Tag Archives: music

Jim Croce cover band

When I was a kid, our next door neighbors had a Hammond organ. They used to let me play it but their sheet music selection was pretty limited.

Very limited.

Let’s put it this way: if you ever form a Jim Croce cover band and need some funky organ breaks for “Time in a Bottle,” I’m your girl.

I have no idea how this post was supposed to end because I went down a rabbit hole for a while. I was linking to Jim Croce’s website and the front page link for “dinner reservations” was deeply confusing until I discovered it led to the Croce’s Restaurant site. Croce’s Restaurant is closing in December. It’s in San Diego, I bet Batty has been there.

I should really get back to lecture writing. Or watching shitty movies. Ooh, my lecture is on urban legends, so I could watch the movie Urban Legends and multitask!

MTV

In the summer of 1981 my brother and I spent a lot of time at our cousins house. They had a TV. And cable. And they were cool. And on August 1st, they got MTV. And they got to stay up as late as they wanted, so we all watched it’s debut.


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I could spout some media and cultural theory bullshit about the dawn of MTV. Instead I’m just going to do what everyone else is doing and embed the moon landing station ID and the Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star,” because frankly, as a 5th grader, watching the debut of MTV didn’t fill me with any grand-eloquent sense of the future of music. I just thought it was cool.

"It's so white, Sarah Palin just named it her running mate for 2012."

Have you been following Maura Johnston and Christopher R. Weingarten’s countdown of the 20 worst songs of 2010 over at the Village Voice? If not, now’s your chance to catch up. It’s worthy if only for the lengthy screed about their choice for #1 (worst) song, Train’s “Soul Sister.”

“Hey Soul Sister” is an orgy where bad ideas trade STDs, and the most syphilitic brain-fart stumbled in drunk from a Smash Mouth show. (For those of you who arrived late, Smash Mouth was a band from the late ’90s that was formed when a soul patch met cake frosting. Their wikki-wikki scratching and dorkpie hats did to music what blood-soaked clowns do to the dreams of sleeping children.) Listen to “Hey, Soul Sister” a few times and you’ll inevitably be reminded of the “whistling solo” from the Shrek house band’s inescapable “All Star.” From Smash Mouth, Train picked up an earworm that burrowed into society’s asshole, laid 4.7 million iTunes eggs, and gave birth to a grey cloud of banality that covers the Earth.

That’s one of the nicer things that can be said about that song. And I like ukuleles.

If you’d like to start at the beginning of the countdown, the front page is here.

(Link courtesy of Husband)