To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I’m giving up Taylor Swift as my current songstress crush because, frankly, a large number of her songs refer to her Daddy, and each time she does, I’m reminded that her Daddy is probably my age, and that makes me feel creepy. If it makes me feel creepy, it must be creepy indeed.
Instead, here’s Jane Monheit:
I am pretty sure Monheit translates into Hot, man in some language.
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She rips your copy of Tin Tin’s Astral Taxi to MP3s for you.
No, that’s really an album.
And she’s trying very hard to get Marian Segal With Silver Jade’s Fly on Strangewings ripped.
It is love or indulgence.
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VodkaPundit tries to start something:
After strapping the boy into his car seat, I got in myself and checked to see if the next song on the iPod was inappropriate. “Son, would you like to hear a really good song?”
“Yeah!”
“It’s Earth, Wind & Fire, and it’s really funky.”
Pressed play and watched his face as “Shining Star” started to play way too loud.
Preston sat, listened, judged, pronounced: “It’s not funky enough.”
Last night, I offered to sing “You Are My Sunshine” (first verse only) to our two-year-old, and he declined. He wanted to hear the “Hi, Hi, Hi” song.
“I don’t know that song,” I said.
“‘Minne the Moocher’,” he said clearly.
Top that, Martini Boy.
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Country and Western singers and band members (particularly men) should not have more than one capital letter in their last names, such as Rascal Flatts members Gary LeVox and Jay DeMarcus.
The fact that the other member of the group, Joe Don Rooney, has two first names in his professional name, cannot salvage any C&W credibility with the group.
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So 101.1 went from the River to Movin’ and failed spectacularly, quickly, at changing from an eclectic mix of music to light, office-friendly dance and hip hop to an FM sports station, and for the first time in a very long while, I had to change the presets on my truck radio.
Because they kept sending me mail flyers, I changed it to 107.7, an actual Top 40 station. I say this because it plays the Top 40 countdown on Sunday mornings still. I thought that was an anachronism, but I guess it’s still around.
And I’ve been treated to this particular piece by Lady Gaga:
And I hearken back to what Ramon, a night manager, said to a younger stocker as they finished up work one morning. He didn’t understand how they would be able to sing or rap to the same songs in 20 years time the way he could still sing old R&B songs.
I spent the day echoing Ramon to everyone I spoke with. “How the heck do you sing along with that? Puh puh puh poker face. Muh muh muh muh my puh puh puh poker face.” I also laid into the whole thematic girl power manipulation of men thing, kinda as though every song on the dance radio top 40 was equivalent to Dion and the Belmonts singing “The Wanderer” with a lot of sampling and synth.
But then it occurred to me: 20 plus years later, I can still sing to this because I played the 45 single over and over again:
In my meager defense, the M/A/R/R/S is far superior because it features laser blasts in the audio and space race footage in the video.
But I guess it’s a matter of not understanding these damn kids or not steeping myself in Top 40 music enough yet.
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I present to you: Harptallica.
Videos on YouTube include Enter Sandman:
Master of Puppets:
Sanitarium:
And Unforgiven:
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Attention country and western singers:
I understand the lure of the Christmas album, and that backlist sales for such can go on for years and years, providing you with a steady, albeit low, income even once your waning popularity relegates you to performing at state fairs and store openings.
However, in your zeal to cash in on the reason for the season, note that steel guitars do not belong in Christmas songs.
I am talking to you, Alan Jackson and Trace Adkins.
Thank you, that is all.
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Ladies and gentlemen, up and coming country and western singer Zac Brown is a metrosexual.
Let’s look at the textual evidence within his paean to all things country, "Chicken Fried":
Jeans that fit just right? Ladies and gentlemen, real men do not understand the concept of jeans that fit just right. Women’s jeans, apparently, have 132 different variables in cut, shape, and jib. Women worry about jeans fitting just right. A man worries about jeans merely fitting, which means the button closes and not too much sock shows. Fitting just right sounds an awful lot like Zac Brown has spent time in trendy urban outfitters, getting custom denim cut for him. He probably uses body wash, too.
And that’s just not manly. Know your inseam and your waist and take the one off of the top of the stack at Walmart, you sissy.
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A smooth jazz rendition of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”:
That’s rolling a 1 on a d20.
And, sadly, that is the version on the Lethal Weapon 2 soundtrack. You know, from the very end where Riggs is shot by the South African diplomat on the freighter.
If you don’t know the exact scene, you haven’t watched it enough.
UPDATE: You know what I really could have lived without? Researching it and finding out who else did the song. Roger Waters? Are you freaking kidding me?
This is an unholy aberration.
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I bought this book because when I flipped through it, I landed pretty quickly on the beginning narration for the original Battlestar Galactica, so I thought I’d do pretty well. As it turns out, I got about 10% of the questions, maybe less. Because, let’s face it, the popular television seasons spanned a large bloc of years, so the theme songs you remember represent a very small percentage of television shows. The book is rife with answers based on short-running shows from fifty years of television, including four or so decades where I didn’t watch television.
As a result, I didn’t get many questions right about 1960s cartoons, 1940s detective shows, 1970s meaningful sitcoms, or 1950s westerns. I didn’t even get the chance to answer the question about the inexecrable Buck Rogers in the 25th Century theme song lyrics, which the producers fortunately turned into a science fiction march after the pilot. So I knew something that this author might not, which is the best I can do.
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Remember the band Color Me Badd?
Me, either.
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You may now confuse the Primitive Radio Gods (“Standing Outside A Broken Phonebooth With Money In My Hand”) with The New Radicals (“You Get What You Give”).
If you ever happen to think of either, that is.
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The Bangles “An Eternal Flame”, their biggest hit, released in 1988:
By 2008, the poet-narrator’s “eternal flame,” whom she married in 1990, has left her after succeeding at his career (success being a district manager in a repair-shop-directed auto parts chain) for a 24-year-old whom he met at a coffeeshop in Indianapolis, IN, during a national sales meeting and who “rocked his world.” In 2008, our poet-narrator has been single for 6 years and has begun dealing with empty-nest syndrome as the only child from her “eternal flame” relationship (born ahead of the marriage) has left to go to school in San Francisco.
She’s got nothing left, just a mother nearby who has given up trying to console her daughter and a couple of people whom she calls every couple of months, trying not to impose upon them but ultimately proving too morbid for a return to their early friendship, which she sacrificed to her husbands’ interests (now, they’re married and raising children and don’t want to relate to her experience).
Pleasant dreams.
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The Pat Sajak Assassins. The very name inspires me to purchase one of their CDs.
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The only thing nearly as cool as Ript doing “Suspicious Minds”, we have a metal tribute to the Bee Gees:
(Link seen on The Sniper. Finally, that blog is good for sumpthin.)
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You know the song “Love Machine” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles?
It just doesn’t sound right to me without sighing hens.
You’re only playing her once an hour, so I get the point.
She’s also a young one, like Taylor Swift. What the heck is going on with country music turning into pop music with its focus on young stars? I wrote back in 2003 about how the charts were skewing younger, which meant that as I grew older, I couldn’t connect with the music since I was no longer 20 and in love for the first time.
Fortunately, country and western hasn’t gone that far yet. For every Hough and Swift, we still get some Trace Adkins, Montgomery Gentry, or oldsters like LeeAnn Rimes.
Hopefully, though, success will allow Hough to buy something to eat. She’s got blue eyes, blonde hair, pretty skin, and functional bones, but it looks like her man will have to do a lot of gratuitous lifting in their relationship.
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