THE WEATHER IS JUST beginning to warm up here in New York. Spring is arriving in fits and starts; although it was colder than a witch's titty for a few hours this afternoon, we had a gorgeous Saturday, which I spent lying around and napping with Oscar, windows open and fan gently blowing. Check out the sweet kitty porn from our love session.
See how I seduce you?
The true indication that spring is on its way, however, is that songs built for floating out of cars windows are starting to show. True to form, Usher has hit springtime hard with a skittery banger called "Love in This Club." It's already topped the Billboard charts, but the video just dropped and it's got everything you'd want: pretty colors, flashing lights, great choreography, sexy hip-hop ladies and total nonsense for a plot.
Ole!
Usher - "Love in This Club (Director's Cut)"
We all know what kind of club Usher means. Bring a towel!
KANYE'S VIDEO FOR "FLASHING LIGHTS" has some amazing cinematography, gorgeous colors, and the girl has a serious swerve. Something about it reminds me of the Arcade Fire video mash-up I posted a while back, something about the pacing and the cold, silent violence, but this one is definitely more hip-hop.
The song is typical Kanye - stunning beat, great sample, tiresome, self-congratulatory lyrics - but I like the video enough to post it anyway.
GUESS WHO'S GONNA BE gainfully employed this summer?
After suffering the slings of excessive self-doubt, after countless recruiting cocktails and conversations with a dozen firms, after a slew of interviews where I whipped out my MECE at every conceivable instant, your boy's got an offer from a great firm.
Needless to say, I'm stoked. It's a firm I'd jocked all semester - smart, fun, genuine people, interesting, meaningful work, great brand name.
Early on in the process, a second-year at school told me that the whole recruiting process was like dating. You're out trying to make it happen with someone, putting out your best. That's recruiting events.
You find someone you're clicking with, but you're more into them than they are into you. You're just trying to keep them from getting tired of you, so you flash a little leg and telling all your really good stories. That's interviewing.
Then, at some point in the relationship, the power switches hands and you realize the person you're seeing is really into you. Supposedly, that's what it's like after the offer comes.
And then you realize that you're both into each other, and you make a ten thousand babies.
Let's just say I'm really looking forward to this stage in the relationship.
Amerie - "Gotta Work"
"Show me someone without a goal, show me someone with no control."
LIKE A MAJORITY OF FIRST-YEAR business school students, I'm in the middle of the summer internship search. I'm gunning for a job in consulting, and applications are due in a few weeks for the big firms. Like any other Type-A overachiever, I'm doing as much as I can to make sure that when I pull the lever on the big employment slot machine, I pull cherries or sevens and not... uh... you know, something that leaves me without job.
The hardest part about this whole job search thing is the fact that, ultimately, it's out of my hands.
This is hard for me to accept.
I don't do hard drugs. I don't gamble. I don't fall in love easily, as any number of ex-boyfriends can attest. Not because they're stupid things to do (which they are), but because they require you to surrender yourself to something else: a chemical, chance, or someone else's uncertain affection.
My father may be surprised to read about this need for control. I frequently leave on trips without a map, directions, or even a precise destination address. Yet I know that I can always call him and he'll tell me where I've managed to wind up, and how to get where I'm going, thereby providing the illusion of control. (All that said, I pray he's not actually reading this blog, as it occasionally acknowledges the existence of sex and that I have a semi-functional sex drive. Dad, if you're reading this, those things are lies. Also, Hillary made me do it).
I know that I'll eventually need to give up on this need, that being successful eventually becomes less about doing the right thing all the time, and more about leveraging a rare moment of possibility and otherwise rolling with the punches. It's hard to make that shift, though, when doing what I can to determine the outcome of uncertain periods has been relatively successful.
THE FIRST SONG I EVER memorized was "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon. I was young, certainly far too young to grasp the song's interpersonal complexities, too young even to memorize the words correctly. By way of illustration, when Carly sang "Some underworld spy, or the wife of a close friend," I would sing "Some underwear spy and the wife of a clothespin." My mother never attempted to correct me. She probably thought it was cute. Like a lisp.
Like a lisp, if it's not corrected quickly, your son winds up a fag, and gets tormented in elementary school because not only is he singing Carly Simon in the playground, he's singing it wrong with a fucking lisp.
REGARDLESS, THIS LYRIC MADE perfect sense to my child brain. While singing, I would picture a clothespin puppet, dressed up in a pretty felt dress, yarn hair pulled back, standing next to a man wearing a cape and a pair of underwear over his eyes to conceal his identity. I may have confused spies with Zorro.
When you're a kid, your ability to discern the reasonable from the absurd is severely limited, as my friend, whose imaginary friend "Broccoli" (a human-sized head of broccoli), can testify. I think that's one of the reasons kids attach to such horrible songs. The neighborhood kids used to spend hours dancing around with Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" on repeat, and our parent's never tried to kill us! Not once!
Even if we put aside children's music (hey, remember Raffi?), there's enough kid-friendly, soul-grating music by otherwise credible musicians to fill thousands of trips to and from Gymboree, the day's playdate, and any number of mind-numbing soccer games. One key entry into this pantheon of shame is surely "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon. Why can I call you Al, Paul? And it's not Betty, okay? I'm having enough trouble with the kids in the playground and I don't need this from you.
The song makes no sense, but an entire generation of kids grew up singing the song from the wayback at the top of their lungs. It turns out it was an international phenomenon, as Jens Lekman explains, before launching into a worthy rendition of the song. Lekman gets at the heart of what makes the song so annoying - the chorus, and Chevy Chase's smile in the original video - and then does us all a favor and gets rid of both. The guitar riff in the hook is pretty amazing, right?
I WAS E-STALKING A GENTLEMAN (who will inevitably read this blog, making the whole endeavor all the more shameful), and one of his photos was of a girl wearing a homemade t-shirt that read "I Can Drink Myself Gay."
Genius.
I would drink myself straight for Carrie Underwood, as long as she sang this song to me whilst cuddling.
Carrie Underwood - Alone
And by straight I mean I'll talk about boys with her.
IF BRITNEY SPEARS AND Tori Amos had a baby, and that baby turned out to be a queerbait with a flair for the melodramatic and a YouTube account, that queer baby would record a version of "Gimme More" a lot like this one.
As Toby said, be thankful I don't play the piano, otherwise my blog would be full of crap like this.
WHEN I WAS A KID, the end of summer was always marked by the Saint Leo's Fair. Kids from all over town would come for one last hurrah before school started. The fact that doom was looming so close was highlighted by the fact that Saint Leo's was, through some cruel twist of fate, located on the same block as an elementary and a high school.
All us kids would go crazy trying to ride all the rides, desperate to hold on to the final days of freedom. The fair would last five days and nights, and we would go as many nights as possible; during the first days at school, we would one-up each other about how much time we'd spent at the fair, or how many times we'd ridden the rides that everyone agreed were the most likely to make you barf and were therefore the best.
Even when we got "too old" to ride the rides, going to Saint Leo's was still an end of summer ritual. It was a chance to see (or in my case, actively avoid) people you hadn't seen all summer, to try to sneak a beer from a priest, and to show off your tan to the pretty girls in your class (or something).
There was something manic about Saint Leo's, but it was tempered by the universal acceptance that summer was over. The video for the Shout Out Louds' latest single, "Impossible," off their album Our Ill Wills, uses the Saint Leo's effect wonderfully. The song is about that last night you spend in a relationship you know is ending, a night with someone you still love but can't be with anymore. You get that same frantic feeling, like you need to make it last, but because you can't, or won't, you don't do anything but lie there and hold them in silence.
Shout Out Louds - "Impossible"
"Let's not fall back to sleep like we used to, do you remember? I don't want to wake up knowing I don't have a future."
A FEW MONTHS BACK, a guy I was sort of dating said he'd met someone else, that they'd slept together, and that we needed to stop seeing each other. I was taken aback by his confession, not because I thought my shit was too hot to give up, but because he didn't owe me that level of explanation. We weren't in a relationship, we'd just been on a few dates, yet now we were going through a whole breakup rigmarole. He could have just said he wasn't feeling it, that it wasn't there for him, and that would have been that.
Instead, I felt like he'd cheated. It was like paying the taxes on a big lotto win without the getting the payout. If I never liked this guy that much to begin with, why did I feel so shitty?
Jenny Lewis, in the latest single off Rilo Kiley's wonderful new album, Under the Blacklight, sings about cheats, and how the cheated can take back some of their lost dignity by calling things off. The song, "Silver Lining," is about a woman who leaves her lover after he sleeps around town, saying, "I was your silver lining, but now I'm gold."
The video is just okay (not as good as the long form docu-video for "The Moneymaker"), but the way Lewis' vocals float up into falsetto during the chorus and the shimmying electric guitar are glorious.
Rilo Kiley - "Silver Lining"
I didn't like you anyway, I was just looking for fun.
IN THE LAST TWO years, new styles of hip-hop dance have popped up all over the country and have spread through YouTube. Last year in New York it was the Chicken Noodle Soup, and this year it's the Aunt Jackie.
Check it out.
Jason Fox - Aunt Jackie
"New rap music with the old school flow."
And because it's so obvious they're having such a good time, here's a couple of guys doing the Aunt Jackie around the house.
AMONG THE MANY WORDS of widsom that my father has spoken over the years, "You know you know but you don't know" is surely one of my favorites. It's either entirely nonsensical, or it's a brilliant reduction of Faith. Given, however, that it was generally muttered when one of us kids did something moronic, I'm going to lean towards the second.
Another winner, "Boys are like streetcars: when one passes you by, there's another coming around the bend," has held me in good stead as well, perhaps because it leads to the obvious corrollary that boys are easy to flag down and ride.
Perhaps my favorite, however, is the old Wizzle family addage, "Better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you're an idiot than open it and prove them right." Poor Britney Spears needed this advice, and she needed it bad. My girl released a demo track full of actual gibberish.
The beat is kind of hot, but what is happening here? Is the track waiting on a songwriter? Maybe it's some sort of commentary on the vacuous nature of most pop music. Like, let's just give up on lyrics entirely, put on some ripped fishnet stockings, bare our navels, hump around a stripper pole, and sell ten million copies on iTunes.
Leave it to some poor drag queen to choreograph a "routine" to this mess. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Miss Britney Houston.
Britney Houston - "DFA Demo (by Britney Spears)"
"He hit my heart/And he hit me hard."
This drag queen also goes by Lil Britney, and she did an amazing video remix of Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss."
[C’s bedroom, 8:15 AM. Sunlight filters through venetian blinds, casting horizontal stripes of light across the floor. C is asleep in his bed. K stumbles into the room.]
K: Okay, two things.
C:[startled awake] Ugh... Good morning. [props himself up on his elbows]
K: First, I don't think I can go into work today - I made out with a coworker.
C: [bursts out laughing] I was wondering where you were last night! What did you do? Were you drunk?
K: I'm still drunk. I woke up this morning in my bed, nude, and found my clothes scattered all over the living room.
C: Wow, that's a hot make out.
K: Yeah. I don't know how I can face him today.
C: I bet. [He nods. They are silent, contemplating her situation.] So what's the second thing?
K: What?
C: You said there were two things.
K: Oh. Number two, your dildo is in the shower again.
My friends, ladies and gentleman! Initials have been changed to protect the guilty.
Shop Boyz - Party Like a Rock Star "On a money makin mission/but I party like a rockstar"
A COUPLE DAYS AGO I posted a handmade video for the Daft Punk song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." Today I heard Kanye West's new track, "Stronger," and guess what it samples? The same Daft Punk song. Oh shit, Kanye! You and I are totally fingers between eyes.
The song is the first single off Kanye's upcoming album, Graduation, that I'm legitimately excited about. I love the dark synth feel. And the video is beyond dope. As Pitchfork put it: "Expensive!"
MARK RONSON, THE PRODUCER behind Amy Winehouse and the 40s revival currently taking place in pop music, recently released an album of his own in Britain. It's coming to the States in early July, and it should make a splash, even if it's not an enormous commercial hit (which it may wind up being). For the album, he's teamed up with some of the artists he's worked with recently, including Winehouse and Lily Allen.
This video is for the track he cut with Lily Allen called "Oh My God." It's representative of the general feel of the songs I've heard so far: they roll forward with a strong rhythm section, and the man's never met a horn he didn't like. The video is fun, a play on the Jessica Rabbit performance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit - a great fit for his modernized 40s sound - with an animated Allen in the Jessica Rabbit role.
Mark Ronson with Lily Allen - "Oh My God"
But do you think we could add a French horn someplace?
More Ronson! The first single off the album is a cover of "Stop Me," a Smith's song, and the vocal here is by Daniel Merriweather. It's a great choice for a first single. It reels you in, makes you want to listen again, and makes you wonder what the rest of the album is going to sound like.
Mark Ronson with Daniel Merriweather - "Stop Me"
I was a part of the fabulous girl group The Supremes.
And for good measure, here's the Jessica Rabbit clip. I remember being, like, thirteen or so, and being really turned on by Jessica Rabbit. And then I turned out gay. Go figure. I'm not sure what it means, but a psychologist would probably have a field day with it.
Jessica Rabbit - "Why Don't You Do Right"
I like boys and misproportioned, over-sexed animated women.
LIL' MAMA'S FULL COURT PRESS continues with a remix of Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend." The original's bratty, shiny snark comes through, and Avril re-delivers the chorus and the bridge, but this is more hostile takeover than remix - Lil' Mama makes the track her own. At first you think she'll just be gracing the intro, but as she herself says as the first chorus winds down, "Please, 8 bars and stop?" She rides this forwards and backwards, and then throws it to the floor and winds around all over it.
Watch out for Lil' Mama, kids.
Avril Lavigne and Lil' Mama - "Girlfriend (Remix)"
THE ARCADE FIRE's new album, Neon Bible, is marvelous. This will probably shred whatever indie cred I had (not much, considering I posted Paris Hilton's "Nothing In This World" with unironic pleasure), but with the exception of a few songs, I wasn't such a huge fan of their first album. Neon Bible, though, I love straight through.
This video for their song, "My Body is a Cage," is a mash-up or sorts; the YouTuber took the song and set it to clips from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West. Cool how well it works. The song, while not my favorite on the album, is moody and powerful nevertheless.
Arcade Fire - "My Body is a Cage"
My body cage ain't big enough for the both of us, pardner.
Bonus! Here's the group performing "No Cars Go" at Rock en Seine in Paris. I love the way Régine Chassagne's vocals are brought further forward in this version, how, at the end, they're all just belting it out, and the way they yell "Let's go!" with so much gusto. A great song about the desire to escape to someplace safer and more innocent.
Arcade Fire - "No Cars Go (Live at Rock en Seine)"
"Little babies, let's go!"
And what the hell, here's the same song from the ACL festival, this time with more propulsive drumming and tighter instrumentation.
Arcade Fire - "No Cars Go (Live at ACL Festival)"
"Between the click of the light and the start of the dream."
THIS WEEKEND WAS GAY PRIDE in Washington, which meant that Team Peen was out in full force across our nation's fairest district. Personally, I feel like gayness is a strange thing to be proud of. Not that one should be ashamed of being gay, but it seems weird to be proud of something in which one played no part. I mean, be proud as hell when you make out with a great guy, but as Margaret Cho so aptly pointed out, there's no such thing as the Slut Pride Parade.
If we're being honest, Gay Pride Weekends aren't doing much for gay politics. I have straight friends who get more excited about Pride than any gay people I know, in large part because the gays all know that the three days should really be called We're All Trying to Have Sex At Once... Weekend.
Gay Pride also seems to give people license to act in ways they would never act normally. I was out at a bar this weekend and had the following conversation:
"Hey," he said. "Where'd you get those shoes?"
"Thanks! I got them online. Do you like them?"
"Yeah. So, like, are you a top?"
Are you kidding me? Can we at least exchange names first?
Electric Six - Gay Bar
First Cobalt, then the after party in the Lincoln Bedroom?
THE 80s HAD MADONNA. The 90s had Britney. And in the 00s, we have Paris Hilton. Every decade needs a quintessential blonde, a blonde that reflects back to us what we love and despise about ourselves, deep down at the root of our being. So what does it say that America's Favorite Blonde, the Blonde America Loves to Hate, begins her 23 day sentence in an LA County correctional facility?
Is it possible that she actually wanted to do time? Lend her a little street cred? Stay with me here, just for a second. Word is that Ms Hilton has already lined up a book deal for the Paris Hilton Prison Diaries. If she can make it sound terrible enough, and believable enough, I bet she makes a cool mil off the deal. Even if you think she's reprehensible, but you kind of have to admire her particular form of resiliency.
Jennifer Delfino - "I Wanna Be Famous"
"Paris, put down that notepad! This is joke, not advice!"
And for an extra treat, because you've been so good to me, here's Paris' finest music videographic achievement to date, "Nothing In This World."
THE WEEKEND IS HERE, first one back in DC in a few weeks, and tonight promises to be a dance party for K's birthday, and then a Team Peen party later in the night.
I have but one desire, and that is for Eve's new song, "Tambourine," to make it onto a playlist at some point in the night. Miss Eee-vee-eee has been undercover for a while, but I predict she's back in a big way with this song. It's a great summertime song, and the fact that it samples Puffy's "Can't Hold Us Down" is hilarious. Expect to hear this heavy for the next few months.
The video is a good too. Very colorful, which always gets a plus, and she looks like she's having a blast on the shoot. Particularly in the shiny teal pleather leggings. I mean, hello!
Eve - "Tambourine"
"Shake your tambourine and go get yourself a whistle."
THE NATIONAL, an indie rock outfit from New York, recently released their moody and fantastic album, Boxer. A lot of the reviews talked about how the album is a slow-opener, which is to say that you have to listen to it a few times before it reveals itself to you. I disagree. It hooked me immediately, and I think it ranks up there with the best indie rock releases of 2007.
"Mistaken for Strangers" is representative the album's tone. It's brooding and stylish, with a strong forward propulsion and a subtle but memorable hook. I love the way Matt Berninger's vocals rides the baseline, the way the drum beat is relentless, and the way the chorus grabs you without falling into the standard "quiet-loud-quiet" formula.
The lyrics also hit home. The song is about the way people deflate and acquiesce their way into adulthood; the drum and bass line capture that the transformation to your adult self can feel sort of inevitable, inescapable. About six months into my first job, I was spreading mayo on a sandwich for lunch and all of a sudden it hit me that this was the new life - making five sandwiches a week for the next 40 years. I think I've gained a lot in the years since college - perspective, certainly - but sometimes I wonder what was lost.
Anyway, the video is of the low budget "watch the rock band play their music" variety, and isn't much to write home about. In fact, I would recommend plugging in your headphones and listening to the song without the visual, as the song creates an atmosphere and a depth that the video works against by being rather claustrophobic.
The National - "Mistaken For Strangers"
"Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults"
