My House Is Turning Into A Library

I am inspired by Mr. Dan Kelly's list of books he has actually managed to kill off to post my own list of neglected books which are gathering dust on bookshelves or elsewhere and which I WILL read before I buy more books, dammit. Yeah sure (in my predicted order of actually getting read):

Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra

Wall Street Noir, featuring a short story by Henry Blodget??? Curious.

This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel J. Levitin

Londonstani, Gautam Malkani

Abraham, Bruce Feiler

Maxium City, Suketu Mehta

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

Portraits and Observations, The Essays Of Truman Capote

Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk: I have a funny story to tell about Chuck Palahniuk sometime.

The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios, Yann Martel

Amnesia Moon, Jonathan Lethem

The Granta Book of Reportage

Carter Beats The Devil, Glen David Gold

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith

These last three I have picked up and put back down. That typically bodes ill for me finishing them, but I actually do want to read these:

Collapse, Jared Diamond

The Journalist And The Murderer, Janet Malcolm

And They All Sang, Studs Terkel

And there are about another 20 that I ought to just put out on the curb because I am clearly never going to read them. I'm so uninterested in them that I'm not even going to list them here.

Marching Band Geeks, Rise Up

For eons, I've been trying to build a playlist of marching band-inspired music - let's qualify that: an enjoyable playlist of marching band-inspired music - and was motivated by Vampire Weekend's recent incorporation of a high school drumline in their lineup to finally get this list out of my head and onto blog.

We aren't talking anywhere near CD length yet, and without Missy Elliott we wouldn't even be talking EP, but here ya go:

My favorite marching band-influenced performance evuh is Kanye West's Jesus Walks, which he did live with the Ohio Central State marching band for "Dave Chappelle's Block Party". Irritatingly, the only way to see or hear this performance is to buy the DVD (which I did, but still). It didn't make the CD, and there's no trace of it online. Grumble. Hating on whatever copyright laws are keeping me from enjoying this someplace other than my TV.

We'll just have to content ourselves with these other offerings. Can something be simultaneously whack and dope?

*JC Chasez: Blowing Me Up With Her Love. This song was made for marching band. Literally. It appears on the soundtrack to the movie "Drumline," a fine example of the movie genre of good teenager A faces off against bad teenager B, goes through trials and tribulations, and ultimately, unsurprisingly and tritely, triumphs.



*Gwen Stefani: Hollaback Girl. Gwen kind of lost me with the whole Harajuku girl thing, but I still dig this song. Wind It Up has a similar vibe.



*Missy Elliott: Bad Man. Missy loves her some marching bands in general. But she especially loves them on "Bad Man," which is all about the tuba. As anyone who's ever been in band knows, that's, well, whack.

A few other also-rans: Eve's Tambourine, which makes solid use of drum major whistle, but is devoid of energy, and Outkast's Morris Brown, which is a full-on marching band extravaganza and even talks about marching bands, but somehow completely lacks excitement. And Destiny's Child with Lose My Breath. Yawn.

I don't know why this list is all hip-hop. Is marching band inherently anti-rock? What am I missing?

Danzing!

A friend I hadn't seen for nine years was, awesomely, in town last weekend. Needless to say, we had some catching up to do. One of the things we did was reminisce about Russian music - especially bad Russian music.

I reminded him of Ivanushki International (Little International Ivans), the Russian equivalent of the Backstreet Boys. I particularly love this song, which translates as "I'll be yelling about this all night," for its lovely combination of classical riff and disco beat and its tuneless screaming about something that ought to be romantic ("I seriously love you! I really hope you love me too! And I'll be yelling about it all night!" And then they put it in the third person for a chorus of screaming: "He seriously loves you! He hopes you love him too! Etc.")

He, in turn, introduced me to this wonderful horribleness, which isn't strictly Russian (it's Ukrainian) but certainly qualifies in terms of cheesy, huh?-inducing strangeness. Or wait, maybe that's just a characteristic of European popualar music...

This Song Sounds Like This Picture Looks

Vampire Weekend meets Ra Ra Riot?

Say no more.

I'm only writing this post because I stumbled across "Osaka Loop Line" before the vast majority of the tune-oblogosphere, which never happens. I would also like to take this opportunity to brag that I saw Vampire Weekend for free - FREE - at some weird outdoor amphitheatre down on the East River by the F train East Broadway stop last summer. In the audience were lots of overdressed Williamsburg kids, some folks from Virginia on whose floor the band had crashed, and a guy with a video recorder who was maybe a dad? Vampire Weekend still was a little frayed around the edges, which made them even better. It was a beautiful day to take off your shoes and listen to a little ska.

I'll be real curious to see what happens to this band in the over-hyped new media world that we live in. I'm wondering if it's even possible to have a "next big thing" anymore, given the backlash to the backlash to the backlash environment that now dominates.

Now It's Said And Done

I've been vaguely conscious of the Shout Out Louds as that band with the one song that you can sing along with loudly and that is easily confused with a rather similar LL Cool J song..."Let's call this the comeback...mumble mumble"...but otherwise I had pretty much ignored them. But when my Magnet indie rock magazine declared their follow-up album one of the top 20 of last year I revisited them.

This song is pretty good objectively. It also happens, for me, to be that rare song that burrows its way into your consciousness just because it happens to exactly match your mood the very first time you listen to it.

Normandie