTunes and my iPod. It's true that I've been deliberately choosing the Fabolous, but the Usher song just seems to have my iPod in thrall. I was getting a little tired of it, really. But now I feel just as excited to hear it again as ever.

As ever? Really? Well, maybe. I don't know. Back at the beginning, it was really exciting. Run-to-the-dancefloor exciting, in my imagination at least.

Bothered me in a guilty way, I mean, so that I would always be more aware of who could hear me listening to the song.

(A common worry of mine that has never fully disappeared.)

I'm not sure I ever adequately understood what 'My Michelle' was about, in detail, but I think it always bothered me that it was somehow 'bad' and featured my mom's name prominently.

It would be interesting to speculate, I suppose, as to whether that casual remark equating 'realistic' overproduction with quote-marks holds up to the attractive response to the advocate of realism in sound recording, that all recording and accompanying production are in some way unrealistic - contrivances that do not simply provide a transparent (audio) window onto 'what actually happened'. Holds up, I mean, in the sense of being able to maintain the insinuation of campiness (which I hadn't really thought through beforehand).

Often when I go back to a rock record that I once liked, say in college, or more likely, as an adolescent, the thing I now dislike the most is the drumming (considered separately from the drum production, which I almost invariably feel irritated by, whether it's a record with 80s-throwback airplane hangar drums or 90s 'real drums! see! real!' overproduction - cf. the remark of Sontag's, below, about camp seeing everything in quotes).

This was occasioned by my buying a copy of Appetite for Destruction on CD. (The first time around I owned it on tape.) It always feels so strange, being reminded of how committed to memory the records I used to listen to are. The present tense is appropriate, because they never really go away.

I don't understand, at all, how one could always skip 'Mo Money, Mo Problems'. That song makes me happy to be alive. Sometimes I stop listening to the record just so I can hear that song over and over again.