You Won't Take What I Have And Make It All Wrong

Do you watch Mad Men? In the mash-up below, audio and visuals from Peggy Olson and Peter Campbell's best interactions are pieced together really well, and the creator used one of my favorite artists for the background music...

The artist, Louque, has a sound that is eclectic and tangy, and his '04 release So Long mixes funk, soul, trip-hop, reggae and r&b into what he calls "faya." 

Listen to more of Louque's songs HERE. 

And FYI- Christina Hendricks (who plays Joan on the show) is my new girl crush.

Boz, this might be my Rihanna.

Since Mad Men is set in the early '60s, you constantly find yourself noticing how much things have changed since then. The role of women in the home, the workforce, and society. Race relations. The seriousness of alcoholism. And they're always smoking at the office- you could never do that now so openly. But buried beneath all these changes, there's one cultural practice that didn't seem to evolve as much as one might think: saving face. For instance, some of these characters literally live double lives just to prevent their personal issues from getting scrutinized by their peers. The private life and the public life were two separate entities, and social interaction was more of a strategic art than a natural, friendly act. How much has that changed?

I bring this up because someone recently told me that the future of blogging was to have blog authors get more personal. But he didn't mean we should just be allowing you to take a glimpse inside our homes- he meant that we should be giving you the key to the front door and let you take an intentional, good look around. If you're someone who's deeply immersed in the online world, then his suggestion to take privacy public is probably not a new idea to you- blogs are like reality TV, they're at their best when something real is being captured. 

Because I'm such a private person, I constantly battle with how much personal information to release over the internet. But this a music blog that also has a running dialogue with culture, so even though it's extremely blogger-cliche of me to say, I truly believe that our lives have some useful stories worth sharing. Unfortunately for me, something about being too open around the campfire makes me very uncomfortable. Maybe it's fear: If I reveal who I am -flaws and all- people might judge or pigeonhole me, so like the characters on Mad Men, I play it safe. Should I relax and spill all my secrets, or make like Betty Draper and keep it buttoned up? 

I posted this Lily Allen song in April when it was rumored to be called "I Don't Know." I think I like "The Fear" better as a title... and it certainly speaks volumes to this topic:

"I don't know what's right and what's real anymore... 

I've been taken over by the fear."