Kulture Korner: bored meditations

Young Marble Giants: Best Band That Never Realized How Awesome They Truly Were (Cos They Would've Put Out More Albums If They Had); or Simply The Best Band Ever? Maybe they are more awesome for only putting out one very magical album? Here is a picture of them in a boat.

Colossal Youth keeps my morning coffee warm. I am trying to figure out a song upon which to bestow "best song" status. Right now it is a toss up between "Searching for Mr. Right," "Eating Noddemix," "Constantly Changing," "N.I.T.A.," "Choci Loni," "Wurlitzer Jukebox," "Salad Days," "Credit in the Straight World," "Brand - New - Life," "Wind in the Rigging," "Cakewalking," and "Ode to Booker T." (That list was really pointless.) I give you 5 stars in my iTunes rating system, Giants. You guys rule(d). I am feeling you so hard. You are like the inverse of my other love, Steely Dan: completely undressed, almost painfully literal, no attempt at singing, an almost faulty emphasis on simplicity. Here are some lyrics.

Yesterday we were always laughing
Always good for a laugh in passing
Stepping outside of the rules for asking

Misery passes and so does crying
Just look around
when you feel like dying
Stepping outside of the rules
when trying

Hopeless cases will drag you under
Fiery lovers will make you blunder
Tearing all the rules asunder

Trying to cakewalk but it's too boring
Coming to life at four in the morning
You think you're alive
But then you're just yawning

I don't completely relate to those lyrics, cos I go to bed at like midnight, TOPS, unless I am drinking bourbon, but that is OK, I totally dig what you are getting at. Elsewhere you told me, in a very beautiful way, that maybe I don't need to really know what you are on about to be totally rapt by what you are saying: "This doesn't mean that I possessed you / You're haunting me because I let you." And I think those two lines kinda sum up perfectly my relationship with this record? I am not sure how. But I think they do. Also, you have serious zings. Here is one: "I don't need you to love me / I don't need you to care / Take your body from by me / Be yourself over there." Crucial. That is like the kind of zing that makes my jaw hit the floor because it is so tight! So economic! So complete! Devastating. Please don't anyone ever say that to me directly. I think maybe this is kinda like what Kate Bush is getting at in "Running Up that Hill," except she's way more ambivalent about the whole thing, she kinda wants mindmeld, but she also kinda wants this d-bag to leave her, that's why she is taunting her addressee with rhetorical questions and stuff about bullets at the same that her most affecting couplet is on some serious death-drive type shit: "So much hate for the ones we love / Tell me we both matter, don't we?" But Allison Stratton is much more sure-minded, much more interested in singularity than cosmic and quasi-religious empathy. It's just a shame that I could never rock you (or for that matter find you) at karaoke. Kate Bush does have that going for her.