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There was a time when you couldn’t escape the earnest, verging-on-falsettoness of Five for Fighting’s “Superman.” It’s the kind of song you don’t realize has stopped littering the airwaves until you hear it again years later.
When I came across it this morning, I instantly thought of my mother-in-law (we’ll call her that despite the fact that, to her horror, we have not yet managed to properly marry). I remember her being quite taken by the song at one point, and trying to figure out who sang it so she could track it down.
But that’s really a thinly veiled excuse to talk about her. She’s having a suspicious lump removed from her breast today, and her world (and ours) is either about to turn completely upside down, or not. It’s a strange sort of limbo to be in, the normalcy and sunshine of a late-June day overshadowed by life’s greatest uncertainty.
Beyond the empathy and the extra hugs for my fella, I find that I’ve been regarding my own breasts differently these last few days. This form of illness seems particularly unfair to women, that it should strike this body part so tied in with self-identity, whether as object of lust or object of fashion or object of hungry baby’s needs. And that it should strike right there, in your face, inescapable.
Needless to say, I hope the news today is good news. It might not even come today. But if I were prone to prayer, I would pray that when it comes, it be what we all want to hear.
It is possible that, while I am no particular fan of the solo artistry of either Kid Rock or Sheryl Crow, I find their craptastic duet “Picture” irre-frickin-sistible.
“WHAT?!?!? But we are SHOCKED, Girl on the Swing! We, the faithful readers of Auto Tunes, would never DREAM that YOU OF ALL PEOPLE would enjoy something cheap and cheesy!”
I know! It is shocking. Yet TRUE.
This may be one of my guiltiest of guilty pleasures. I always stop the radio on this song, and I always sing it right out loud. Well, okay: I sing the Sheryl Crow part, the one where she’s a church-going slut (ohmygoodness that cracks me up every time), and I either let Kid Rock be Kid Rock or … I pretend I’m dueting (duetting?) with a dude I know. (And you thought this post couldn’t get more embarrassing.)
Yep. That’s me in the little beige sedan, singing the lady half of an utterly ridiculous and dumbass song, pretending that in the seat next to her is a dude singing the dude part. It’s not enough that I enjoy the bejeesus out of this stupid tune, I seem also to feel the need to add an imaginary friend to the whole crazy mess.
Don’t worry, though: I’m at least conscious of my lunacy. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I’m an excellent driver. Who kind of wants to restyle herself as a church-going slut.
I don’t think I fully understand David Bowie’s career, but I always like what I see. There is something spellbinding about his performance here in a short, slinky get-up and thigh-high boots, despite (or maybe because of) the shoddy video quality. Before he opened his mouth, I wondered if it might even be an over-the-top impersonator:
“Ziggy Stardust” will forever make me think of one long weekend when I was in junior high or high school. My favorite local radio station was playing its entire catalogue, from A to Z, and kept running a canned teaser to advertise that fact: “From [I don't remember the A song, alas] to Ziggy Stardust … we’re playing it all.” I think the song’s distinctive guitar lick was even part of the promo.
It was the first time I’d heard of an A-to-Z weekend, and the first time I’d encountered the title of the Bowie classic, so I spent the whole 48 hours entranced, waiting for this mysterious song to reveal itself. Along the way, I enjoyed a whole lot of (alphabetical) hits, and I was young and sweet enough that I think I actually believed they were playing every song in their library. Awesome concept!
It’s hard to convey the power that DJs held back in the day, with people hanging on their every word, wondering which song would be next in the A-to-Z epic or in the weekly Top 40. When we were in Seattle last week, we heard an old Casey Kasem broadcast from the ’70s. First of all: Casey Kasem! Second of all, it gave me a little dose of shivery countdown nostalgia.
Apparently Casey is still at it (with help now from Ryan Seacrest, of course, and an earlier stint by Shadoe Stevens [Shadoe Stevens!]). And I still occasionally hear radio stations trumpeting an A-to-Z weekend. But in an age of iPods and personalized playlists, it seems like the thrill is gone.
Then again, it could just be that I’m not seventeen anymore.
I’m not??
I’m thinking this morning about cultural touchstones — those songs and movies and TV shows and whathaveyou that somehow, magically, take hold with a generation (or the populace in general), and forever remind of a particular moment in time.
I’m thinking about this because of the inimitable, deathless (for better or for worse) “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which came up on my scan this morning. There’s truly nothing else like it in pop music, is there? It is epic in length and scope, it is bizarre and fascinating, and the fact that it ever made it onto the radio — let alone managed to stay there for three decades and counting — is fairly shocking. We, the mass consumers, are not generally so keen on originality and weirdness.
The song was apparently a hit from the get-go, amazingly enough, so I assume some of its staying power is due to its original impact and popularity. But I’ve got to guess (and Wikipedia is backing me up) that Wayne’s World gave it new life in the early 1990s.
Wayne’s World, of course, is one of my cultural touchstones, and certainly my first thought upon hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I can’t say for certain that I first saw the movie with MamaKitt, but I have this idea that I did — that we caught it in the somewhat down-at-heel downtown theater where we saw so many movies together over the years, and that we laughed our asses off. (I may just be extrapolating my strong association with the “Wayne’s World” SNL sketch and MK to the movie, though; as she has written, she did such a good Garth impression that she once played him in a high school skit.)
At any rate: For me — and, I suspect, so many of my generation — “Bohemian Rhapsody” means Wayne and Garth and buddies in a car, cruising and singing and banging their heads.
But … today when I heard “BR,” I thought of this instead. (Sorry, can’t find a clip that’ll let me embed here.)
Will this be the new cultural touchstone? Is it good / powerful / entertaining / epic enough to last in the collective pop consciousness? Will today’s youngsters think of “Glee” whenever they hear “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Can I — now an oldster of 36 — even begin to guess at what today’s teens and twentysomethings are going to register as significant moments in pop culture?
Probably not. I am curious about these kinds of questions, though. And I do think Freddie Mercury probably got a good heavenly kick out of the ridicu-fabulousness of the “Glee” take on his tune.
You know, I could write a long and labored entry about how I heard two songs complaining about fame this morning, Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” and Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris.” I could reminisce about how one of my best college friends was actively angry at celebrities who complained about their fame, and how I took up her battle cry and still trot it out occasionally, even though the older and tireder I get the more sympathy I feel for them.
I could discuss the fact that TGOTS loathes Joni Mitchell, that my sister loathes Joni too and especially this particular song, but that another dear college friend grew up listening to “Court and Spark” and told tales of dancing around her living room to it as a little girl, all happy and floaty like, in a life that was not otherwise particularly happy and floaty.
I could explain that I really only became aware of Joni during my sophomore year of college, when yet another friend loaned me a cassette of “Blue” and I fell immediately in love with it, even recording a sample on my outgoing phone message, and it is still one of my favorite albums, though I rarely listen to it these days. I could drop in the fact that my mother puzzled over the significance of that answering-machine message, and there wasn’t any, but another sister informed her that I’d chosen the song “Carey” because our sister Carrie was due to give birth any day.
Or I could just let Neil do the talking. Warning: do not watch unless you’re in a Neil mood:
I don’t know that there’s any reason why Heart’s “Magic Man” should make me think of one of my childhood babysitters, but it does.
Heart never really did much for me in their heyday, aside from making sappy young me swoon for “These Dreams.” I didn’t love the more rocking stuff, and wasn’t keen on Ann Wilson’s signature wail. Now, though, I find I rather enjoy the older, harder Heart tunes — and I get a big old kick out of the kickass Wilson sisters.
And like I say, for some reason “Magic Man” brought up thoughts of one of the series of permed, feathered, perky brunette girls who would babysit me and my younger sister (and, later, sisters) at our house on the rare occasions my parents would slip out on a Saturday night. This particular babysitter, whose name (like at least two others in the series) was Michelle, lived across the street from us at the time. She was a preacher’s kid whose hair was more perfectly permed and feathered than all the others’, and whose older brother dated (if I’ve got my story straight) one of MamaKitt’s older sisters. I remember thinking she was incredibly pretty and super fun; she treated me and my sister(s) like we were enjoyable pals rather than obstacles to talking on the phone with friends and/or boys.
My mind may just have jumped to her today because her hairstyle was not unlike Ann Wilson’s, and because I was obsessed, for many years, with getting a perm and feathers like all my cool teenage babysitters had. I haven’t otherwise had a conscious thought of Michelle in many years — have no idea whatever happened to her. She and her family moved when I was still quite young, and her full name is way too common for Googling to be of any use.
Oh well. I hope she’s happy and thriving. And I hope there’s no more sinister reason, buried deep in my subconscious, that made me think of her today when hearing the not-so-vaguely creepy “Magic Man.”
If the web is to be believed, that is a line from Michael Jackson’s “PYT.”
I heard several Michael songs this morning, and as I am wont to do, wondered if it was coincidence or a sign of something. Turns out, of course, that it is the one-year anniversary of his death. For once the pattern I detected was real.
Hard to believe it’s been one year since he died. I am terrible at gauging time in this way — every year, when the Oscars roll around, I think, ‘Really? That movie came out this year?’ I also cannot keep track of baseball seasons or particularly snowy winters the way most people seem to be able to do (e.g., “Don’t you remember three years ago, when we had that huge storm and then February was so warm?” No. I don’t.).
Anyhow, Michael was a force to be reckoned with. I was not always kind to him. In grade school in the ’80s, when his hair famously caught on fire while he was filming a commercial, I joined the other kids in chanting, “I pledge allegiance to the flag/Michael Jackson is a fag/ Pepsi-Cola burnt him up/Now he’s drinking 7-UP.” Aside from the horrible homophobia and disregard for pain on display there, it’s a remarkably uninspired rhyme. Cringeworthy all-around.
I’d like to say I matured over the years, but I distinctly recall tittering as a college friend changed the words of PYT — a song I’d never known until then — to “I want to love you/PYT/pretty white boy.”
Poor Michael. Such a complicated, sad burden of a life. And yet by all accounts he was kind, joyful, and energetic to the end. May he rest in some kind of peace, free of the taunts of ignorant hicks and surrounded by tendoroni-ness.
It’s been several days, and I can no longer live this lie:
Though I did, in fact, hear “Mysterious Ways” on the radio this week, the other song I heard — and the one that has latched itself to my brain ever since — was “As Long As You Love Me.” That’s right: the one by the Backstreet Boys.
This song makes me laugh every time I hear it, because it’s just so dadgummed lame. It sounds like someone pressed “play” on a drum machine then waved at Les Boys des Backstreets to sing over the synthesized beats. (Wait — you’re telling me that’s what actually happened? I won’t believe it.)
“As Long As You Love Me” sounds like everything else that was on the radio in the late 1990s; I’m pretty sure the BBs shared their drum machine with Britney and *NSync and all the others of their ilk. It’s the sound of that time when MamaKitt and I were living together in Maine, and of a little after that, when she was in Boston and I was in Minneapolis. I don’t know that I have many (any) specific memories relating to the Backstreet Boys, but I know they were hovering at the corners of my existence (and everyone else’s) in those years.
And let’s face it: Mock them as we will — and we will — those prepackaged groups are the sound of youth. Not only does hearing the Backstreet Boys make me think of the crowds of girls they somehow reduced to swoons, it also reminds me of my early twenties and the fun and freedom attached to those years. That’s a romanticization, of course, and I know it’s not like I’m up for AARP membership right away, but I have felt horribly old this week. I hurt my back trying to do repairs on a house that I own, and hobbled around most of the week — what is that if not a sign of maturity?
I can’t say I like it. Might be time to start fighting back against the things that make me feel physically advanced in years, at least. If the Backstreet Boys — the balding, beer-bellied, be-mustached pretenders to teendom — can do it, why can’t I?
Whenever I hear the Cranberries — which seems to be a lot lately — I picture one of two things. If the song is “Zombie,” I picture singing the chorus with my sister, fueled by ironic-but-earnest passion. When the song first came out we weren’t sure if the chorus might be “Tommy,” so we often tried that on for size: “To-ommeh, To-ommeh, To-ommeh, eh, eh” and so on.
But if it’s any other song, I picture the back stairwell of a beautiful old dorm at my college.
At the end of the first year (not to be called freshman year, too un-PC), I had become part of a large group of friends, much to my surprise. We all wanted to move together, but as we started going through the horribly stressful dorm and room lottery process, it became obvious that we numbered too many to score spots in the same place. So we split into two, along fairly natural but slightly awkward lines. One half landed rooms in the aforementioned beautiful old dorm, all brick and ivy and wooden floors and charm and central location. The other half — my half — found ourselves in a tall, ’60s-era monstrosity on the edge of campus, a building whose distinct lack of charm was only emphasized by its name: Ham Hall.
Oh, Ham Hall. The big pig on the hill. We had good times there — the handy thing about being a college student is you can pretty much make good times happen anywhere — and even met new friends. But we also made plenty of pilgrimages to that decorous old dorm across campus.
I’m sure it’s not possible that the Cranberries were blaring every single time we traipsed up the back stairwell to one of the rooms occupied by our friends — a room whose location on the stairway landing and outside the main hallway was considered a major benefit. But it felt that way. And every time I hear them now, I am climbing those stairs toward an open door, a doorway to warmth and laughter and the satisfaction derived from living in an It Dorm.
At least, that’s how it seemed at the time. It was very How the Other Half Lives to drop in there, and I always felt a mixture of joy and jealousy when I walked in.
The following year, I opted out of two possible study-abroad opportunities, in part because the study-abroad departures of some of the group meant the rest of us could move together. And junior year was the best of my college career, by far. It’s no coincidence, I think, that it played out in a lovely brick-and-ivy building with the considerably more stately name of North Rockefeller.
No offense to Mr. Ham, who I’m sure was a delightful fellow. In the late 1930s, he became the first male president of my school — or, as this hilariously sly Time article put it on that occasion, my “jealously feminine citadel.” How fitting.
Back when I lived in the southland, my friends and I had the occasional run-in with a famous person. I’ve already written about the ubiquity of Bruce Hornsby in my little former hometown; Colin Farrell once filmed a movie in our area and I saw him asking advice on birthday cakes in the local grocery store. (He hit on a girl I knew at the local bar, too — a much more glamorous anecdote.)
Another friend of mine waitressed at the fancy hotel in town, giving her still more opportunity to encounter the famous folk. She once excitedly reported having waited on Lee Ann Womack, who was “totally sweet” and left a big tip.
Hearing this story, I tried gamely for a few moments to act like I knew who Lee Ann Womack was, but then gave it up and confessed that while that name rang a vague bell, I couldn’t place her. “You know, ‘I Hope You Dance!’” my friend exclaimed.
Oh. I mean, “Ohhh! Cool!”
I cheerfully congratulated my friend on her fun brush with fame, but inside I was wretching. That flocking “I Hope You Dance” song — so insipid and, like Bruce Hornsby, ubiquitous for a time. It made me want to vomit. It was lowest-common-denominator music, playing on the basest emotional response, sung in a chirpy and grating voice by the big-tipping Lee Ann. It was not one of those things I hated-but-secretly-loved, either. Just the hate part.
I think/hope I got through the conversation with my friend without revealing my loathing for song and singer, but I can’t make any promises. (Poker face? Not so much.) I heard the song again today and laughed, remembering this moment in time with some fondness even as I punched the dial to change the station. It made me think of the coffee shop where my friend told her Womack story, and the endless hours I spent there with dear friends. That time was really rotten in a lot of ways, but I do miss the friends and the coffee shop. I haven’t had much of either so far in my new northern life. Will have to get on that.
Lee Ann Womack would want me to.
