Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

14 March 2008

I have found the limit of the internet

OK, so. This morning I'm walking with my girlfriend to the A train when she suddenly busts out singing this maybe late '80s, maybe early 90s, maybe mid '90s dance song that goes something like this: "...Tearing up my heart / Tell me I'm the only one / Tell me is this love / Or just a game." I know this song, I remember the melody well, I immediately join her in singing those lyrics, which I'm about 95% sure are correct. When we stop singing it, I ask her the name of the song and the performer. She says, "You know, the one that goes," and she starts humming and then singing the verse of "Together Forever" by Rick Astley, which I tell her is impossible because I remember a woman singing that song and Rick Astley is nothing if not a man. When I get back to my apartment I say to my roommate, "Oh, do you remember that song, um, I think it goes..." and I start humming and then singing what I'm certain is the song in question but which I soon realize is the verse to Cece Peniston's "Finally" -- glorious in its own right, no doubt, but definitely not the song in question. I just spent the past 15 minutes googling various combinations of the lyrics above... TO NO AVAIL. I have found the limit of the internet. It is apparently this song. I did learn this, though: asking someone "tell me is this love or just a game?" is cliche as hell. Do you have any idea how many times singers have implored absent lovers with this line? I found out. Too many times.

So I turn to you, Human Gold readers; you, with your accumulated knowledge of things strange and wonderful; you, the archivists of songs you enjoyed in those tender years circa 1987-1995. Help me save this song from the dustbins!
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14 January 2008

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.
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07 August 2007

Kulture Korner: Title Spoken by Character

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME



I KNOW WHO BLEW MY MIND.


If I told you what this movie was about you wouldn't believe me. If I told you what this movie was half about you wouldn't believe me. The basic formula, as far as I can work it out, goes a little something like this: The Parent Trap + USA Up All Night circa 1989 * The Watcher in the Woods %torture porn + stigmata * glass blowing+Luis Bunel+improvisation, possums, owls, crotch shots>willful, misguided, 88-miles-per-hour-in-a-De Lorean-bad+pilgrim costumes=I KNOW WHO KILLED ME%what remains of my brain.

Here is how IMDB has seen fit to classify it. Just keep going with the list. Once you get to "opossum" you'll know that you have passed through on towards "stabbed in the neck". May I stress: "title spoken by character".
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