this is a love song

full disclosure: it's 2:26 AM EST, i should be writing a philosophy paper, and i'm listening to coldplay's "fix you", which i just stole from someone in the library using mojo. this seems more important at the moment.

do you remember the creaky-voiced prelude to the cocorosie cover of kevin lyttle's "turn me on"? it's fucking sexy. "this," says bianca, "is a love song." at first listen, this line seems facetious, one of those ironic indie-rockin' top 40 covers that have been so popular ever since ted leo covered "since u been gone". a song with the line "one hand on the ground / and bumper cock sky high" is decidedly not a love song. love is something deep.

oh, but when bianca sings "push it harder back on me," any deeper would be indecent. she makes a persuasive argument: what if love is a good hook-up?



when i say, "this is a love song," i mean it. i knew bow wow wow's cover of "fools rush in" would be a love song when i read juliette goodwin's cassette from my ex entry: the pressure of life. cassette from my ex is for people, like me, who believe they should have been seventeen in 1992. better than love is a mix tape.
"fix you" by coldplay
"turn me on (kevin lyttle cover)" by cocorosie
"since u been gone (kelly clarkson cover)" by ted leo
"fools rush in (ricky nelson cover)" by bow wow wow

or maybe love is brooklyn? Continue reading...

the anti girl talk

This is a Sunday-afternoon kind of mash-up. Its beats are easy going, its recontextualizations are subtle, and its melodic sense is lovely. Mosey on over here to download it. Continue reading...

dope beats to step to

As Timbaland once said,

"It’s been a long time, long time
I shouldn’t have left you, left you
Without a dope beat to step to
Step to, step to, step to
Step to, step to
Freaky-freaky"

Here are five songs I think you should hear.

Morning Benders - Why Don't They Let Us Fall in Love? (Ronettes Cover) (Buy their orig' stuff): My personal favorite off their free new album, The Bedroom Covers, which can be found here, among other places. I LOVE MOTOWN.

Arms - Shitty Little Disco (Buy): Try not judge this song on it's title before you listen. It sounds a bit like the National if the singer preferred dance clubs to dive bars.

Starfucker - German Love (Buy): This band is really fucking good. They are from Portland; they play a really pleasurable species of upbeat glitchy pop with lots of samples and vocals with pretty harmonies. If you download one song from this post make it this one. They are also coming up the East Coast in mid-October; tour dates are on their myspace.

Volcano! - Africa Just Wants To Have Fun (Buy): Sounds like a mix of Dirty Projectors and Ted Leo with some Sunset Rubdown and Animal Collective in there. They just put a new album out called Paperwork. I haven't heard the rest of it yet but if the first single is any indication, it is worth the effort/money it'll take to obtain.

Mirah - Slighted (Buy): Off an album that came out in July, taking its content from, to quote Amazon's description, "a variety of sources, home recordings, hard to find foreign compilations, out-of-print releases, alternate versions or previously unreleased tracks." These songs are all so pretty you wish they weren't 2 minutes long. Continue reading...

classmate turned korean superstar

I went to high school with Taecyeon Ok. Nobody paid much attention to him here in the Occident, and all I really remember is he was one of those kids who wore t-shirts he got from Christian youth retreats and said "Jay, you so stupid" in a funny voice. Now the kid's making dry Korean pop videos overseas and getting modeling work. A valuable lesson in cultural relativism. Continue reading...

the conet project

Wilco likes it, so you should too. The spies are out there, and they're reading off numbers to each other. Continue reading...

i'm always down for social experiments

"what i really want from this blog is a communal archive. a kind of social experiment, if you will. a collective record of witty, silly kids bumbling through and occasionally careening across the internet. playing with cyberspace/virtual reality/parallel universes/comic books/game theory (just kidding -- kind of) also music because we all like it. " - the lovely Fran Harlow

anyways, just as Fran was letting me know of her disastrous decision to let me and others onto this blog, I discovered this kind of amazing video which is marginally music-related.

I DO MORE SHIT THAN BARACK OBAMA. yes, I worked for his campaign this summer, and he's listed under my religious views on Facebook. But I don't really consider myself a political person. And I suspect that most of my posts on this blog might end up talking about modern "classical" music, cause I like it lots (and because I noticed that somebody linked to Alex Ross's terrific blog on the right over there.)

Anyways. Without further ado, here are P. Diddy's views about Sarah Palin:


as per Fran's ideas about kids+internet, I'm pretty sure this sort of thing couldn't exist without the internet. (side note: if you feel like being terrified about the state of this country, I recommend the comments section on the youtube page.) I don't know what it is, but Diddy seems like a pretty solid embodiment of modern culture to me. And this video is the embodiment of modern internet (everyone gets an opinion on everything, so P. Diddy's non-expert political views suddenly have a huge audience. On the other hand, I now want to hear Diddy's views on, like, everything, because I thought that was hilarious. On the internet, people aren't really compartmentalized: P. Diddy isn't a rapper, he's a cultural force.) I also just think everything related to Sarah Palin is hilarious, from her preggers daughter (check out her baby daddy), to the fact that she was a member of an Alaskan secessionist party. I really hope a TV sitcom (starring Tina Fey) is in the works. Anyways. I hope more people run with this blog-about-internet idea so I'm don't feel ashamed for not writing about indie rock. please leave comments! Continue reading...