Extreme Listening Mode!

It’s quite fashionable to detox these days. We live in a toxic world, full of bacteria, viruses and poor people, where lurking round every corner is a potential deathtrap contained in a pork pie or a pint or something. Anyway, what you do to defeat these demons is detox. This means buying some stupidly expensive pills from Boots and taking them for a month whilst only eating leaves and drinking water – filtered, that is. You will feel a bit ill for three days, give up and then tell everyone how great you feel whilst existing on a diet of Mars Bars and lager.

The thing is, your body doesn’t really need cleansed. Your mind though….whoa Nelly! Think of the clagged up filter it must have. Especially the bit marked music. Yes, yes, you’ve tried to live a healthy musical life, but it doesn’t always work that way. There really are toxins everywhere. If I say ‘Snow Patrol’, chances are your brain starts playing one of their songs whether you want it to or not. Chances are if I say ‘Fireflies’ then you’ll be hearing the latest Yankee one-hit-wonder Owl City’s current song. Chances are if I say ‘N-Dubz’ you won’t know one of their tunes, but you’ll still want to punch the berk with the stupid hat. You get my meaning though.

So what to do? Well, reader HowlinWhippet suggested this and we rather like it; it’s the Ramones Musical Detox. Here’s how you do it:

• Listen to The Ramones and only The Ramones
• Yes, only and exclusively listen to The Ramones.
• Do it for a week.
• In the car, on your iPod, at home.
• If anything else comes on, switch it off or change it. To The Ramones.
• There are about 20 albums, but the first four and Its Alive are sufficient.

It makes you remember what you like about music, why you are obsessed with it, what’s good about the thing, why Johnny was the only cool Republican apart from General Patton ever and so on and so forth.

Don’t believe me? Well, get this from the horse’s mouth! HW told us ‘I’ve tried this for a week and thoroughly recommend it. I’m hoping to go a month, think of it as like a diet, enema, catharsis whatever…’

So scour your brain, re-charge the batteries and come out the other side ready to rumble like the musical Panzer division you are. 1-2-3-4!* We’ll kick you off with this lil beauty….

(*It was either that or ‘hey-ho-let’s-go and you know it.)

Filed under: General Stuff Tagged: | detox, n-dubz, Ramones, scouring, snow patrol