The first time I saw this song was on MTV at a friend’s house, before its release; the captioning was missed, so I didn’t know who it was or what the song was called, but just the guitar solo at 2:34 and bridge at 2:49 made me weirdly convinced that I had to find out who and what I’d just listened to. The truth turned out to be a girl band so manufactured that the members of the band these days contain none of these original members, and everything I liked in this song came from Massive Attack producer Nellie Hooper. That, in many ways, feels like the true pop experience.
“It’s An Investment In Myself”
Oh, how I wish that I found this strip funny for reasons other than nodding to myself and going “Yup, that’s my life right there.”
(From here.)
Best Response Ever?
If Andy Williams hadn’t died, my Time piece would’ve been the most popular article on the Entertainment vertical today. Another reason to be sad about Mr. Williams’ passing, dammit! As it is, it did generate this spectacular response: “I really enjoyed your ST:TNG piece. It could have been shorter.” Thanks, I guess?
Here it is, for those of you know need convincing that Star Trek: The Next Generation actually predicted the future.
366 Songs 270: The King Is Half-Undressed
The album this song came from – Bellybutton – came out in… 1991, perhaps? And it was the soundtrack to my last year of high school, discovered via a tape-cassette given to me by a friend. This was my introduction to power-pop, I think, and this song was my introduction to Jellyfish. It’s got everything that I would end up loving about the band, from the humor in the lyrics (“She dots her ‘I’s with a smiley face/A work of art, in all but taste”) to the four-part harmonies and the jangly guitars, and I remember that I was hooked within seconds of hearing it for the first time. Maybe I heard it on the radio at first? I heard it and wanted to listen again, immediately, and then again and again and again. To this day, I want to be able to sing like the band sounds like in this song. I want to be able to make music like this all the time.
This Is Why I Don’t Write Books (Not Really)
The fact that Penguin is suing authors for neither writing a book nor returning the advance they were given to do said writing is a weirdly entertaining concept to me, for some reason (Despite the fact that one of the authors being sued is Ana Marie Cox, whom I happen to enjoy as a writer more than a little bit). What makes it especially interesting to me is that all of the authors being sued are non-fiction writers; is it just that non-fiction writers flake so badly on contractual agreements, or is there something else happening here?
Part of me really likes the idea of one day writing a book, but then I see this and I just imagine myself being one of those non-fiction writers who’d end up having to hand back payments after missing the deadline or two.
“Can It Be Some Harbinger of Hope — When Hope Is Almost Gone?”
366 Songs 269: Too Tough To Die
There are days when everything gets on top of you, and you find yourself feeling that worrying sense of vertigo, even as you know that you’re standing upright and theoretically perfectly fine. On those days, dear friends, Martina Topley-Bird has this song for you, a simple one in which she reminds you that – like herself, of course – you should consider yourself too tough to die. If you don’t find yourself wanting to sing along to the chorus of this one, I suspect you need a whole lot more self-belief.
(I love the lyrics of this song; “The strange fruit swing” is a wonderful euphemism that plays off the Billie Holliday song, and yet brings a really strange sense of bleak humor to it. The swing? Really?)
And if Martina’s version isn’t enough for you, maybe you need this spectacular cover from Neneh Cherry and the Thing, from earlier this year:
Holy moley. More songs should sound like the sound of a messy, violent fight inside your head.
Recently Read, Prose (9/25/12)
In addition to the regular diet of Star Trek novels to help my brain decompress – Warning, that Star Trek: New Earth series isn’t nearly as fun as you want it to be – this week, I’ve also been reading Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, a book that I cannot recommend enough. Wonderfully funny, bold and just plain fucking smart, I’ve heard a lot of people here in the US describe it as “The British Bossypants,” which – Well, I know what they’re trying to say, but it does How To Be A Woman an amazing disservice. For one thing, it’s more of a coherent book than Tina Fey’s, and it also has more to say – It’s trying to educate and argue as much as make you laugh, even though it’s at least as funny as Fey’s book. I really, really loved it, and I hope that the attention it got here in America around its long-overdue launch will make Moran well-known and much-loved over here, as well as in the UK.
Obsessions, Not Beats
So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena—the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in. “Financial markets” is a beat, but “the financial crisis” is a phenomenon. “The environment” is a beat, but “climate change” is a phenomenon. “Energy” is a beat, but “the global surge of energy abundance” is a phenomenon. “China” is a beat, but “Chinese investment in Africa” is a phenomenon. We call these phenomena our “obsessions”.
That’s Gideon Lichfield, editor of an about-t0-launch business news site Quartz, writing about what’ll make the site different. I like it a lot as a model – The idea that writers don’t have particular “beats” or areas they have to follow, but will instead follow particular stories wherever. It strikes me as a smart reaction to the decentralization of media thanks to the Internet (Now people want to follow stories and ideas, not particular areas, as readers, I think, a lesson they’ve learned from reading bloggers go wherever they want), and I’m curious to see how it works out.
Sleeping In
You know it’s not going to be a good day when you wake up late, from weird (but not especially bad, per se) dreams in which you get lost in a foreign city without your glasses, but manage to find refuge from the rain in a workshop that backs onto multiple different locations all around the world (It was a specific type of location, but frustratingly, I can’t remember what type). There’s a lot to be done this week in general, and sleeping in and having odd dreams distract you afterwards isn’t what I need right now, thankyouverymuch, brain.