Hey, You Kids Get Out of My Yard!

I hadn't had much previous awareness of Youtube, apart from the occasional viral video, but I've realized that I can find just about any commercially released song on there that I can think of. This is fantastic if I want to revisit a song I haven't heard in a long time and don't want to bother cluttering up my hard drive with a copy of it, or just want to check out somebody I've heard of but haven't actually heard yet, since I don't listen to the radio very often. I spent the better part of an evening recently just looking for the most obscure bands or songs I could think of and there were few, if any, that I couldn't find. If you have a taste for music with a heavy dose of English humor (I'm looking at you, Monty Python fans), got to Youtube and put in Neil Innes or Bonzo Dog Band, and check out whatever looks potentially amusing to you.

I was even able to find convenient videos showing how to play some songs, meaning that I didn't have to puzzle it out by ear for myself if I wanted to learn how to play them, provided I wasn't concerned about getting every nuance correct.

And lyrics! I hadn't needed to figure out the lyrics to a song since before I owned a computer, and now of course I can find the lyrics to anything in a matter of minutes. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was listening to the same part of a song repeatedly to figure out a mumbled line or two of a song I was supposed to sing at band practice later that week. In fact, it's probably been a dozen or so years.

Not to mention that it's cheaper and easier to find even the most obscure music via download than it's ever been.

I'm sure none of this is news to anyone reading this, and tells you more about how long it's been since I've done anything musical than anything else. Once again, I marvel at how we ever functioned without the internet and find myself feeling very, very old.