Month: July 2011

30 Songs in 30 Days: day 18 – a song that you wish you heard on the radio

As we have already established, I don’t really listen to the radio, so frankly I don’t much care if anything in particular gets played. However, I think the radio-listening world would be a lot better off if they listened to some Art Brut.

I love this band, and this song covers most of the reasons why. Aggressively optimistic and cheerful, but not in a happy-sappy way. Tongue firmly in cheek. Attention to the minutiae of life. The hard-edged, high-energy guitars. Eddie Argos’s not-quite-singing voice. “It’s not irony. It’s not rock and roll.” (As a guy who can’t sing but loves to do it anyway – fortunately for the sake of everybody who knows me, I confine it to when I’m alone in my car – I am living the rockstar life vicariously through Eddie Argos.)

I am sorry to say that these guys have played Chicago quite a bit, and I have never made it to one of their shows. The last one would have been perfect – they were playing somewhere I had free tickets for – but it coincided with a business trip. Dammit. Some day, Art Brut, SOME DAY!

30 Songs in 30 Days: day 17 – a song that you hear often on the radio

I may have hinted previously that I don’t actually listen to music on the radio. In fact, the only time I regularly listen to the radio is on my very short drive to work in the morning. And it’s never a music station. I flip back and forth between NPR and progressive talk radio. Given the time of day I’m usually making the drive, this is the only song that I hear regularly, because it’s the theme song for The Stephanie Miller Show.

The song has been around for 25+ years, and I’ve been aware of its existence, but I never paid much attention to it. It wasn’t until Stephanie Miller had Katrina Leskanich on the show that I learned that the band member who wrote the song was Kimberley Rew – a musician with whom I was much more familiar as the guitarist for one of my all-time favorite bands, the Soft Boys. The world of music is full of such intertwinings, I guess, but given the different styles and sounds of the two bands, I found it surprising that Kimberley Rew was not only a member of Katrina & The Waves, but that he had previoulsy been a founding member of a precursor band (just The Waves back then) before going off to work with Robyn Hitchcock in the Soft Boys. (There may be a whole post about the Soft Boys coming some day. You have been warned.)

Walking on Sunshine is never going to be on my list of top songs. It’s a bit mindless, a bit happy-sappy and relentlessly optimistic – and it takes fucking forever to get through on Rock Band – but I hear part of it almost every weekday morning, and so far I haven’t needed to kill anyone afterward. I’d say that makes it a pretty good song for the radio.

30 Songs in 30 Days: day 16 – a song that you used to love but now hate

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba

I don’t know that I ever actually loved this song, but I will admit that when it first hit the radio (back when I was still listening to the radio), I enjoyed it. It was loud and anthemic and easy enough learn the words to for singing-along-in-the-car purposes. I even bought the CD. Listened to it a few times, read a little bit about the “collective” that is Chumbawamba… and finally decided I wasn’t impressed. Maybe it’s because it was being played 14,000 times an hour for a while, but eventually I realized that the song is pretty vapid.

Really, there’s nothing there. It is not musically innovative. It is not lyrically interesting. It isn’t even “fun,” in any sense of the word that I can understand. Maybe it’s supposed to be some sort of satire on hooliganism or British alcoholism, in which case… nah. It’s bullshit. There’s really nothing that can redeem this song – which is all the worse because it has a tendency to become an earworm and burrow into your brain if you hear it.

Except.

This morning, Jim turned me on to the one thing that could possibly make this song worth listening to: a cover by They Might Be Giants, performed for The Onion’s A.V. Club. The two Johns rarely disappoint. I’m not going to spen a lot of time with it, but this version is at least enjoyable. The people in the video actually seem to be having some fun.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…

(I’m sure I’ve used that title to refer to this sort of thing before. Oh well.)

Anyway, I’m blocked again on the 30 Songs thing, so I decided to change the theme around here to see if that would help. (Hint: It hasn’t.)

30 Songs in 30 Days: day 15 – a song that describes you

I know I haven’t exactly been hitting the “daily” aspect of this meme, but I’ve stalled out compeltely for the last several days (maybe a week) for a couple of reasons. Reason one: very busy at work. Reason two, and the more critical reason: this entry. I have been struggling to figure out how to identify a song that describes me. I’ve considered and rejected the jokey ideas (Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict, Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer, Peter Gabriel’s No Self-Control), and a few others that I think would appear overly confessional (whether they were or not). Hell, I don’t know how to describe myself in prose; how am I supposed to identify a song that does it?

So, I’m cheating. This song (no video this time, sorry) describes everyone – which by definition means it describes me. I declare victory and move on.

07_We_Are_All_Animals.mp3

(It’s also an awesome song. I really love The Rakes, and I wish I had discovered them before they split up in 2009.)