Category Archives: music is my boyfriend

I Would Chide You for Using Sports to Escape from Your Pathetic Life, but You Know I Do the Same Thing with Reality Television

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 8, 2010 – 10:30 am
Filed under a taste for tv, music is my boyfriend, par-tay
Tagged as , ,

I do not care about the Super Bowl. Aside from backyard basketball games involving the word horse, I think sports are pretty stupid. Especially professional ones.

I went to a Super Bowl party last night, though, and I went all the way to Jersey for it. And by “all the way”, I mean that I took a bus 15 minutes to my friend Jeff’s apartment, but I couldn’t use my MetroCard to pay the bus fare, so it seemed like a big deal. I did watch the game, unexpectedly, and I casually cheered for the Colts simply because Indianapolis is much closer to my hometown in Ohio than New Orleans is.

And also because I thought all of the pregame crap about how much a win would mean to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina–which happened five years ago, people–was unnecessarily sentimental and trying to make a story arc where one wasn’t needed. It’s a football game, and its outcome has nothing to rebuilding a city and everything to do with giving the kind of people who stand behind on-air newscasters and scream and show off their replica team jerseys an excuse to get drunk and light things on fire.

Anyway. I found the bidet in Jeff’s roommmate’s bathroom about a hundred times more interesting than most of the Super Bowl commercials, but there was one that really pulled at my heartstrings, and no, it wasn’t the Budweiser one with the Clydesdale and the cow. It was, oddly, a promo for the NFL itself, telling its fans how much better they are than are than NHL and MLS fans:

Funny what a little well-placed Arcade Fire song can do.

New York Magazine’s Brooklyn Top 40

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 17, 2009 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
Tagged as ,

This weekend, instead of properly paying attention to me, Kamran combed YouTube for all of the songs listed in New York magazine’s Brooklyn Top 40, the top 40 songs coming out of Brooklyn and defining what it means to be indie right now. He made a playlist of them, which you can enjoy here:

I feel so close to all of these artists somehow. Both physically, because I live down the street from them, but also . . . not spiritually, because that’s lame, but somehow like spiritually, because this sound is so distinctly Brooklyn to me, and I feel so distinctly Brooklyn myself.

While we sat on Kamran’s loveseat, him reading cases for law school and me scanning blogs as we listened to the playlist for the second time, he looked over and said, “We should be doing this!” I said, “Oh, um, I don’t know if we could do this.” He said, “Well, not THIS. This is good.”

This is the song he was talking about:

We decided that when we need to feel better about ourselves and how easy making music is, we’ll listen to this:

I forget sometimes that I’m so freakin’ lucky to live in a city where this stuff is being made and is readily available to me. I saw Crystal Stilts open for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, saw Amazing Baby open for Cold War Kids, saw MGMT play in an abandoned pool, saw The Dirty Projectors play on the Williamsburg waterfront. Remind me of this when I say I can’t be out at a show until 2 on a weeknight.

I Love Miley Cyrus, and I’m Not Even Sure It’s in an Ironic Way Anymore

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 22, 2009 – 11:35 am
Filed under music is my boyfriend, stuff i like
Tagged as ,

If you don’t work with me and don’t receive a daily instant messenger reminder from me to listen to it, you may be surprised to know that my favourite song at the moment is Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”.

I first heard it months ago in the background of the Max Azria/Miley Cyrus Wal-Mart collection commercial and could only make out the words “the butterflies fly away”. Naturally, I ran to Google and typed that in but kept coming up with a song called “Butterfly Fly Away”, which was decidedly not it. Not having heard a lick of Miley before that, I had no idea that this was apparently some hit from her Hannah Montana movie.

I later found the right song, listened to it on repeat all day every day, and dreamed of the day they would make an official video for it where Miley would be wearing short-shorts and cowboy boots and would be singing into a corded microphone out in the middle of a field where there’s obviously nowhere to plug that thing in. And then they did:

SO HOT! Then, yesterday, I hired a painter to re-do the lobby of my company’s office, and he randomly started telling me that he’s also currently painting the home of the guy who wrote the new Kelly Clarkson song. I was like, “Oh, I don’t really listen to popular music,” but he assured me I would’ve heard this song, and when we pulled it up on YouTube, it turns out he was right. After enjoying that, he said practically as an aside, “This guy also wrote the new Miley Cyrus song, if you know it.” I was like

IF I KNOW IT?! So what I’m saying is–there’s three degrees of separation between Miley Cyrus and me, which practically makes me one of those friends in her video. Probably the Asian one in the red bikini top.

Making Friends with Perry Farrell

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 16, 2009 – 10:20 am
Filed under fun times on the subway, music is my boyfriend
Tagged as ,

‘member how I said that I’d legitimately never stood next to someone listening to music and recognized the band? That was less than a month ago.

Wednesday morning, I was on the green line on my way to work, and the air conditioning suddenly turned off despite the fact that the subway is UNDERGROUND in an entirely ENCLOSED SPACE that doesn’t get ANY NATURAL AIR. Without the whooshing from the vents, I was able to hear the music coming from the headphones of the guy in front of me. I listened in for a second and dismissed it as some hip-hop crap, but during the bridge, I realized that I not only knew but loved the song!

Read the rest here.

Stop Making Me Question My Taste Thx

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 7, 2009 – 6:54 pm
Filed under music is my boyfriend, stuff i like
Tagged as ,

When I first moved to NYC, I was dating this great guy named Todd who had this terrible friend named Sarah. On my first night in the city, she took us to eat at the Sea in Williamsburg, which would later become the neighborhood I’d move to and live in for three years and counting, even though I’m not even sure I knew we were in Brooklyn at the time. I thought Sarah was a little bit bitchy and a little bit glamourous, which is exactly what I look for in friends, and I assumed we’d be likethis soon enough.

But then Todd came home from hanging out with her one night and told me that Sarah said my taste in music was not indie but singer-songwriter. As I’d prided myself up until then on knowing all the music my friends didn’t, I was super-offended that this Goldfrapp-loving rich girl was calling me “not indie”. When I thought of singer-songwriters, I thought of John Mayer and Jack Johnson, who I just don’t consider my guys.

The other day, though, I realized that actually, yeah, I’m totally not embarrassed to like certain singer-songwriters:

But I hate all the others, and I’m totally indie, so there.