MusicFan44

I thought I might as well combine asking a question with letting my contacts know I'll be on vacation for the next 11 days...I'm off to Japan!

Since the song has a fairly sparse arrangement - but still works well, to my ears - I'd like to hear your perspectives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnaUL8OpBck

This week I had a conversation about the upcoming election with an individual I know, and this person claimed they would move to an EU country (citing past family ties) if Barack Obama won the election. Mind you, this is a person who is a flag-waving, Republican activist, with a sibling in the Armed Forces, and appears to be very patriotic (gung-ho support of U.S. troops, etc.). This calls into question the true extent of the individual's patriotism. Does anybody else know of someone who might fit this description, no matter their political affiliation? What do you make of it?

Several songs have thought-provoking, clever, or entertaining videos, and when I listen to one of these (e.g. Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill") - images from the music video created for that song often come to mind.

My question for you all (especially the R&P regulars - we're always attaching links) is this:

When you listen to a song, do you prefer to let your mind wander, and come up with its own images as inspired by the music, or do you like to see images/videos created by others to accompany the music?

Turn back the musical clock a few years, and the pop culture clock back about 50 years....sorry to be using a highly edited version of the song, but I wanted to use this particular vid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRrCZCN8Kj0

Here's a pair I thought of:

Ozzy Osbourne with Norah Jones

Note: it's okay to suggest deceased singers, too, but I think it's more challenging to only pair still-active performers (even if some of them should have retired a while ago, lol)

My collection is fairly small - Cats, Phantom, Oklahoma!, Les Mis, J.C. Superstar, The Sound of Music, and West Side Story. I'm looking to expand this, but other than some familiar names of others (e.g. A Chorus Line) this is a genre I don't know much about.

My frame of reference is a late '77 show; AC/DC (with Bon Scott) opened for Aerosmith. I had never heard of AC/DC before, and was expecting a boring band: AC/DC came out and just ROCKED like crazy and threw in a few of their stage antics - the crowd was completely into it. Then Aerosmith came out and slogged through their greatest hits, most likely in a chemically-induced stupor. What a letdown!