No, don't replace that! It's a great song! Sort of!
I mean I like broccoli di rape if that counts.
Here is a surefire earworm displacer if you really want one. At least it gets really lodged in my cranium.
That's a pretty cute song. I've never heard of them before.
And then he realized he had entirely misread a very short post.
I thought you were looking for something to replace "Joey."
2: Ah, so the "hush" refers to the lack of verbal consent. I never get beyond the surface interpretation of songs.
You've never heard of the Magnetic Fields?
Here's my top earworm.
Number two.
Even the videos are catchy.
A song about what you might put in your ear.
I've been listening to this a lot lately.
I think The Magnetic Fields were sort of a local hipster thing but they've had moments of rarefied not-quite-fame from stuff like NPR's story on 69 Love Songs (which album above clip is from) and Stephin Merritt's public catfight with tiresome music writer Sasha Frere Jones, who called him a "rockist cracker."
Merritt writes lyrics of Cole-Porter-like brilliance. And he's 5'3" so he's on my list of Excellent People of Modest Stature.
Apparently Mumford and Sons is overplayed to a hilarious degree in Britain while still being a fascinating novelty to those of us in the US. Possibly the musical equivalent of "Spaced" or "The Mighty Boosh".
69 Love Songs is probably one of the disappointing albums I've ever bought. I believed the reviews. It didn't work for me at all.
This song* has been running through my head for the past couple of days, but that's not a bad thing.
*I have no idea what the (unrelated) video is about.
To make up for 9, here's something heebie will probably enjoy: The Rub's History of Hip-Hop mix for 1990.
13: I had the *exact* same experience, after it was recommended by nearly everybody I knew.
I think I'm going through one of those phases when almost every new band sounds like derivative over-hyped shit, to me. Usually I'm fairly 'neophilic' about music and get pretty tired of 60s/70s/80s music nostalgics, but just recently I've struggled to find much I didn't find disappointing. There's been a lot of revivals of genres that were shit 20 years ago and remain shit now.
Although I have been liking Dizzee Rascal's stuff with a full live band.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bY7viwMU80
Everything but the kitchen sink, and his usual flow ...
I like 69 Love Songs, and I also know something really interesting about it that I can't tell without arg internet anonymity why arg.
I would like to find out which 70s band the Kaiser Chiefs are reviving, because I bet they're a lot better than whatever 70s band the Kooks are reviving.
"Fuego," Bomba Estereo
Anybody who listens to Spanish-language FM radio know if this got played in the U.S. a lot last summer? Sad world where Daddy Yankee can achieve ubiquity but these guys can't.
I should really just farm out all of my musical selection to Apostropher and Ttam, because apparently we have exactly the same taste and reactions to things, except that they know a lot more about music.
This is my favorite Magnetic Fields song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE59VaFVIMs&feature=related
It is unfortunately titled the same as a racist 19th century poem:
Everything but the kitchen sink, and his usual flow ...
That choral intro is something, all right.
I prefer Everybody Knows
but I would, wouldn't I
I would like to find out which 70s band the Kaiser Chiefs are reviving
XTC
I kinda wish Johnette had done EK in the higher register throughout, as a near-scream.
"Tomorrow Wendy" is also very well done.
But so much for fucking Rufus, trying to use "Everybody Knows" to lead a conga line.
I would like to find out which 70s band the Kaiser Chiefs are reviving
XTC
There was a crappy band whose name I can't remember, I think it had "silver" in it, that was basically imitating the Dukes of Stratosphear.
For earwormage I recommend "The Serialization of Cruelty" off the Flying Luttenbachers' Incarceration by Abstraction.
This, from a couple of years ago, has been in my head for the last couple days since I put it on a Happy Songs mix for a friend.
This is my favorite earworm of all time.
(Please ignore the attached videos for both, which for the first song is a bit dumb, and for the second one is some Swede's slideshow, but all of the live videos have crap sound and flub the opening chords, so WAYGD?)
Everybody should go listen to this. (The player's in the upper-right-hand corner.) And if, like me, you can't place the song right away, you can watch this.
Oh yeah, that Henrietta song is pure irresistiblenessitude.
I think The Magnetic Fields were sort of a local hipster thing but they've had moments of rarefied not-quite-fame
"Local"? Sometimes it seems like everyone I know listens to the Magnetic Fields. The dude I know from college who refused to listen to any band other than They Might Be Giants now raves about the Magnetic Fields to everyone he meets. One precocious person I went to high school with was already a Magnetic Fields evangelist at the time, in 1998 or so. I think they qualify as famous.
I like 69 Love Songs, and I also know something really interesting about it that I can't tell without arg internet anonymity why arg.
Surely some combination of presidentiality and careful use of Pig Latin should suffice.
Volumes 1 and 3 of 69 Love Songs are two of the most amazing collections of music ever. I don't know what's wrong with you people.
Although I do remember that someone in this forum referred to They Might Be Giants as a "highly literate novelty act" as if that was a bad thing, so I sense a pattern emerging.
36.1 Some of us are with you rob! V. 2 is also by far my least favorite.
34 Were a kind of local thing. Like ten or twelve years ago, when your friend had to be precocious to evangelize.
Local to where? Based on the friend that introduced me to them, they were all the rage at Berkeley in the mid-90s.
34: But, still, heebie hadn't heard of them. So at best they can be semi-famous (above the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, but well below American Idol runner-up Justin Guarini).
39 Ok ok. I am wrong. I am often wrong. My mutant power, some would say, is being wrong.
I first read about them in the British music press when 69 Over-rated songs came out. Maybe a little before, but it was 69 Not-as-good-as-the-Magnetic-fields-believe that got them a lot of broadsheet newspaper reviews.
Everyone's mutant power is believing that something that only a small group of his peers knows about is somehow "local" or special to the place or group in question.
If only a small group of his peers knows about it, then wouldn't it be special to that group?
I'm sort of obsessed with Wolf Parade circa 2005. I think it's the strained, slightly hysterical voice of the lead singer that I find appealing.
Actually, I rather like 69 Love Songs.
41: Oh, I was really just curious about where was "local." (I am a nitpicky questioner, apparently.) Being known in Berkeley isn't really constitutive of nation-wide fame.
43: Jamba Juice started in my hometown (as The Juice Club). I had no idea they were a huge chain because I always knew it as that local smoothie shop -- it wasn't revealed to me until a visitor requested that we go someplace local for a smoothie (there are a lot of such places in my area) and I took them there. Total embarrassment.
If only a small group of his peers knows about it, then wouldn't it be special to that group?
In one sense, sure, but if lots of people in various places have little groups like that, then no.
And it may indeed have been overrated, but that would be the fault of music critics, whom you shouldn't waste your time reading anyway.
It is kind of strange how "overrated" functions as criticism of the overrated thing. It didn't rate itself.
Earworm related bleg: I have had a song running through my head for the past couple of weeks that includes the lyric "The next best thing to paradise is a simple life with you." Google, Yahoo, and Bing all assure me that no such song exists, nor apparently has the phrase ever appeared on the web, which strikes me as utterly bizarre.
I am obviously losing my mind, as I have a very clear memory of the line and accompanying melody. If I had the musical chops God gave rocks I'd be able to say something helpful about the music other than that it's exactly the sort of romantic and slightly maudlin acoustic guitar song you'd expect to go with the lyrics quoted above (and helpfully enough the only others I remember are simple variations on the phrase "a simple life with you," though given that I've misremembered lyrics they might well be about crocodiles and lederhosen).
There's a dude with a youtube video playing a song about a simple life with you, but it's not the right one and doesn't involve paradise anyway, so fuck that clown.
Help me, Mineshaft! You're my only hope!
re: 49
Reading music critics is a pretty good way to find out about new music. Even music critics often talk a lot of shit.
re: 50
Actually, I think pieces of work that have the sort of structured conceit that that album does precisely do rate themselves. It's all about 'look how clever we are'. Which, tbh, I'm all in favour of. I quite like pretension and self-regard in music when it comes off and works. And if it doesn't come off [from my subjective point of view] then I'm going to reserve the right to brand the musicians pompous wankers, in a completely unfair judgemental way.
51: No Doubt's "Simple Kind of Life"?
I'm going to reserve the right to brand the musicians pompous wankers, in a completely unfair judgemental way.
Sure, but that's not to say it's overrated. (Well: I guess what you mean is "the musicians rate it too highly." But even that need not be criticism; you could think very highly of something, of which the creators think yet higher.) Most of the time "overrated" doesn't even mean that, though.
Yeah, I suppose I'm not being particular precise in my use of 'over-rated'. Valued more highly than it deserves by critics, and also, one suspects by the people who made it.
Speaking of music critics, there was a very fine demolition of the new Hurts album by Alexis Petridis in today's Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/02/hurts-happiness-cd-review
North Korean People's Army Funky Get Down Juche Party
53: Sadly, no. That came up in my more open-ended searches, as did a number of other songs, but no dice. I am either grossly misremembering the lyrics or it's very obscure indeed, most likely both. Oh well.
Overrated usually means "I believe my disdain for this makes me smarter than the people who like it." I say this as someone who uses the term this way frequently but thinks it would be worthwhile to try not to.
Yale: "I think Lewitt's overrated. In fact, I think he may be a candidate for the old academy. Mary and I have invented the Academy of the Overrated, for such notables as Gustav Mahler..."
Mary: "And Isak Dinesen, and Carl Jung..."
Yale: "Scott Fitzgerald..."
Mary: "Lenny Bruce. Can't forget Lenny Bruce, now, can we? How about Norman Mailer? And Walt Whitman?"
Isaac: "I think that those people are all terrific, everyone that you mentioned."
36, 37: Reasons not to discount volume 2 of 69 Love Songs: "When My Boy Walks Down the Street", "Long-Forgotten Fairytale", and "Papa Was a Rodeo".
I think the main problem with the album is just that there's too much of it -- reduce it to the 20 best songs and it would seem like a much higher-quality album. I still like it, though. My next-favorite Magnetic Fields album is probably The Wayward Bus / Distant Plastic Trees, which is pretty different.
But seriously, when I say something is overrated I usually mean something along the lines of "it's fine for you to like [band]. I happen not to. De gustibus. Please please please stop telling me that [band] is the best thing evar and/or that I just don't get it.
I can't stand the Magnetic Fields.
64: You've certainly put a negative spin on them.
Nuclear grade earworm from the OP. (True fact! In 9th grade I was in the Concrete Blonde fan club!)
Favorite Magnetic Fields song, not counting the Superchunk cover of "100,000 Fireflies": "Papa Was a Rodeo" (or possibly "Candy").
Now I am going to listen to the Sword in an attempt to make myself seem macho.
Superchunk cover of "100,000 Fireflies"
Wow.
68: Thanks. I like it; it's nice when covers don't try to sound too much like the original. I wouldn't have thought the song was suitable for rockifying, but it works.
63 gets it right most of the time, although sometimes it's more 58, tbh.
Like a lot of people who care passionately about music, I have pretty strong opinions and sometimes that slides over into out and out music snobbery. Which, sometimes,* is a bit shameful, but other times more, "fuck it, you buy 2 albums a year, and usually at least 1 of those is shit, so when I tell you I don't like X, it's not because I don't get it, it's because it's fucking shit."**
* not here, I mean in general ...
** see previous footnote.
I absolutely subscribe to 58. My distaste for whiny-ass white-dude driven feeeeeeeeelings or iiiiiiironic feeeeeeeelings-y rock music (and my appreciation for Shalamar) absolutely makes me better than everybody.
SURE, 'HEY ZEUS' WASN'T THAT GOOD, BUT 'FUCKING SHIT' IS A LITTLE HARSH, DUDE.
51: Togolosh, I have no idea what that song is, but here is a thought process that has helped me recover lyrics in the past:
1. When have I come across music lately that it was not intentionally listening to an iPod or radio? (drugstore, elevator, movie score, friend's car, scene in a movie where somebody is supposed to be a musician).
2. Can I picture anything else about when or where I heard the song?
3. Do I have any visual images to go along with the song (guy in a flannel shirt, Bollywood heroine)?
As a last resort, I sometimes think the song fragments in my head before I fall asleep, and wait to see if I'll remember more when I wake up.
In general when I half-remember some song pieces it's not an actual, new, playing-on-the-radio song, so the above prods help me to generate ideas of where else it might have come from. If you hang out with people who listen to imported CDs or ride in taxis a lot, you might also have heard some non-USian song that has no airplay/web presence here.
Alternatively, perhaps you are songwriting in your sleep. Did you see this book somewhere recently? Are you sufficiently suggestible that it might have spawned a melody in your subconscious?
I have listened to him/them, and I just don't care about The Magnetic Fields. I don't like them, I don't dislike them, I don't think they are overrated or underrated.
"My Boo" is a good song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZdMFB4BhrQ
This book is good on indie rock:
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Dirt-Aesthetics-Rituals-British/dp/0819568112/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
Here is a candidate:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/a-simple-life-lyrics-farnham-john.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBLSOqvWYAM
I can't be sure it's for real, but I think it's kind of awesome that Trent Reznor is apparently on record as a big Magnetic Fields fan.
Here is a cover thats got some awesome to it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9b4q9XYJIU&feature=related
I don't think Merritt's a genius but the album's got its moments. E.g. "All my Little Words" is pretty nice - the thing of starting some of the lines just a little earlier than you'd expect (what do you call that: syncope?) gives it a freshness. And things like the dry delivery of "woah Nelly!" and "ain't pretty" on "Chicken with its Head Cut Off" are funny.
But I agree that the album isn't as clever as it needs to be to justify the implicit claim that it makes about its own virtuosity. Quite apart from the self-conscious ambition of the 69 songs concept, if you're going to signal cleverness by allying yourself with a tradition, like musical theatre, where part of the point is a sort of arch awareness of its own hyper-professional artificiality, you really need to knock it out of the park to make it work. Which is hard to do. Another album that strikes me as having the same problem is The Divine Comedy's Casanova.
51: Your maudlin "The next best thing to paradise is a simple life with you" couldn't be "Well it's not far down to paradise, at least it's not for me", could it?
My favorite Magnetic Fields song might be "Just Like a Movie Star", recorded as The 6ths, so with a guest vocalist (Dominique A.), but always great live.
Just about nothing else fits, but The Weepies have a "Simple Life" song.
The one I posted is not my fave, as it happens. That might be "The Book of Love" or possibly "Come Back from San Francisco." My favorite silly rhyme occurs in "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing."
Wait is 71 about Magnetic Fields? Because I may wish to quarrel if it is!
I think 79 probably expresses some of what I wanted to say. And I probably agree re: Casanova and other Divine Comedy stuff, too, which has exactly that kind of problem. However, not re: the Divine Comedy's A Short Album About Love which I think largely does pull that sort of thing off.
I think "If ..." for example, completely succeeds at that sort of musical theatre word-play, and is wonderfully bathetic in places:* " ... because trees don't cry", etc. Although 'success' here is clearly pretty subjective.
Album version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMvevJfvVcg&feature=related
Live solo piano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeRezthZDtk
* and has a Father Ted reference.
OT: My first thought upon reading the article about christwire.org was that unfogged was prob a similarly not-so-secret fake liberal site. You people are really a bunch of conservatives, arent you?!?!!
But, still, heebie hadn't heard of them.
I haven't heard of most bands.
I love A Short Album About Love - "I made a small boy cry ..." is my favourite line, I think - despite being with Teo and LB on the musical appreciation spectrum. If it has smartalecky words and a tune I can sing along with, I'm happy.
Song of the holiday was Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind).
51:
Don't want nothin' fancy,
Don't need nothin' new;
Nothin' too expensive,
Just a sinful life with you.
Give me somethin' borrowed,
I'll buy you somethin' blue;
I'll trade this life of sorrow
For a sinful life with you.
Sinful life,
Sinful life with you;
No promises of paradise,
Just a sinful life with you.
Marley was a Rasta;
Moses was a Jew;
Jesus was an outlaw,
Just like me & you.
Let love be our religion
Until this life is through;
The next best thing to Heaven
Is a sinful life with you.
Sinful life,
Sinful life with you;
The next best thing to Heaven
Is a sinful life with you.
I hate there was no YouTube link for 88; it's a lovely sentimental number, with fine harmonies. I've been hearing & singing it regularly since it came out.
Here's a song of complaint (complicated by the band's composition at the time: one man, one woman, one drum machine).
Here's a number from a later album, suitable for a holiday weekend.
And OK, sure, here's the Big Hit Single from 1985.
88 Wins. Apparently I have extensively edited the song in my mind. Excuse me while I kiss this guy.
My favorite Magnetic Fields song is "Born on a Train." Why does no one ever talk about the album that's on (Charm of the Highway Strip)? Is it generally unloved and I for some reason have never gathered that?