Sabato 10 Mag 2008, 16:32
I like to come up with personalized tags, and I like to listen to other people's original tags. Sometimes you can tell what the thing is all about: for example, italophilia and russophilia are collections of miscellaneous interesting music from those countries, and fennoskandia is my collective tag for all the Scandinavian countries including Finland (I'm biased towards Swedish and Finnish, since I know those well, but I have also included some Estonian, Norwegian and Danish tidbits, and some bands from Russian Karelia, such as Santtu Karhu & Talvisovat, who I adore).
Here's a key to a few of my less self-explanatory tags.
goldenbird - A fantasy soundtrack for my comic Goldenbird. It's a mix of 20's popular music, classical music (baroque and romantic), medieval music (f.ex. composers Hildegard von Bingen and Walther von der Vogelweide), Argentinian tangos and walzers (Tango Goes Symphony and Valses Que No Se Olvidan) and much more, modern bands that suit the mood of modernity and mythology that I use to come in the right mood for drawing and writing.
tumultenoir - "Black thunder", the catchphrase invented by painter Paul Colin for the jazz age in Paris, and the craze for everything "African", including the very American Josephine Baker. This tag started as my own early blues & jazz tag, but has since then evolved to include a lot more performers uniting music from America, Europe and Africa. A kind of "black history month" tag radio…
rowr - A joke tag with dog-themed songs; I have had some peculiar dogs in my life, and this is dedicated to them. This tag has also evolved/degenerated to a sort of catch-all tag for artists that are funny and sexy at the same time, like Mae West. I don't know what Inkubus Sukkubus does here. Honestly! (They're a guilty pleasure of mine, a bit like Rondo Veneziano, which I'm a bit ashamed of. I don't know why, I listen to so much silly music anyway.)
tatar - Music by Tatars. The smallest common denominator. Breaks the ice at parties. chirayliq is a related tag that collects music by and about handsome, more-or-less Central Asian men, for my and kabanowa's blog Chirayliq about… well… handsome Central Asian men. (The lead singer of Yat-Kha, f.ex.)
fika - Means "coffee break" and is a cultural institution in Sweden. At my workplace, we have two mandatory fikas every week; people write their names on the fika list and make coffee and buy buns (of course the budget has a fika post). Of course, everyone has several informal fikas daily, as well. So these songs are about coffee and more. I have two spin-off tags, too: kahvitauko (Finnish coffee break, coffee only) and jellyroll (blues slang for… something sweet).
the great war - Music loosely connected the First World War, the "War to end all wars". I have an obsession with certain scenes and related events, hence the bias towards Italian Alpino choirs. Still looking for more from the German point of view. Unlike in WW2, all sides in this disaster were equally nasty, so I can allow myself to cheer for the Germans occasionally (except when they're hounding the poor Italians at Caporetto 1917). You can see I'm a historian by the way I speak of past events in the present tense. They play like a movie in my head, and I'm always looking for a new camera angle. (I actually mistyped that as "camera angel" first, which makes me think of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, desperately trying to make sense of the piling catastrophe that is our past.)