Jesse Sheidlower traces the antecedents of Britney Spears' catchy but horribly-depressing ode to low self esteem If U Seek Amy. I'm not sure if the use of 'U' in the title is (like the ham-handed opener of the video) an attempt to remove any remote bit of sly-ness from the joke so that idiot fans don't miss it or if it's just a reflexive post-Prince convention that undermines the joke unintentionally.

Back in the old Music Club days one of our themes (which I somehow neglected to blog) was songs with curse words and Jill brought in the Memphis Slim classic If You See Kay. (My contribution was the trifecta of Shit, Damn, Motherfucker.)

I remember reading about the Joyce poem when the Amy faux-controversy first hit a while back, but Jesse also points out a related Shakesepeare gag that I'd never noticed, despite having read or seen Twelfth Night countless times. Handwriting analysis at it's most gratuitously raunchy:

"By my life this is my lady's hand. These be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's."

9:27 AM :: Comments (13)

From MSN Live Search:

In case you haven't been keeping up with the Rapture Ready! news page or Facebook group, here are some highlights from the last few weeks:

Reviews in Publisher's Weekly, SoMA Review and Discerning Reader (a conservative Christian site, so this is as close to a rave as I could possibly get).

Interviews in The Forward and Metromix.

A thoughtful discussion and analysis in Slate (that, for what it's worth, I don't entirely agree with).

Also, there are now six excerpts available online at various sites, with more to come. Pretty soon the entire thing will be free on the Internet, just like music.

Perhaps due to all this buzz, my Amazon rank briefly rose to about 850 and has now settled down to 3,000-something.

What can you do to help continue this saturation coverage, I hear you ask? Well, if you have a blog, drop a mention in whatever manner suits you best. If you want to enlist me in any such enterprise for a Q&A or guest post or whatever, let me know. If you don't have a blog, get one. Or Twitter it. I have no idea what Twitter is, but I hear it's quite fashionable.

Also, if you read the book, please take two minutes and write a review on Amazon. If you haven't read it, check out the reviews that are already there and let them know which ones were "helpful to you" (hint, the five-star ones). You can do that in less time than it took you to read this post.

You did read this far, right?

Hello? Is anybody there? There was going to be cake.

Update Thanks a million to The Millions for taking me up on the Q&A offer. Also, the buzz continues at The Onion AV Club. RR! is... tolerable!

4:24 PM :: Comments (2)

So how excited are you about the announcement of a Spider-Man Broadway musical directed by Julie Taymor with songs by Bono and the Edge?

Not very, right?

But wait — what if the show turns out to be based on the classic 1975 album: Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero?

It won't be, of course, but just the thought sends shivers down my spine. I loved this weird novelty record as a kid and a few years ago I bought the CD re-release in anticipation of a music club meeting that would never actually materialize on the theme of superheroes.

Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment, although it was worth it just for the artwork of the backup band — Captain America on tambourine, Conan and the Barbarians on strings. One song that holds up (more or less) is the haunting ballad Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes, written (it says here) by a 17-year-old kid.

For a limited time only, you can download the MP3 here. After that, you can find a low-fi clip here.

Maybe proto-emo song-styling should be a challenge on the next season of Who Wants to Be a Superhero.

Update: J tells me there's still a chance for you (Time magazine's person of the year!) to be in the Spider-Man musical.

There's also some suggestion on that page that the show might be better than a simple rip-off of the movies, notably the creation of a new character, Arachne (apparently not the Marvel heroine of the same name) and of a "geek chorus," that gives the show a meta spin.

Also from Superhero Hype, depressing news on the Y:The Last Man front:

We wondered whether Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men might make it easier for Hollywood to understand Vaughn's vision, to which Goyer countered, "But Children of Men didn't do well..."

Well, maybe if it's a hit on DVD, hint hint. Related: The entire first issue of Y is now free online.

10:12 AM :: Comments (3)

The girls of Clique may flirt chastely on MySpace, but so far they have resisted entreaties to unfold the delicate petals of their official web site. Fortunately, as Melanie Martinez taught us, it doesn't count if you slip in through the back door.

So what can we learn from the hidden home of Ariel, Destinee and Paris? (It's annoying, but one must use their names in every post or else Googlers will never find it. One thing Brian Lukow got right was the importance of choosing a name that will top search results right off the bat.) Well for starters, these girls love to have their pictures taken. Or at least, Sal Dupree loves to take their pictures. Seriously, one page of photos would probably be sufficient. (There is some evidence that Cousin Dupree is not actually the mastermind behind Clique, but for my purposes he'll do; more on that later.)

In the bio, there is some information that got taken out of the MySpace version, most notably that before Clique, Ariel Moore and Destinee Monroe were in a "girl pop singing group" with "another young girl from Connecticut." Anyone with details on this proto-Clique is requested to please pass them on.

But let's cut to the chase. If you leave the bio page open for a few minutes — or you may have to click on the MTV Overdrive link and then wait — you'll be treated to samples of several previously unheard Clique songs. I think these girls have recorded more songs than Huckapoo did in their entire career (and released just as many albums!). Admittedly, some of these are half-assed ballads, but the opening track is an insanely infectious dance number that deserves to go straight to the top of the pop tart charts. Go ahead and check it out, you will not be able to get it out of your head.

That said, the song's lyrics raise some important questions, which I will address after the jump. Join me there. It'll be fun. As an enticement, there's a photo of Destinee looking totally metal.

Continue reading "Exploring Clique's secret places" »

11:00 AM :: Comments (16)

Hey, I didn't say it, John Lydon did. Recently, NR published a list of the 50 greatest conservative rock songs of all time (hey, didn't music club do that ages ago?) and a quick read through it shows that at least — at least — half of them aren't conservative at all — the Sex Pistols's Bodies being the example that Lydon was presciently objecting to when he said (so very colorfully) that he is pro-choice and that people who think his lyrics are anti-abortion aren't thinking hard enough. Pete Townshend less eloquently blasts NR's top choice.

As others have noted, there are a few general flaws with the list, including the facts that the NR editors think any song that is anti-Stalinist is conservative and that they clearly don't understand irony.

But there are also several instances where they just seem to be hoping that nobody knows what the chosen song actually says.This satirical list of 50 more "conservative" rock songs makes the point pretty well, and this analysis tackles the question of what is meant by conservative, but for sheer missing the effing point:

My City Was Gone is about Wal Mart-ization, not "central planning."

I Fought the Law is about, um, fighting the law, not obeying it.

This one's more open to interpretation, I guess, but I've always heard Stay Together for the Kids as a lament about parents who think fighting all the time in a miserable marriage is preferable to getting a divorce.

Keep Your Hands to yourself doesn't "affirm old-time sexual mores," it whines about them.

If the last verse of Godzilla means anything, it means the same thing as the movie: no good can come from nuclear weapons.

Why Don't You Get a Job "capture[s] a motive force behind welfare reform"?! Whaaaa? Tell me what these lyrics have to do with welfare: "My friend's got a girlfriend and he hates that bitch... She sits on her ass/He works his hands to the bone/ To give her money every payday/ But she wants more dinero just to stay at home/Well my friend/ You gotta say... Why don't you get a job?" Shouldn't conservatives be encouraging men to be breadwinners?

Frankly, the most conservative thing about NR's list is that there are no almost no blacks allowed. What did they ever do for rock and roll anyway?

6:22 PM :: Comments (1)

Landesman? Check. Huckapoo? Check. Promoting friends' vanity projects? I knew I'd forgotten something! Yes, I've been remiss in fulfilling one of this blog's prime objectives: hypocritical clubbiness. My buddy Gersh Kuntzman's musical has already had two performances at the Fringe Festival and I haven't plugged it once.

New York Magazine calls SUV: The Musical "a song-and-dance joyride!" NYtheatre.com raves, "A perfect show for the hot and humid summertime blues! A breezy, sloppy, all-over-the-place crowd pleaser!" Even Click and Clack love it (or least the idea of it). Me? I haven't seen it yet, but there are three more performances this week and next, so I'll see you at one of them.

5:03 PM :: Comments (1)

A while ago, probably during the Music Club era, I had an e-mail exchange with Kevin about the shelf-life of today's rap songs. He suggested that the over-reliance on product placement as shorthand for style would limit the appeal of current hits in years to come. I agreed that this was probably the case by and large, but argued that an exceptional song would have no problem sustaining itself well past the era of its status symbols, and pointed to Cole Porter's You're the Top as evidence. The song is still considered one of the all-time greats, even though few people know what half of it means. (Personally I prefer the less gimmicky Porter tunes; give me So in Love or Night and Day over Let's Do It anytime).

My curiosity about the dated references in You're the Top was satisfied recently when Timothy Noah posted an exhaustive annotation. But now that Noah has posted an addendum I find myself curious all over again.

Continue reading "What, you thought I only know teen pop?" »

9:26 PM :: Comments (11)

When the New York Times ran an article about Camplified — a concert tour in which pop-tarts in training up their Q scores by performing at summer camps — my first reaction was the same as any worthwhile blogger's: hey, those 14-year-old Spice Girl wannabes are kinda cute.

So I did a little Googling, and here's why Huckapoo is now officially my new favorite band:

1. Huckapoo! OMG is that the worst band name ever, or what? Maybe it would work for punksters who want to evoke the sound of coughing up phlegm plus a turd in a name that could be a rejected Sid and Marty Krofft character (but is actually an item of clothing from two decades before the target audience was born). But for Disney ditzes? It's just so, eww. Love it!

Continue reading "Hit me baby five more times" »

4:26 PM :: Comments (42)

EW music critic David Browne has a box this week on cover songs that are better than the original, which as you know was a music club theme in November, 2002.

There's no overlap, largely because Browne's picks are predictable (Aretha Franklin's Respect), wrong (Nirvana's Where Did You Sleep Last Night) or both (Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower). Browne also cites Eliza Carthy's version of Ben Harper's Walk Away -- not knowing either, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And while he's right that the Monkees' version of I'm A Believer trumps Neil Diamond's, I'm not sure Music Club would accept Diamond's as the original, seeing as how it wasn't released until after the Monkees turned it into a hit. (As noted, we rejected Anthony's attempt to claim Patti Smith's Because the Night as a cover of Springsteen).

2:16 PM :: Comments (0)

I am very excited about next month's music club theme... but first, let's have a quick with the results of our last session, songs you want played at your funeral. I complained about this theme, as you may recall. As Kevin pointed out, pretty much any song, no matter how sappy or cheesy, when played at an actual funeral becomes sanctified by its context. And yet, this being not an actual funeral but merely a gathering of music geeks, I found it hard, as I said, to think of a song that wouldn't be trite.

As it happens, in Jewish tradition, we don't play music at funerals. While I'm not down with every Jewish law (I'll be drinking the tap water, thanks), this one makes sense to me. Which led me to the only possible choice I could make, a recording of Kaddish being chanted.

What did other people come up with? Well, Eve had a touching story about Emmylou Harris's Born to Run, certainly a fine reminiscence of a life well lived. Gina chose the song whose sentiment comes closest to the one I'd want at my funeral if I had to have music -- What A Wonderful World as performed by Victoria Williams. Tracy, knowing it's hard to go wrong with either gospel or Dylan, brought the Chicago Mass Choir's rendition of Pressing On. Francis and Rose both went for the joke, he with You'll Miss Me (They Might Be Giants), she with Too Darn Hot (Ella Fitzgerald). Emily will be laid to rest to Dobie Gray's Drift Away.

Next month: superheroes. Some say best theme ever. I've got some swell ideas already, but I'm always open to more. Remember, it doesn't have to be "songs about superheroes" (though there are enough of those). Interpret how you will. Up, up, and away!

4:50 PM :: Comments (5)

This month's Music Club playlist will not be all that exciting to most people, because the broad category — songs in a foreign language — meant that we were able to choose pretty much anything that struck our fancy, thereby eliminating the gameplay aspect that often makes the Club intriguing to outside observers. (But stick around to the end for something you might want in on).

Though a pleasure to listen to, this mix will also never be shared on iTunes 4.5 because, and here's the problem with iTunes in general, I'd be shocked if even three of these songs were available on it. (Upbdate: Good call. Only tracks 2 & 12 are on iTunes.)

Anyway, I'll at least claim the mantle of most obscure languages chosen for my own picks (tracks 3 &4).

1. Mariza: O Silencio da Guitarra (Portuguese)
2. Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys: J'Aimerais te Pardonner (French)
3. Alpha Blondy: Sebe Allah Y'e (Dioula)
4. Kula Shaker: Govinda (Sanskrit)
5. Quruli: March (Japanese)
6. Peter Gabriel: Eindringling (German)
7. Lhasa: El Desierto (Spanish)
8. Psi Vojaci: Russian Mystic Pop, Op. IV (Czech)
9. The Ukrainians: Batya (Bigmouth Strikes Again) (Ukranian)
10. Luna (with Laetitia Sadier): Bonnie and Clyde (French)
11. Omara Portuondo: Donde Estabas Tu? (Spanish)
12. Alcione: Sufoco (Portuguese)
13. Faudel: La Valse (French)
14. Susana Baca: Zamba Malato (Spanish)
15. Kirsty MacColl: Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine (French)

Next month's theme, against my strident protests, is songs you want played at your funeral. My problem is that I can't think of anything that's not trite (and also, I don't particularly want to spend the next month thinking about my funeral). But while this is a personal choice, maybe you can inspire me. Use the comments section to tell me what song you want playing when you're buried, scattered, or picked apart by vultures.

10:59 AM :: Comments (5)

Local acts were out in force for Music Club's session on songs about parties, with both Life in a Blender and Little Gray Books troubadour Jonathan Coulton getting nods. In other willful obscurity news, Francis had to go and inflict one of his annoying bootlegs on us (it's not as good as the original of either), and I got around the obviousness of All Tomorrow's Parties by bringing the demo version (a combination of takes 1 and 3 if you must know) from the 1995 box set.

So, let's get this party started:

1. Joe Logic — Pinkarama (Pink's "Get This Party Started" vs. the theme
to Futurama)
2. Hank Williams Jr. — All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight
3. Etta James — In the Basement, Pt. 1
4. The B-52's — Love Shack
5. Eminem — My Fault
6. The Dismemberment Plan — You Are Invited - Rose
7. The Velvet Underground — All Tomorrow's Parties (demo)
8. Jonathan Coulton — I'm Having a Party
9. Oingo Boingo — Dead Man's Party
10. Desmond Dekker and the Aces — Intensified Festival 68
11. Life in a Blender — Party Soon
12. Nat King Cole — The Party's Over

Next month's theme is foreign-language songs. This one's tricky in a different way: how do you narrow it down? Like many people, I went through a bit of a world music phase in college, so I've got plenty of ideas and won't, for a change, seek suggestions. But since I have these comments now, why not let everyone know if the club overlooked your favorite party song?

5:08 PM :: Comments (4)

Before Landesman, before Easterbrook, before even Arnold's manhood, Radosh.net's signature feature was dispatches from Music Club, a monthly gathering in which assorted music geeks assemble a mix CD on a randomly-chosen theme. Previous installments have included murder, cover songs that are better than the original, and songs by artists whose first or last name is the same as the last name of a US president.

After a hiatus to allow various members to relocate and procreate, Music Club returned last weekend for songs about musical instruments. My pick was track 2 Ð not just a great song, but the one I found that is most about the musical instrument. Rose was prepared for a fight over track 4, but got none. Of course two turntables and a microphone are instruments!

1. While My Guitar Gently Weeps — The Beatles
2. Fender Stratocaster — Jonathan Richman
3. Coney Island Washboard — The Firehouse Five Plus Two
4. Where It's At— Beck
5. Tamborine — Prince
6. Mr. Theremin — Barbara Gaskin & Dave Stewart
7. The Violin — Brian Dewan & Eileen Ivers
8. The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) — Tom Waits
9. The Hurdy Gurdy — Agnes Bernelle

Gina found track 6 by thinking of the instrument first then searching for songs about it. It's a lovely bit of early 80 prog rock. Track 9 is the oddball here. It could also have worked for the murder set.

Next month (really!), songs about parties. There are lots to choose from, and I'm certain that most of the club has already thought of every possible definition of party. Since everyone's first reaction was, At least this will be a fun CD, I would kind of perversely like to find a song that's really bleak and depressing. Any suggestions?

1:23 PM

Like any Romenskoid, I have been eagerly awaiting New Yorker film critic David Denby's new memoir, American Sucker, ever since hearing that it includes a confession of his addiction to Internet pornography. Sure, I didn't expect it would be as dryly witty as Anthony Lane's confession of porn addiction, nor as reliable as Lisa Schwarzbaum's, as frisky as Nathan Rabin's, or as filled with bizarrely irrelevant pop-culture references as Elvis Mitchell's. But I hoped that, given the nature of the topic, it would still be more exciting than a David Denby movie review.

So I was disappointed when I finally got my hands on a copy and found that the porn section spans a mere three pages (12-14), and is barely smutty at all.

Or is it?

Herewith, Denby's complete PG-13 confessional, annotated for maXXXimum salaciousness. It will not surprise you that most of the links are NOT SAFE FOR WORK, or, if you are David Denby, for anywhere. (You'll notice that I started to run out of steam after the first paragraph, but, honestly, that's about how long the joke is good for; also, some of these links are dead already and may no longer make much sense.)

---------

"For the most part, I stayed home in the apartment that I loved. And instead of going out, I entered in that summer of 1999 a dark and empty tunnel, an enclosure illuminated along the walls by a flash of naked men and women. I had discovered porn on the Internet. In the solitude of night, and in my little study at home, where mighty volumes of Plato, St. Augustine, Hegel, Montaigne, Nietzsche — hardly my regular reading but a recent obsession — loomed over the desk, the kneeling young women awkwardly turned their eyes to the camera. They often had long and beautiful hair that they must have laboriously cared for; they looked for approval not from their partners but from the camera, which I thought was the true object of their desire. They wanted to be seen. And the men, ugly and strong, sullen, tattooed some of them, thick-membered, concentrating on their erection and their orgasm, lest they lose either — they were amateurs, not models, exercising the democratic art form of exhibitionism, with me as their willing audience. They all wanted to be seen, but I didn't want to be seen."

"'The worst thing that can be said of pornography,' Gore Vidal wrote in 1966, 'is not that it leads to ‘anti-social' acts but to the reading of more pornography.' I'm not sure that's the worst thing that can be said of pornography. But I know what Vidal means: Obsession leads not to satisfaction but to more obsession. Pornography is addictive. And Vidal wrote that sentence long before the development of the Internet, which so easily feeds the desire for more that it seems to mock appetite itself. You enter a porn site, try to back out, and get sent not to the previous screen but spilled sideways to another erotic site. Asian Frenzy? Latino Studs? Oh, why not? At least take a look. Even when you get out, mocking e-mails arrive, by the hundreds. The notes were confidential, blunt, chummy. Hello, Fellow Pervs, Kinksters, and Lifestylers… More goodies for you this week. Several new free sex stories are on-line (including part 7 of the My Wife Stella series). Stella! A man who was married to her, or said that he was, shared her with anonymous millions. Did it save his marriage?

"I had no desire to "chat"; I wanted only to gaze. After a while, as I spilled from site to site, I felt not that I was controlling and discovering porn on the ‘Net but that it was discovering me. It was seeking me out, reading me, and it found out things about me that I didn't know. I continued to review movies, I had dinner with friends, took care of the boys when it was my turn. I fed the cat, read the Times and the Journal, but I felt, at times, as if I were breaking into fragments. I had this appetite and that one, but what held them together?

"The Internet is always spoken of as a medium of connection, but it is also a medium of isolation that surfs the user and breaks him into separate waves going nowhere. There was the movie hunger, and the lust hunger, and the early stirrings of the money hunger. But where was the core, reconciling and joining the many elements together? In the tomes above the computer? My book about the classics was devoted to Columbia's version of the "core curriculum." That's why the big boys were up there, in the shelves above the monitor. What would they have said? Plato, observing a man staring at shadows in a cave, would not have been in the least surprised. But Hegel, I imagined, would have been dismayed by the passivity of erotic contemplation, and Nietzsche, I was sure, would have been disgusted by the absence of vigorous, joyful activity — fighting, dancing, revelry, lovemaking — even though Nietzsche, poor crazy bastard, was as terrified of women as any man who ever lived."

1:06 AM

Music Club convened last night to spin songs by movie or TV stars. Numbers from musical productions account for a big chunk of the entries, perhaps not surprisingly. Because we had a small summer turnout, there was room for a couple of people's back-up songs. Bill Cosby's deranged funk Dope Pusher, from the Grammy-winning 1971 album Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs, was Francis's back-up and our only so-bad-it's-funny entry. My pick was Dan Rather's gloomy news-rap, assembled by The Evolution Control Committee, a discovery from Carrie's fabulous Illegal Art exhibit (do yourself a favor and right-click to download the MP3). I was also glad to be able to include my back-up, Kirsten Dunst's lovely rendition of the jazz-age standard After You've Gone, from The Cat's Meow soundtrack.

1. Movin' Right Along — Kermit the Frog & Fozzy Bear
2. Road to Morocco — Bob Hope & Bing Crosby
3. A Little Girl from Little Rock — Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell
4. That Old Black Magic — Kevin Spacey
5. After You've Gone — Kirsten Dunst
6. Green Acres — Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor
7. I've Got a Theory — Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast
8. Rocked By Rape — The Evolution Control Committee feat. Dan Rather
9. Dope Pusher — Bill Cosby

Next month: Songs about musical instruments. Lots of possibilities here. I already have three strong contenders, but I'd like to hear your suggestions. Extra points for unusual instruments, as two of my top three are about guitars.

1:39 PM

A small turnout for the latest music club, but everyone managed to bring a tune that doesn't make the usual lists of songs with stuttering:

1. Back In The U.S.S.R. — The Beatles
2. Cherry Bomb — The Runaways
3. Girl O'Clock — The Dismemberment Plan
4. Move Your Feet — Junior Senior
5. Tennessee — Arrested Development
6. My Kingdom — Echo & the Bunnymen
7. D'yer Mak'er — Led Zeppelin

A Radosh.net visitor recommended Dismemberment Plan, but I didn't choose it, partly 'cause I knew Francis would. My pick was Junior Senior. The trashy pop fan in me rears its head again. Next up: Get out your earplugs for songs by movie or TV stars.

10:08 PM

Music Club's profanity session produced our most musically-coherent mix to date (a title previously held by presidents) -- not counting the bonus track intentionally added at the end for much-needed comic relief. Heavy on the post-punk. No rap ("fish in a barrel," said Ivan). Elizabeth (track 3) and Gina Sue (track 12) chose, cleverly, to work with the first dictionary definition of profanity, while the rest of us went with the more common definition 2a. My pick (track 9) was a suggestion via this site. Thanks, Tim!

1. Untouchable Face — Ani DiFranco (fuck you)
2. Song for the Dumped — Ben Folds Five (fuck you too; you bitch)
3. The Ballad of John and Yoko — The Beatles (they're gonna crucify me)
4. Chowder — The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (fuck)
5. Add It Up — Violent Femmes (screw; fuck)
6. Pablo Picasso — Jonathan Richman (asshole)
7. Flower — Liz Phair (fuck you like a dog; blowjob; fuck you till your dick is blue)
8. Precious — The Pretenders (shitting bricks; fuck off)
9. Tits and Whiskey — Mary Prankster (tits; fuck me)
10. Why'D Ya Do It? — Marianne Faithfull (balls; cock; snatch; dick; cunt; barbed-wire pussy)
11. Break Stuff — Limp Bizkit (fucked; sucks; motherfucker; bullshit; shit; fuckin' up; ass)
12. Highway To Hell — AC/DC (I'm on the highway to hell; hey, Satan, paid my dues)
13. Uncle Fucka — South Park (Shut your fucking face, uncle fucka; cock-sucking, ass-licking uncle fucka; fucked your uncle; fuck your uncle; boner-biting bastard; suck my balls)

That's one hot mix not to play with your parents in the car! Our next theme is (sorry, Joel Stein) songs with stuttering. I knew right away what I'm going to bring, but I should probably have a backup, so please, let me know your f-f-favorites (other than My G-g-generation, Ch-ch-changes, and You Ain't Seen N-n-nothin' Yet).

1:01 PM

Music Club ended up with a pretty nice mix this month, considering that the theme was a recipe for randomness: Songs From Your Vinyl Collection. We're heavy on childhood and teenage favorites, of course, but a couple of folks went with tracks from albums that have never been released on CD (egregiously). My pick was the Lotte Lenya, from the first LP I ever owned, and was obsessed with from age 3 through 7.

1. Think About Your Troubles -- Harry Nilsson
2. Sail Away -- Etta James
3. Freedom -- Wham!
4. (Don't Go Back To) Rockville -- R.E.M.
5. A Clean Break -- Talking Heads
6. Pirate Jenny -- Lotte Lenya
7. Running Up That Hill -- Kate Bush
8. Here Is The House -- Depeche Mode
9. All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side) -- Peter Frampton
10. Sara Smile -- Hall & Oates
11. You Can Get It If You Really Want -- Jimmy Cliff

Now the fun begins. Our next theme is Songs With Profanity I have something in mind that has great profanity, but is not the best song in the world, so I'd like your suggestions.

4:16 PM

In my opinion, Music Club had its first bust. The category was songs you disagree with. Most people tried to bring songs they liked, but that expressed opinions or sentiments to which they objected. Several folks, as you'll see, "disagreed" with a narrator's emotional reaction to a specific situation, which strikes me as petty. Here's the mix:

1 Bob Dylan - Neighborhood Bully (I chose this rockin' apologia for Israeli militarism)
2 - Steve Earle - N.Y.C. (disses our fair city)
3 - Johnny Cash - Understand Your Man (mean to his woman)
4 - Dusty Springfield - You Don't Have to Say You Love Me (you know those songs where the singer is a strong woman? This isn't one of them)
5 - Alanis Morrisette - Ironic (too busy on "You Can't Do That on Television" to pay attention in English class)
6 - Adam Brodsky - Cubicle Girl (shallow)
7 - Bloodhound Gang - Three Point One Four (Not sure what Jenn "disagrees" with, other than the song's attitude, which I think everyone agreed is actually pretty funny. She'd be on stronger ground if she'd argued that in fact it's easy to find rhymes for vagina.)
8 - Graham Parker - You Can't Be Too Strong (pro-life)
9 - Bob Marley - Redemption Song (I never thought about it, but Anthony's absolutely right: this is a song that advocates abandoning political struggle in favor of spiritual struggle because bad things that happen on earth -- atomic energy, killing our prophets -- are all part of the plan spelled out in the Book of Revelation.)

I'm afraid our next theme is fairly uninspired too: Songs in your vinyl collection. Although there was a funny moment when Eve said, "I was born in 1980. I don't have a vinyl collection." (She later confessed to owning a Wham LP, so there's one slot taken.)

7:50 PM

Humorist and Music Club member Francis Heaney is, as you'd imagine, both funny and smart about music. In fact, he's been known to be both at the same time. This weekend he'll be performing some of his catchy, comedic pop songs in NYC. You'll find him along with Charles Herold (and me, in the audience) at 22 Below (155 E. 22nd St) on Saturday 4/26 at 9pm.

3:11 PM