I was falsely under the impression that being in a band means you’re cool.
Back in high school and college, I went to a lot of shows. I’ve seen my favourite band well over 50 times all over the country, and that’s just the beginning. I used to be obsessed with meeting members of the bands after the concerts, so I’ve gushed to an embarrassing number of musicians. And they all seemed cool to me. Honestly, I can’t remember anyone who wasn’t cool. Some of them were assholes (I’m looking at YOU, Ed Roland), but being an asshole only adds to your air of untouchability.
A couple of weekends ago, though, Kamran made me watch the documentary Kill Your Idols, which is about the NYC no wave scene of the 70s and 80s and the current noise scene that grew out of it. The film features a couple of Yeah Yeah Yeahs performances, which was really exciting for me, because I’ve always thought Karen O is a super-sexy performer with unrivaled coolness. See for yourself:
But then they made the horrible, horrible mistake of interviewing her. She says “like” and “you know” a million times, which isn’t really an issue for me, because who do I know who doesn’t talk that way? The problem for me is how . . . Midwestern . . . she seems. I can’t look at her the same way anymore. She has a weak chin! And insecure lips! And awkward hand movements!
Someone made the best YouTube video with clips from the interview called “Karen O tells it, like, it is”. So funny:
Seriously, if this person is cool enough to front a band, who isn’t? I can put on a lot of makeup and look mean (haha 2005), and what you’ve seen of me at karaoke is 1/8th of what I’m capable of. Kamran and I even have our band named.
In case you haven’t already heard, I sort of loved the movie 500 Days of Summer but also sort of hated it for its attempts at making me feel like my boyfriend doesn’t wear enough sweater vests and for my unexplainable secret desire to see the couple in it fail.
Other than the female lead being a coldhearted jerk, I couldn’t pinpoint anything specific that caused me to not feel much attachment to them, but this morning on the train, I realized that what made me roll my eyes about them was the elevator scene, shown here in the opening of the trailer:
The problem is that I’m jealous. This exact scene is the stuff of my emo, music-fanatic, high school dreams, and it’s never happened to me . . .
The other day, Dr. Boyfriend innocently informed me that he’d been listening to Electric Six’s Switzerland album on his iPod, not realizing that I’d go crazy reminiscing about how much it meant to me three short years ago. See, I met my ex-boyfriend Todd during our senior year of college at THE Ohio State University in a German film class, and after we’d dated for six months, he moved here for grad school at NYU. I took an extra year to write an undergraduate thesis and then moved to NYC myself, thinking that we’d both loved karaoke and strawberry shortcake from Whole Foods and riding the subway equally.
It turned out that Todd only liked to sing one song at karaoke, that they built a Whole Foods in Ohio, and that the subway made his claustrophobia act up. So he planned to move back home, and I planned to move with him, because it’s hard here, you know? And it’s even harder when you don’t know anyone but five of your boyfriend’s friends. I started looking at apartments in Columbus, picked out my future dining room table one day while I was shopping on High Street with my best friend, Tracey, and even bought some candles to match the exposed brick wall I imagined my new place would have.
And then I just didn’t go. Todd still went, and my friends must have thought I was the biggest asshole for teasing them with my plans to go with him, but I stayed, and I left our beautiful 350-square-foot studio with its black and white checked bathroom tile in Chelsea and found a sublet in Brooklyn. The sublet was the ground level of a brownstone in Park Slope where the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and one bedroom were on the first floor, and the entire basement was a second bedroom with its own bathroom.
I was rather lonely during that time. I hadn’t really considered NYC my home and hadn’t bothered to accept any invitations to hang out with friendly co-workers, so the only person I had to rely on was a guy from my very first job in the city. He lived in Park Slope and had been the one to convince me to take a sublet there, so I naturally assumed he’d be my tour guide and makeshift boyfriend. We did super-romantic things like meet at midnight for walks in the park (because he didn’t go into work until 11 a.m. and didn’t care that I had to be up at 7), listen to hours and hours of Radiohead (because it’s the only band we had in common) in his one-bedroom apartment (I didn’t know anyone else who was able to afford to live alone in NYC, so it impressed me), and watch the sun set from the roof of the Met (and then go straight to our respective homes instead of continuing an actual date). He’d call me only once a week, and I’d call Tracey eight times a day to complain about it.
The lease was up for the girl I was subletting from at the end of August, and I just assumed that my friend Wen (who I met while working Barnes & Noble, which was my second job for the first year I lived here) and I could just slide right in to a new lease. But on August 29th, the landlord called to tell me he was raising the rent from $2100 to $2800 and that I could get the hell out if I wasn’t happy with it. I begged him for a month to find a new apartment, and Wen helped me move my stuff into the basement bedroom so I could enjoy four glorious weeks of sleeping in a room the size of other people’s entire apartments.
I’d met Kamran (who is, of course, the current Dr. Boyfriend) on September 14th, but I wasn’t spending every waking moment at his apartment in front of a reality TV show yet. Every morning, I’d take a shower in the first-floor bathroom (because the downstairs one had seemed too scary to me after the flooding) and then try to find a corner of my room where I wasn’t visible to Wen on the first floor. The staircase was an open one with wooden bars where a wall should have been, so anyone standing in the kitchen could look down into the bedroom through the bars and see whatever wild thing I might be doing. I tried hanging sheets up with various sticking materials, but nothing ever took, so I resigned myself to hiding in my closet to put my underwear on for a month.
And I’d listen to Switzerland every single morning. I mean every single morning. Wen was always upstairs listening to cool stuff like The Blow from the crappy speakers attached to our TV (since we didn’t have a proper stereo), and I was always trying to drown him out with “I Buy the Drugs”. Which is totally a romantic song, right? “I am your man and I buy the drugs.”
I have no idea why the album hit me in just the right spot at that particular time. Maybe it’s because I was in such a state of oh-my-god-why-did-I-decide-to-stay-here? that I needed the tongue-in-cheek-ness of it to keep me focused on my yay-I-have-the-chance-to-do-whatever-I-want-to-with-my-life-in-NYC! thoughts and to keep my mind off my oh-crap-I-have-no-money-I-need-to-find-a-new-apartment-I’m-not-tough-enough-for-NYC thoughts. It was super-exciting to live in Brooklyn for the first time in this huge apartment and super-exciting to start looking for our next new place in my now-neighborhood of Williamsburg with Wen and super-exciting to be dating this person who felt different than everyone else from the moment I met him, and I really associate the album with those feelings and that time.
And now I have a boyfriend who loves it, too. Kamran and I agree that this is the best song on the album:
And now that I’ve told you my life story, tell me yours. What songs do you associate with certain times in your life? If you’re really motivated (and I hope you are), write your own blog/journal entry about it and let us know in the comments so everyone can enjoy.
Back on April 3rd, Dr. Kamran took me to see Cold War Kids at Terminal 5 over on the waywest side. It was sorta weird to me that I was paying real money to see them, because when I saw them for a $3 donation last summer in Prospect Park, I felt fairly so-so about them. I liked their vocalist, but I didn’t care for their songs.
And then I couldn’t stop listening to them for weeks afterward and kicked myself for all the times I missed them playing $5 shows when I lived in Ohio. I finally understood why everyone was so gung-ho about “Hospital Beds” and “Hang Me Out to Dry“, and then their new album came out, and I couldn’t get enough of “Mexican Dogs” and “Against Privacy“.
So even though Kamran had spring semester law school finals the following week, he took me to the show, and it was amazing:
It just sucks, you know, because I’m to the point that I would say I sort of love this band, and yet their fans suck so hard. The people behind us were chatting through the entire show, and half of that chat was complaining about how they didn’t know any of the songs. When they started playing “Something is Not Right with Me” and everyone cheered for, like, the first time all night, I yelled, “Buy the album!” and the girl beside me who actually knew the songs turned and laughed.
But I’m a crochety old lady who should be ignored.
First, Joe Satriani accused Coldplay of ripping off his 2004 song “If I Could Fly”:
Now Cat Stevens (er, um, Yusuf Islam) is accusing them of stealing from his 1973 song “Foreigner Suite”:
And suddenly Brooklyn band Creaky Boards claims that their 2008 song “The Songs I Didn’t Write” was also copied by Coldplay . . . even though their albums came out at the same time. And seriously, when you straight up tell everyone that you didn’t write the song IN ITS TITLE, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on in the courtroom.
The fact that Cat Stevens evidently didn’t think Satriani himself was worth suing when his song came out four whole years before Coldplay’s interests me, though. If I was Satriani, I’d be super-offended.
I'm Katie, a farmgirl originally from Ohio who moved to NYC in 2005 for no apparent reason. I like vintage-looking things that are actually new, filagree everything, people who don't make me feel awkward, meaning it when I say "no sleep till Brooklyn", and not trying too hard.
