Bad songs say so little

Okay, the snow banks are crusty and filthy and the edges are littered with doggy-do. I dropped off younger daughter at school really late, and her last words to me, delivered over her shoulder as she stood in the middle of her classroom were: "It's not going to be a great day..."

Seeing as I'm in a crappy mood anyway, I thought I'd adopt a really poor attitude and muse about songs I hate. As almost none of you know (because this was from a really early post when no one was reading my blog), I have a Launchcast station. Usually I concentrate on how it delivers my favourite songs, along with songs it thinks I will like, but it also has a feature where you can, with a click of your mouse, tell it "Never play this on my station again". Of course, if I'm feeling particularly cruel, I'll rate the song at 30 or lower which accomplishes the same thing, just to show how much I dislike and disdain a particular thing-purporting-to-be-a-song.

I thought I'd run a few selections past you today. Now, usually I provide a link or a YouTube video to illustrate musical selections, but these are songs I can't stand, that set me diving at the radio to switch it off, so why torture you? If you're determined to torture yourself, you're welcome to google these things...

This is not a comprehensive list. There are millions of songs I hate. These are titles that occurred to me while sitting in the coffee shop this morning, paying bills. (Another mood-killer.) The seventies are over-represented. Maybe my next post should be There really was good music available in the seventies; it just won't be evident by perusing this list.

Here we go, hold your nose and plug your ears:

1. Hotel California by The Eagles. One of the most pretentious songs ever written, with a melody that goes nowhere. Launchcast has something called "Fan Stations", and I made the mistake of playing The Beatles Fan Station. It played "Hotel California" three times. In half an hour. (A really good idea when selecting a "Fan Station" at Launchcast, by the way, is choosing someone you like who isn't that popular. Stone Roses work well, as do Billy Bragg, or Lyle Lovett. Forget The Proclaimers, their fan station just plays eighties drek. Not that all eighties music was drek -- uh another possible post: There really was good music available in the eighties... I think I'm getting side-tracked because I don't want to list the next one...)

2. Double-whammy here. Kashmir and Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. I actually used to like these songs, but they've been played to death, and they go on and on and on...

3. For the Love of Him by Bobbi Martin. I feel guilty even mentioning this song, because it's sunk into obscurity and it needs to stay there. Trust me, it was awful. Syrupy, banal, anti-feminist. (Shudder)

4. Another double-whammy: Feelings and My Way by anybody. Cheap shots, I know. Why, why, why are these songs popular?

5. Any song about oral sex. I'm looking at you, Aerosmith. Yeah, yeah, it feels good, it's natural and without it, life would be less pleasant, but the same can be said about taking a dump. I don't want to hear a song about it, okay? Maybe mention should be made of "Going Down" by The Stone Roses, which, admittedly, is a lovely melody; in fact, it's the prettiest little ditty about cunnilingus ever. The problem is... It's about cunnilingus, people; let's not sing about it.

6. Black Water by the Doobie Brothers. I didn't much care for this song in the first place, but there's a really, really disturbing scene in St Elsewhere which is otherwise one of my all time favourite TV series: It's when Boomer is trapped in his apartment with a psychotic rapist/murderer who has been released from prison. Boomer is tied up and gagged in a chair, while his wife is bound and gagged to the bed and the creep starts singing "Black Water". (Double shudder.)

7. Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. Because it drives me cra-a-a-a-ze-e-e-e...

8. The Reason by Hagendaz Hoodenhof Hoobastank. Never has a group name suited a song so well. This is one of those songs that spoiled a summer for me. The radio just kept playing it, and those over-grown adolescents kept whining, whining, whining....

Can we stop now? Looking at this highly unscientific and disorganized list, I see that it consists of songs that I loathed from the get-go, and songs I grew to despise through overexposure. Now, just because I hate to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth and a buzzing in your ears, I'll offer you a song that falls into the second category --- but has been redeemed by my very favourite fan-vid creator The Big Blue Meany. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this woman is a genius, and only she could take an over-blown, overplayed song like "Drops of Jupiter" and turn it into the perfect musical rendition of what happens to Donna in the fourth season of Doctor Who:
Hope your day is shaping up into something better.

February makes me gibber

One of the reasons I started this blog in the first place is that I spend the first few weeks of the new year doing a quick rundown in my journal of the past year. It gives me a snapshot of a given year month by month, and each year, it seems to take me longer and longer to do. Last night, I decided to glance at some of these yearly rundowns, focusing on the February of each year (and perusing some actual February journal entries while I was at it).

Bad idea. The basic impression I got was that I was way happier, even in bloody February in the years when I first began keeping track. Is the unexamined life really not worth living, Socrates? Sometimes I think that the refining fires of suffering would be a lot easier to take, if I could actually see some improvement in myself as a person....

Drastic measures are needed. I checked my Facebook page where my favourite songs are on rotation, and I'm choosing three of the five of today's featured songs to cheer me up.

First, "New Age Girl" by Deadeye Dick. I never watched the movie Dumb and Dumber so never heard of this song until The Q radio station in Victoria had an Alphabet Weekend while I was packing up the house to move to Ottawa. This was early in the weekend, under "D", of course. I can't embed it, but I can give you a slightly higher quality link.
Rargh!

Next we have some Can/Con. I love this number by Jeremy Fisher(né Binns) who was born in Hamilton, Ontario and spent some time on Vancouver Island where I grew up:
She runs guns; everyone wants guns; she runs guns everyone wants -- there she go-hoes!

Now I don't care much for the Deadeye Dick video, and the Jeremy Fisher video is kind of cute. Both videos are new to me, although I've loved the songs since I first heard them. However, "Downtown Train" by Tom Waits is a classic, both as a song and as a video. What do you think?


Now, isn't that evocative? I mean, I've never been to New York, but this says "summer night in Brooklyn" to me. Longing, yearning, beautiful.

Okay, I feel a bit better. Maybe tomorrow I'll summon up the courage to tell you what this is all about. Maybe not.

Hades freezes over

Winter has been playing cat-and-mouse with us this past week, filling up the streets with March-like muddy slush, and alternating between rain and snow. Rude behaviour from a season which isn't supposed to officially arrive until the solstice in a month's time. However, sometime around Hump Day, it pounced and the snow remained on the sidewalks, roofs and trees. Ottawans now retreat into their drab winter gear: navy blue, olive green, dirt brown, and dead black, with only the occasional flash of red. Long forgotten muscles ache in my legs as I try to get used to trudging around in boots again. We're in for this for the next six months.

Everything feels like a set-back at this time of year and I'm in rather a Joni Mitchell mood. Trust a girl from Saskatoon to get the feeling right. Here's an earlyish song of hers, "Urge for Going", sung on the old Oscar Brand show "Let's Sing Out", circa 1968:
Gosh, she was young then, and hadn't adopted her unmistakable vocal style quite yet. Oscar Brand is the fella seated to her right, and was very well-known in Canada, particularly for his song "Something to Sing About" which darn near supplanted "O Canada" as the national anthem, at least among folkies and around the campfire. (He also recorded a couple of albums of filthy traditional songs, but never mind....)

Do you extrude your food?

Okay, here's where I am today. This afternoon, we are scheduled for the feedback session following several intensive psycho-educational tests on my younger daughter, whose current label is PDD-NOS. I've learned to loathe and dread these sessions. Assessments are rarely geared toward strengths; they exist to justify funding, so I'm going to be spending half an hour or so being told what's wrong with my daughter. What I need is a distraction. But I have to ask myself, how desperate am I?

A few weeks back, when we'd just returned to Hades and the humid air flopped over my nose like a cloth soaked with chloroform, I was meditating on the Proust Questionnaire. At that time, I was considering my least favourite noise. Today, I'm thinking of my least favourite word. That word, my friends, is extrude. The very visions that word evokes makes my fingers curl convulsively, my gorge rise, and my nostrils constrict in self-defense. It is a disgusting word. I first encountered it during a First Aid course in relation to eyeballs. Ugh.

Now imagine my consternation in reading Jaywalker's latest post in her otherwise beguiling blog. Apparently Google thoughtfully supplies different advertisements with each correspondent who contacts Jaywalker through her gmail, presumably computer-generated to match our myriad interests and obsessions. The ads accompanying my love-notes to JW are about "food extrusion consultants".

What the *&%#@ is a food extrusion consultant? I "googled" it (of course), and got exactly two results: one is Jaywalker's latest post and the other is this, which informs me that food extrusion is: " A type of food processing in which a food product is exposed to intense pressure and heat within an extruder and cooked in order to give the product a particular shape or greater uniformity." Mmmmn. Yummy. This, of course, forced me to look up extruder and the first hit I got was: "device used to melt-mix plastics and powder coatings". So, I'm guessing we're not talking Jamie Oliver here.

Another question in the Proust Questionnaire is: "What profession would you not like to attempt?" Up until now, my answer has always been "anything in sales". My new answer is...