Here I go again, flaunting my adulation for cheesy love songs… (do I hear toilet flushing in the background?)… Can you imagine a world without cheesy love songs? No, you can’t. Because cheesy love songs are the soundtrack of our lives. Where were you when this cheesy song was number one… one… one… one? In the toilet, of course, crying over a crush named “Pimple With a Face.”

Cheesy love songs define who we are, determine what we eat, what underwear we wear on pay day, what day we pick our nose, what time of the day we fart. Oh yes, cheesy love songs are the total eclipse of our collective heart, the wind beneath our collective wings… our forest primeval… our… OK. I’m done.

Check the list out at http://sound of toilet flushing

I’m having goose bumps. You too, if you’re a die-hard Beatles fan. Read, or I’ll cut my wrists on YouTube.

“On February 4th, 2008, NASA will transmit the Beatles tune “Across the Universe” to the star Polaris, 431 lights years distant, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the song’s recording and to celebrate NASA’s 50th anniversary. NASA’s Deep Space Network, an array of large antennas used to communicate with spacecraft beyond low Earth orbit, will beam the song out at 6:00 p.m. CST (7:00 p.m. EST). This observation has the full support of Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono and the Apple record label. The lyrics are printed below.”

Read the full article here

Back to Tom Reynold’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick – The 52 creepiest love songs you’ve ever heard’. Sorry, I can’t get enough of this book. It’s just that somebody has to remind us constantly how many of the songs we love really suck, and how cutesy melodies can sanitize really awful lyrics. Especially if the song is about rodents! Hey, I have hamsters and I love them. But I would never write songs about “bacon nibbling” and “cheese chewing” rats!

Excerpts:

Muskrat Love — Captain and Tennille/America

“While doing research for ‘Muskrat Love,’ I was invariably led to muskrats, a subject I knew nothing about save having worked for a few in the past. Muskrats are very large rat cousins that live in swamps, breed copiously and are considered a nuisance because they burrow into levees and earthen dams.

“… (The rodents’) names are Muskrat Susie and Muskrat Sam… doing the jitterbug in muskrat land, a magical place where waterborne rodents perform Second World War-era dances and one pill makes you larger, one makes you small. Also, while they ‘shimmy’, we find out Sammy’s ‘so skinny’, perhaps the dumbest rhyme ever concocted…

“The chorus consists of Sam and Susie whirling, twirling and tangoing, which sets up the next bad rhyme where they’re ‘singin’ and ‘jingin’ the ‘jango’. For the record, neither ‘jinging’ nor ‘jango’ can be found in the dictionary so I’m not sure what a jango looks like, let alone how the hell you jing one…

“After a final spin through the chorus of twirling tangoing and jango jinging, Sam and Susie fall hopelessly into ‘muskrat love’, muskrat separation and muskrat divorce. They swim off together into the sunset to tell other muskrats the news…

“Why would anyone write a love song about the courting rituals of marsh-dwelling fauna? Were wildebeests already taken? Why do these two cheese-eating swamp bunnies need to jing the jango in Muskrat Land?”

Ben — Michael Jackson

‘Ben’ is the theme song to the 1972 film of the same name, an inferior sequel to the 1971 cult horror film Willard about a teased social misfit who befriends rats and trains them to kill his tormentors. In the movie Ben, a lonely little boy finds the rat leader Ben and its killer pack living inside his house, and dispatches them on bullies at his school… The film ends with the rat colony being destroyed although Ben escapes, crawling back to the boy’s house. As the kid nurses him to life, the rat peers menacingly at the camera, plotting his revenge. The credits roll and the song kicks in, probably not the revenge he had in mind…

“Though dated and sappy, there is nothing disturbing about the song itself. The melody is pleasant and Jacksons’s vocals is quite impressive considering he was only 13 at the time. It’s only when you realize he’s singing to a man-eating rat that ‘Ben’ veers off into the bad camp arena. It’s probable that most teenage fans who bought the single never knew this since the film Ben wasn’t a hit.

“Now, let’s jump ahead 35 years to an era when the phrase ‘a Michael Jackson song’ has an entirely different meaning to it. ‘Ben’ becomes an example of a creepy love song that becomes creepier when you disregard the thing that made it creepy to begin with. In other words, switch the rat with a 10-year-old-boy named Ben. See what I mean? Of the thousand of boys whose clueless parents shoved them into Jackson’s orbit over the years, the odds are that a few of them were named Ben.”

I told them something like “Fuck you and your Tagalog market.” I never heard from them again. I was reminded of this after reading Bordowitz on Nirvana and the Seattle ‘grunge’ scene. Read, too, what made Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ work. If there’s a song that gave me courage to finally quit my seminary studies, this would be it.

“(Nirvana’s debut album Bleach) was loud, crude, and very punk, but there was something else to both the record and the band. Part of it was that under all the noise and… grunge, as the scene came to be called outside of Seattle, there were hooks. There was also the real pain and vulnerability that came through in Cobain’s vocals…

“Most indie punk bands had a love/hate relationship with even the idea of major labels. On the one hand, no one could get the music out to a broader audience. It was, after all, the concept of controlling distribution that made a major recording company a major recording company. However, there was always the fear factor. “Of course, we were afraid they would make us do something,” Bob Mould recalled of Husker Du’s earlier foray with a major label, “because everyone kept telling us, ‘Oh, you go with them, they’re going to change you completely…”

“… Nirvana gave in to the inevitable, signing with the David Geffen Company (DGC). DGC had no great expectations for Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind. They only pressed fifty thousand copies of it, but the record kept selling and the single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a caustic, sarcastic three-chord blast of alienation that the company had hoped might captivate alternative and college radio so they could “build a story,” actually started to break pop.

“… Many felt it was how well the group embodied the juxtaposition of the twenty-something slacker generation, what Simon Reynolds characterized as a “mix of faithlessness and idealism… Lyrically it is confused, vacillating between the fury of the chorus ‘Here we are now, entertain us/how stupid and contagious’ and the fatigued fatalism of ‘I found it hard, so hard to find, oh well, whatever, nevermind’… Perhaps the secret of their success is that their rage is unspecific enough to provide a catch-all catharsis that appeals across the political spectrum.”

“… Then the word got out of about Cobain’s heroin use… In April of 1994, Cobain took a shotgun to his head and ended his life.

“Effectively, Cobain’s passing put the breaks on grunge as a movement… But Cobain had done something that rock seems to need every few years: He supplied it with a swift kick in the ass that got it up and lumbering again…”

• Dig this
  - MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
  All the sweet, green icing flowing down
  Someone left the cake out in the rain
  I don’t think that I can take it
  ‘Cause it took so long to bake it
  And I’ll never have that recipe again
  Oh, no!

HA-HA-HA

click-to-know-that-your-favorite-horse-with-no-name-is-also-a-stupid-song

My Boy Lollipop/Millie

“…Today a pop classic, ‘My Boy Lollipop’ is … extremely short and as lyrically profound as a traffic sign. Still, it deserves inclusion as one of our 52 creepy love songs for its coital ska beat and the alternative interpretation of the title and lyrics.

“…For all its cutesiness, ‘My Boy Lollipop’ is possibly one of the dirtiest songs to ever hit the charts. Of course, it takes a suspicious mind that sees double entendres everywhere to notice the perverted meaning to this song. Thankfully, I have a suspicious mind.

“Allow me to present my case. First, I don’t know any self-respecting guy who’d accept ‘lollipop’ as a term of endearment from his girlfriend. If that’s his real name, i.e. Lol E. Pop, then fine, we can assume he’s probably someone who had to win a lot of playground fights. But it’s more likely that ‘lollipop’ is a euphemismm one as obvious as all the rhymes in the song. Oh yeah, she looovvves her boy’s lollipop, it makes her giddy-up, it’s sweet like candy, it’s sugar dandy. Need I go on?

“Double entendres in song lyrics are not UFOs. They stand out like funnel clouds and most genres of music, be it R&B, salsa, merengue, blues, rockabily etc., have employed double-meaning lyrics. ‘My Boy Lollipop’ was originally an R&B song, a genre notorious for sexual innuendo, and when you add the humping rhythms of ska combined with the kittenish charm of Millie’s voice, you have a deliciously suggestive creepy love song.”

(Touch Me, I’m Sick, the 52 Love Creepiest Love Songs You’ve Ever Heard, by Tom Reynolds)

It’s so entertaining (and downright hilarious) that I can’t help sharing with you excerpts from some of the articles. To Mr. Reynolds (assuming that somebody other than my girlfriend reads my blog), I’m a huge, huge fan of yours, so I hope you don’t mind.

To you guys, If I leave you hanging after every post, it’s because nothing beats buying the book. So go check it out.

Let’s start off with Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive’…

“Since its 1991 release, I estimate I’d heard ‘Alive around 23,891 times while only deciphering that a mother was in her son’s room trying to accomplish something. I finally ran out of patience and Googled the freaking lyrics. Now, I figured out the rest and realized ‘Alive’ is even creepier than I assumed it was and not in a good way.

“… Alive exemplies the pretentious and self-important excesses that befell grunge groups and turned them into boring wank fests. Listening to the bands like Mudhoney having attacks over ‘selling out’ and ‘artistic integrity’ while impaling themselves to get record contracts really got tiresome.

“As for Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, they greeted every platinum sale of their CDs as some kind of whore deal, and by 1994 I was ready to scream ‘shut the hell up already’ when Kurt Cobain martyred himself with 20-gauge.

“While the decline of grunge is attributed to Cobain’s suicide and overbearing media attention, I think the 1996 music documentary Hype! shows what was really behind its collapse… The film features more than 30 bands in performance. The problem is, 26 of them suck.

“They couldn’t play, couldn’t write and couldn’t perform. Most sounded like 16-year-olds pretending to be Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. The best moment in the whole film is an electrifying debut performance of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by a then-unknown Nirvana, shot inside a seedy club.

“… The band’s raw sound was fresh and original, eclipsing practically every one of its contemporaries. Pearl Jam has good musicians, but I found Vedder to be a tedious vocalist who takes himself way too seriously. But at least the band is still ‘ahhh-laavvee‘”

i have always hated playing live. i don’t even know why i’m in a band in the first place. playing live was not among my plans when this whole bisaya rock thing started. i just wanted to write songs, give copies to close friends and let the songs live their own pathetic lives. and my bandmates knew this. only that they don’t share with me the same weird, anti-crowd motivation to be in a band.

and oh, the surigao gig! it was one of our best gigs since.. .. high school. payter! i told myself, “if it’s going to be my last live performance, might as well give it my best.” and that was what happened.