My 5- and 7-year-old walk around singing (a nearly atonal version of) that "We Are Young" song all the time now.
I'm off to the beach for a week but since a music thread just magically appeared, here's a mix full of punk rock and shouty indie from the past couple of years. Starts off with fireworks, even.
I know Japandroids and then nothing else on that list. Looking forward to listening.
I know Japandroids and then nothing else on that list. Looking forward to listening.
I swear I only pressed that button once.
Oh my God, Apo. You have a five- and a seven-year-old. My mind is blown. We've been here for a long time.
Oh unfogged. I came for the dick jokes but I stayed for the mix tapes! Thanks apo!
I got through about three minutes of the linked video and just couldn't do it anymore. I really hate this band.
Yes the OP: Oh because the Civil War was about standing for something! I find the song ok-catchy. But it is all over the place!
That song is marginally better than the other one, but really it's also pretty terrible.
AWB, you should have gone to the end where you'd see the most pretentious bit.
This song does not ride on my gusty bus. The video bugs me even more.
I am now watching several videos of Freddie Mercury, and, yeah, I can hear the imitation? But while one gets the sense that vague longing and abstraction in Queen songs is barely covering a whole lot of incredibly queer whatnot, I get the sense that the Fun. guy means precisely what he says, that he doesn't know what he wants, but he wants to be for something, and it would be cool to have a point.
(a nearly atonal version of) that "We Are Young" song
This is very fun to imagine.
Dude, I think he's doing the dice thing too much.
So I'm dreaming, I have my very best dreams in afternoon naps after coffee, I'm dreaming that my wizened grandmother, 20 years dead and fifty years past such stuff is sharing a special moment with me, talking about generations and Vietnam, and says:"You know everybody cries when Neil Young gets on stage and sings:
'America has no one to blame
And is younger than fame.'"
So I look up "younger than fame" on the internets to see what I was recollecting and it must really really suck. So much for my unconscious muse.
Haha, I have dreams like that sometimes, complete with poem that seems really novel and stirring, and when I wake up I remember only a rhyming couplet much like that.
There's probably a rhyming couplet module in the brain.
Oh because the Civil War was about standing for something!
Yeah, but you really don't want to be the one saying, "I'm still not sure what I stand for" when that's the backdrop.
I did not find that song very compelling.
1. Too many vocables
2. Lyrics were all over the place
3. Contrast between music/lyrics/delivery/images was confusing
Here in Berlin, the customary fireworks that went off for German goals are now going off for Spain. You'd think they'd just not set off any fireworks, but I guess that's not an option.
25. Weird. When my team gets beaten I always transfer my support to the side that beat them, so if they win I can say we were next best.
Also, Stanley, the band's name is "Fun.", with the period.
Usually the period reduces the options for fun.
26: They may, for all I know, be setting them off for any and all goals. I'll never get a chance to test that hypothesis though - even if the Italians get their shit together - because it just started pouring down rain.
I really hate this band.
I inadvertently made a buddy the other day at the burrito takeout joint, when I walked in, heard the "Tonight" song playing, and swore at the song. (It is as earwormy as it is terrible.) A guy there with his girlfriend said something to her I couldn't hear but that was clearly pointing out to her that I hated the song too, and then he shot me a knowing, "I totally agree with you about this song" look. I kind of nodded at him. Then when I left he bid me farewell strangely enthusiastically. Maybe I'm just unfriendly, but I thought it was weird.
As a Virginian, Stanley should know by now that absolutely everything is about the War between the States.
Christ. It's hard to remember the last time I really hated a band. CIVIL WAR HORSE.
33: War of Northern Aggression, I do believe you mean.
I liked "Some Nights" a lot, and I usually find the low fidelity on Youtube totally unbearable.
I liked the clear confessional content, the ambiguity, the merge of a relationship and politics, the way the singer plays on the edge of aphasia.
I didn't see Mercury that much. Neo-psych, Flaming Lips maybe. Very indie.
The problem Americans have is that the Paris Commune and Homestead aren't taught enough to be our symbols of resistance.
Hmm, I think this song is actually worse than the other one, which is of course super terrible but at least hooky and bizarre. This is the "Vienna Calling" to their "Rock Me Amadeus."
Although to be honest, the lyrics are too alienated and anti-social for the Commune and Homestead to work.
60s would work if we had been worth a damn with myth-building. Beats, maybe.
But Rebel gone West and Cowboy is our angry loner's story. I am open to suggestions for something better.
"Civil War all and only about Slavery" has screwed things up. Sometimes young assholes fight for fighting.
I can't decide if the lead singer is cute or looks like the protagonist from The Dark Crystal. The song is perplexing and bad, though. What everyone thought of the last one, I think of this one: too much of a mish-mosh. Several-part-harmony! Autotune tricks! Spoken interlude!?!
37 is the quality of analogy that can make you forget why we have a ban.
"Mama,
I just killed a man,
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger
now he's dead"
What, we like this a whole lot better? Guess it's urban, and not racist.
43:Wait, it isn't Nate Ruess? I'm confused.
I also like the Iowa crowd, the little I know of it. Bright Eyes.
The Mexicans have some very fine myths, IIRC.
We just haven't had enough watering of the Tree of Liberty in this country.
So long as you use water and not blood, it's ok.
Rebel Rebel, the new movie by Wes Anderson, starring Luke and Owen Wilson as alienated Eagle Scouts who tear up their merit badges and run away to get a double cappucino not at Starbucks. Recommended for adults only.
So at cover band practice tonight, we didn't learn this song as I had hoped, but we did learn "Moves Like Jagger," which is ridiculously easy and really quite an annoying earworm. "Call Me Maybe" is on-deck for next time.
So I finally watched the video in the OP. The song is twelve kinds of horrible, worst of all because it keeps seeming like they're going to switch to singing Paul Simon's "Cecilia", AND THEY NEVER DO. The video seemed like they were going for a straight forward "War is horrible and tears brave young men from their beloved ladies and horses." But as everyone says, the fact that it's the Civil War makes the "Why can't all these nice white people get along?" subtext maddening. And the fact that the closing wanktastic guitar solo plays over the band members playing a xylophone and an acoustic guitar makes me even angrier.
I have to say, I've listened to this song many times over the past couple of months, and a Civil-War-themed video would never have occurred to me as a natural match for it.
Speaking of fun and the south, does anybody know of anything that might be within a reasonable drive of I-77 in Virginia or North Carolina, passable entertainment for a small child, and not make me want to drive a spike into my eyes (i.e. not Mt. Airy).
53: You'll pass right by the New River Trail State Park just south of Wytheville. Despite the name, the river is actually very old, which I'm sure six year olds will find fascinating.
That does look interesting. Thanks.
worst of all because it keeps seeming like they're going to switch to singing Paul Simon's "Cecilia", AND THEY NEVER DO.
This made me laugh.
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I find the headline of this article perplexing. I mean, James Dean died 57 years ago. In what way are we still saying goodbye to him?
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Just because his screaming ghost doesn't haunt you doesn't mean you're better than us.
worst of all because it keeps seeming like they're going to switch to singing Paul Simon's "Cecilia", AND THEY NEVER DO.
I just heard "Vampire Weekend" for the first time a few days ago. I got to them because the singer apparently performed a cover of Paul Simon's "Papa Hobo", which is pretty good.
And then I listened to this other song of theirs, and one of the recent comments says "Paul Simon's 'Jack' with worse lyrics". Setting aside the fact that Paul Simon has no song called "Jack", maybe there's some trend here?
57:In what way are we still saying goodbye to him?
Replicating the crash on each anniversary followed by hot frenzied but ultimately unsatisfying sex?
That's what the Jayne Mansfield crash is for.
59: The comment I'm seeing says "PAUL SIMON 'JACK' WITH WAY WOSRE LYRICS........and its still a pretty good song." So, I'm guessing that they're suggesting, in their eloquent all caps way, that the song was jacked/stollen from Paul Simon.
A lot of both Ezra Koening's songwriting and vocal style are very directly Simonesque, and the mash-up of African musical styles and pop song structures gives the whole thing a very Graceland-redux feel. As with the Fun. video, though, the fact that VW is mostly drawing on West and Central African pop styles, where Simon was drawing on South African and later Afro-Brazilian music, gives their music a feeling of all of the cultural appropriation with none of the Apartheid-era political subtext.
The picture got pleasantly muddier with The Very Best (Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and UK DJs/producers Radioclit) reappropriating "Cape Cod Kwasa Kwasa" and Koening later collaborating with them on the very pleasant single "Warm Heart of Africa".
Aesthetically I tend to find VW more pleasant, but much of Simon's work more compelling and enduring. For me this is the single best VW song.
I like that Vampire Weekend song with the kind of weird line about "the Pueblo huts of New Mexico," but I can't seem to find it on YouTube.
Thanks. I guess knowing the name of the song would have helped.
64: The cover band I play in does that song. As a joke, I suggested we do the song twice in a row, back to back (because it's so short). We tried it at a gig, and no one seemed to notice. So now we pretty much always do it that way, which is great because it eats up twice the amount of time.