Category Archives: music is my boyfriend

The Only Reason to Ever Listen to Justin Bieber

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 25, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under i used to be so cool, music is my boyfriend
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Most exciting things in my relationship with Kamran happen between 8:30 a.m., when we should be leaving the house for work, and 8:45 a.m., when we actually leave.

Yesterday morning at 8:30, he loaded a Justin Bieber song on his computer. I’ve accidentally caught live performances of this particular song on several occasions just because I watch so much crappy reality TV, but it turns out the album version is actually pretty incredible.

Kamran called it pure bubblegum pop bliss. It’s the song “U Smile”, and in a perfect world, it’ll load automatically when you click on that link.

Next, he showed me the 800%-slowed-down version, which New York magazine likened to Mogwai but I think is straight up Sigur Ros:

Isn’t it beautiful? Parts of it made us look up from our lipstick-applying and flexing-in-the-mirror-for-the-18th-time-that-hour at each other like, “Whaaaaaaaa?”

And then I had to tell Kamran this story, which I’m telling you now so I can remember it when I’m 80 and still be pissed off:

When I was a junior at THE Ohio State University, I took a poetry workshop that was supposed to lead to a career in song- and jinglewriting. I actually liked the professor’s poetry, which is kind of unheard of for me, and although it was clear she didn’t think any of my poems made any sense whatsoever, she always blamed it on herself and encouraged me to keep trying.

One of our assignments was to take a song, pretend like we didn’t know what the lyrics really were, and re-write them based on what we actually hear. So I used Sigur Ros’s “Vaka”, which was sung in Hopelandic, an entirely made-up language:

“How clever!”, I’m sure you’re thinking, and I was thinking it, too.

Only the professor said it didn’t count, because the lyrics not being in English meant I didn’t have to use any imagination to make up new ones. Well, you can guess how personally I took that, seeing as how I thought I’d used all of my imagination in coming up with such a unique song to explore. I never took another poetry class again, never started my indie rock band, and never wrote a single jingle.

What’s funny is that while writing this, I wanted to look at the Hopelandic lyrics for the song, but on almost every lyrics site, they’re in English, and they look veeeeeeeeeeeeeery similar to what I wrote for my poetry project. Which means that:

1) Lyrics sites are retarded.

2) I really must not be imaginative.

Run and Tell THAT, Homeboy

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 16, 2010 – 12:30 pm
Filed under music is my boyfriend, stuff i like
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The day before I left for vacation, my co-worker Steve came to my desk and said, “Type ghetto bed intruder into YouTube.” Obviously you can’t go wrong searching for videos with those keywords, so I wasn’t surprised to laugh out loud while watching this interview (which I’m sure you all saw weeks ago, because I’m 100 years behind everyone else when it comes to the Internet):

Then Steve showed me the Auto-Tuned remix of the footage, which was so ingenious I found myself basically putting it on repeat:

I made Kamran pause his 17th viewing of an “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” episode that night so he could watch the videos, and even though he was skeptical at first, because I never find the right things funny, he actually laughed out loud, too. And we sang bits of the song to each other over the next couple of hours as we did laundry and packed for California, but I kind of figured that was it.

It happened, though, that the song would become the focal point of our entire 10-day trip. We were whispering quotes from it on the plane. We were watching it on Kamran’s iPod under the table while out for lunch with his parents. We were pretending to show it to his friends just to have an excuse to watch it again ourselves. One night, I woke up to it and thought I was going crazy until I realized Kamran was listening to it in the bathroom while pooing. And last night, a full 11 days since I first saw the thing, I couldn’t sleep because “hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, ’cause they’re rapin’ everybody out here” kept running through my head.

I Can’t Love a Band Who Won’t Love Me Back

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 19, 2010 – 1:00 pm
Filed under music is my boyfriend
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Back in the early 2000s, I was in love with the band Jump, Little Children and felt for them a passion unlike any I’d felt before. I fell in love with them slowly and accidentally but so fiercely that I followed them all over the country, sometimes driving 14 hours straight to make a show, and saw them well over 50 times. I joined their listserv and exchanged e-mails with their other fans for years, some of whom I became great friends with, and one of whom became my still-to-this-day arch-nemesis. We analyzed their lyrics, analyzed their personal lives, and analyzed our many meetings with them. This was a band who read and responded to your e-mails, knew you by name when you approached them after shows, and hosted heavy metal karaoke nights in Southern towns you’d fall in love with simply because you saw them play there.

(Here’s their most famous song, and here’s my favourite song. (OMG, isn’t Jay’s voice especially dreamy live?))

When they broke up in 2006, I didn’t die like I thought I would, because I had moved to NYC and was preoccupied with my new life. In fact, it was almost better that they were breaking up, because I had sold my car and wouldn’t be able to road trip to see them in five different cities on five different days anymore. I didn’t find a new favorite band to replace them, but I didn’t think I needed one.

And then I created a Pandora radio station based on The Shins and heard Band of Horses’ “The Funeral“. I fucking loved it. I listened to it 100 times at work and at home in one day and still wasn’t tired of it. Then Pandora played another of their songs the next day, and I loved it, too. And then it seemed like every time I was clicking over to my Pandora Firefox tab to see who the band was, it was Band of Horses.

I realized that I heard them before living in Ohio but hadn’t cared about them. I realized my best friend Tracey had turned off “Is There a Ghost?” one time while I was visiting her in Ohio because she was sick of it. I downloaded their albums. Then I got their songs stuck in my head. Then I started sharing them on my blog and on my old LiveJournal, hoping that someone would say something about how much she loved them, too. I watched their live performances on YouTube. I found the best cover possible of one of their songs and thought about hiring the singer, Chris Dodgen, to play in my living room if I couldn’t hire the band itself. I listened to all of the other bands the members have been in and Wikipediaed anything I could think of related to them. I stopped caring about anything else.

The problem is that the Internet is a bit of a different place than it used to be for fangirls. I remember becoming a silverchair follower in 1995 and finding entire webrings of fan sites dedicated to them, and that was true for every band at that time. There were communities with chat rooms built right into the pages, forums for sharing band gossip, and photo galleries compiling every live and promo picture the band ever had taken. The Band of Horses website, meanwhile, doesn’t even have a Contact link, and their fan community consists of individual people writing blog posts, apparently, though I have no idea how to actually view other people’s posts.

And when they tweet a new concert date and I tweet back a legitimate question about it, they don’t respond. I can’t help taking it personally after so many years of direct contact with my last favorite band, and I know that’s stupid, but I paid for the solo album from Jump’s lead singer, Jay Clifford, last night on iTunes, and you can bet I won’t be paying for the Band of Horses album that came out yesterday.

Million Dollar Quartet on Broadway

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 5, 2010 – 12:45 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
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My friend Alison works for a concierge company that books activities for clueless NYC tourists. Because she spends so much of her day recommending Broadway shows and selling expensive dinners, she’s constantly being wooed by theatres and restaurants. Last week, she let me be wooed with her.

We met at an Upper East Side restaurant for fried hors d’oeuvres that I couldn’t eat because I was trying to play it cool on the calories before my impending trip to Ohio to see my family. (Every time I lose five pounds, my great-aunt, godloveher, likes to hug me and tell me how she and my great-uncle were so worried I’d end up “round-shouldered” and alone.) Afterward, we boarded a shiny new tour bus to take us the twenty blocks down Broadway to the theatre district, and I had to look on as Alison ate a Magnolia Bakery cupcake:

Magnolia Bakery cupcake

I’m not really up on my Broadway, so I hadn’t heard of Million Dollar Quartet and honestly wasn’t expecting much from it. Especially when the theatre where it was playing, the Nederlander, was one of the tiniest I’ve been in. Of course crap doesn’t make it to Broadway, though, and the size of the theatre made it so that our front-row mezzanine seats were approximately a foot from the stage.

Magnolia Bakery cupcake

The musical revolves around the night in 1956 when Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis all came together in Memphis to record an impromptu jam session. It’s really a musical for people who don’t like musicals, because it actually makes sense when the actors break into song. And there’s nothing cheesy about the music or lyrics; it feels like you’re at a rock concert, only you don’t have to put up with any deafening 1950s-era Elvis fans.

All of the performances were spot-on, but Johnny Cash blew our minds with how close his voice sounded. And at the end, when I thought, “Okay, this has been nice, but there’s nothing they can do at the end that’ll surprise me,” they totally gave me chills with something as simple as taking a picture. You’ll understand it when you see it. And you should see it.

You should also wait outside after the show like we did and happen to run into Elvis. And when he tells you he’s on his way to dinner like he did with us, remind him to stay away from the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches lest he die an early death.

I’ve Never Even Had Sideswept Hair

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 24, 2010 – 10:15 am
Filed under i used to be so cool, music is my boyfriend
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Remember when Modest Mouse was so cool? When they were really emo, and no one you would consider “normal” listened to them, and not even your friends knew who they were?

And you had all of their albums and also all of their pins and also all of these homemade pins you bought off eBay, which you dutifully stuck to your messenger bag so everyone would know how emo you were wherever you went?

“Polar Opposites” came on my Pandora station yesterday, and I about died, so I immediately had to go to YouTube and find the best made-by-a-16-year-old music video for the song I could:

The lyrics are “I’m trying, I’m trying to/Drink away the part of the day/That I cannot sleep away,” and I remember being like, “Oh, my god, Modest Mouse, you totally get me.” Even though I had the easiest life and the strongest thing I was drinking back in 1999 in Ohio was Carnation Instant Breakfast.