(by strategy)

The urge to listen to Brian Eno again developed more or less like this:

Sometime last week I was listening to a bunch of old Tears for Fears stuff, which included their cover of Ashes to Ashes. That made me itchy for Bowie. The generalized Bowie urges naturally led to a particular urge to hear stuff from the Berlin Trilogy. The Berlin Trilogy led to Eno. Eno urges are dicey--I steered clear of his David Byrne collaborations (with which I have a sort of Charlie Brown/football relationship from way back) and toward Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

So I had a bunch of Tiger Mountain tracks on random shuffle (because take that, Brian Eno, that's why) and I heard the words "a certain ratio" in True Wheel and it reminded me of how people supposedly thought (still think even) that A Certain Ratio had troublesome Nazi leanings based on their name, even though they took the name from this lyric and not from the National Socialist eugenics propaganda. Then sometime later, shortly before I had to leave for work, my favorite track on the album, Burning Airlines Give You So Much More, came on and I remembered that old band Burning Airlines and how, after 9/11, they caught some pretty major hassle for their name.

Driving to work I formulated my own Oblique Strategies card:

If you take your band name from a Brian Eno lyric, you should expect some inconvenient misunderstandings.