[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 6: A Song That Reminds Me of Somewhere

In junior high and my early years of high school, I spent most of my afternoons in my bedroom doing homework (after a bowl of cereal and 30 minutes of DuckTales). My room was full of comic books and Legos and signs that I was gay, like the giant silk screen print of a unicorn hanging on the wall and the pornographic contraband under the mattress. I never listened to music when I was studying or reading, but my brother did. During his adolescence, he transitioned from an angry skate punk to an angry art class iconoclast, and his music transitioned from Minor Threat and JFA to Jane’s Addiction and Concrete Blonde. He played the latter’s album Free a few hundred times when he was a high school junior. And one song vibrated through three walls, into my brown and nerdy room, and it was burned into my brain: “God is a Bullet.” It also happens to be an awesome song. I ended up a huge fan and I saw Concrete Blonde more times live than any other act. But it always reminds of sitting in my bedroom and doing pre-calculus problems.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 5: A Song That Reminds Me of Someone

When I was in college, my most over-the-top, crazypants, tortured love affair was with a talented, if a bit bat-shit crazy, actor. Shortly after we started seeing each other, he starred in Falsettos. When I hear any song from Falsettos, I think of him, but “What More Can I Say?” is the one he would sing to me. While he was on stage. Acting, schmacting: His boyfriend was in the audience, and that was a love song, and that boyfriend turned to a quivering mess of Jell-O when being sung to. Ah, young love. Ah, stupid, stupid, stupid young love. Anyway, here’s a grainy video of the original Marvin, Michael Rupert, singing the song. The photo here is from a clearly much sexier version of the show that ran in San Francisco a few years ago.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 4: A Song That Makes Me Sad

This song. Jesus! It’s the last track on Prince’s probably most underrated album, Parade, which is my favorite after Purple Rain. It’s an absolutely gorgeous song that perfectly encapsulates, in both lyrics and notes, grief and understanding. I used to be unable to listen to it; I’d stop the tape at the first note. And when it was played, only on piano and without singing, at my friend Gabriel’s memorial service, I couldn’t stand it and had to leave the auditorium until the song was done. The first video is the song as recorded, and the second is Prince doing it live.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 3: A Song That Makes Me Happy

The first time I heard Madonna’s “Express Yourself” — or really heard it, as opposed to passively listening to it on the radio — was when I visited my friends Rachel and Laura at Indiana University when I was still a senior in high school. I was thisclose to coming out, and they had cultivated a group of sassy ladies and gay boyfriends, and when they all walked towards whatever party they were attending they sang “Express Yourself.” It was years before Sex and the City and it was so, so Sex and the City. Or Party Girl. Or Will & Grace. Anyway, it changed my life. Not only did I see what kind of fun I could be having in college as an out homo with sassy lady friends, but the lyrics… they spoke to me. It gets better.

Now, whenever I hear “Express Yourself,” I get so damn happy.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 2: My Least Favorite Song

Well, this is confusing. Is this the song that I hate the most or is the song lowest on the hierarchical list of my favorite songs. I’m betting it’s the former, but you can never know for certain with these things. So, I’m going with a song I hate. There are a lot of songs that I think are lame or boring, but for me to hate it, it’s got to be some combination of cynical, unoriginal, and badly performed.

Normally, I’d go with a Puff Daddy/P. Diddy thing, because he’s not just a bad rapper but he’s also the grossest abuser of the sample, ever. He just raps over other artist’s songs, and he usually raps about how awesome and rich he and his friends are. (See, for example, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” and “I’ll Be Missing You.”) But then came Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long.” He’s not only just rapping — or “rapping” — over a better song, but that song is “Sweet Home Alabama,” which is like a dog whistle for arrogant, South-will-rise-again Southerners. It’s a song written to defend the South against Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and “Alabama.” Kid Rock’s career was waning, his own songs weren’t doing much, he needed a new audience, so he covered a song that would suck in country fans. He succeeded. Gross.

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