Everyone knows “Take On Me,” but I submit that “The Sun Always Shines on TV” is the superior a-ha song. I rediscover it every few years and listen to it endlessly.
https://youtu.be/a3ir9HC9vYg
I carried Touching from a Distance around in my backpack for most of my senior year of high school, and even I don’t think this needs to exist.
Until I started listening to Blur again, I’d forgotten the feeling of the impending end of an entire century.
I’ve been struck by how many Blur songs use the word century, or reference its ending. In “For Tomorrow,” “he’s a 20th century boy.” In “Country House,” the city-dweller is “caught up in the century’s anxieties.” And of course, in “End of a Century,” “we kiss with dry lips when we say good night… end of a century, it’s nothing special.”
Time ends, flips inside out. We fall off a cliff and into a different world than the one we’ve known, even though it’s exactly the same, changing by events rather than by numbers. I lived almost the first half of my life in a different millenium.
I’ve come to the point at which it doesn’t make sense for me NOT to learn the stealth and hacking skills I would need to fix the music at the Dunkin Donuts where I spend too much of my writing time.
When I was in college, I had a PDA with infrared capabilities that allowed me to use it as a TV remote once I installed the right app, although we didn’t call programs apps back in 2004.
Remembering this prompted me to use Dunkin Donuts’ wi-fi to search for “use smartphone to change music at Dunkin Donuts,” though not with any success.
“Neighborhood #1” is the first Arcade Fire song I ever heard, and it remains my favorite. I always seem to come back to this album during National Novel Writing Month.
“If I listen to a playlist of children’s new wave songs about trucks at work, will anybody notice?” That’s the question my partner and I have been wondering about (more me because of the nature of my job) now that our kid is obsessed with this song about a cement mixer. Like a disease, it has spread to everyone around her. We all have it stuck in our heads. It goes round and round and round and round…
If this had existed when I was in high school, it’s exactly the kind of thing I would’ve binged-watched just because it’s weird.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRUUwhrAutY
Another great Tegan and Sara song. They came out with a new album a few days ago, and I’ve been binging on their older songs in anticipation all month. Also because my toddler took a liking to them, and always asks for “Sara” now.
The instrumentals of “Shock to my System” remind me of Depeche Mode.
I couldn’t find the official video for “Outsiders,” if there is such a thing, but this was my favorite Franz Ferdinand song for years. I’d never seen the video before.
Orange Juice! I never get sick of this song.
I love the craziness of early music videos. With a lot of them, I get the sense that the people involved had some kind of brainstorming session, then decided that, since there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, they would go ahead and put every single one in the video.
This video supports my theory. The band starts off in some kind of rejected set from the original Star Trek. They change their clothes four times, and one of those four times involves scuba gear.
Three chords, one hit wonders, and other disagreements
Thoughts on music from a recovering pretentious snob: three chords are enough, one hit wonders usually aren’t, and musical taste as a romantic deal-breaker.
Subdued Swiss party music
Back in 2001, my uncle gave me an early mp3 player that came with his computer. It held four songs, although I eventually upgraded it to ten or twelve. Even now, I would be fine with a device that could only store a handful of songs because I tend to listen to the same song on obsessive, brain-numbing repeat for forty-five minutes at a time.
Today, this is that song.
Listening to… New Order
I’m obsessed with this version of “I Told You So,” and how bleak and inexorable it is.
It’s re-sparked my high school-era obsession with New Order, although without the fixation on minutiae like the fact that the version of “Sub-culture” on Low-life has a hyphen, while the one on Substance doesn’t.