[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 15: A Song That Describes Me

I didn’t know what to do with this one, so I crowd-sourced it. The suggestions made on Facebook were all pretty amazing — as either ridiculous or sublime — and I kept waiting for more, which is why I didn’t end up posting last night. So, my apologies for the three people who have been following the Challenge regularly. Some of the songs that were suggested were actually so good that I feel embarrassed to associate them with me or my, uh, subjectivity. And some were just hilariously wrong, like the two suggested by my husband. So, here’s what my friends came up with:

Chris H. suggested the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring.” I don’t if I can live up to this one.

Brock S. suggested Badly Drawn Boys’ “Silent Sigh.” Wow.

Adia B. simply wrote “young gifted and black.” I know I can’t live up to this one.

Rob suggested “There’s No Business Like [the] Show Business” and “Mad World.” WTF? I am not a crazy show queen! The “[the]” is in reference to my weird habit of including an extra “the” in the song when I sing it. (Oh, wait. Crazy. Show queen. Hmm.) I don’t remember why I started doing that. There’s some inside joke that is now so inside it’s become a black hole. Anyway, I chose the disco version of the first song, which is the definition of awesomesauce, and the Gary Jules version of the second. Adam Lambert’s version is better but not embeddable.


Jason F. wrote “‘Gideon’ by My Morning Jacket, or ‘Camel Toe’ by Fannypack.” Sublime and ridiculous, respectively.


Tom W.: “the song that comes to mind is ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ by Taco.” I don’t even know what to say. Anyway, I’m embedding the uncensored version. Guess what was deleted from the video when it ran on MTV.

Karen V-S suggested “American Badass” by Kid Rock. Um, no.

And Amy H. continued the irony with by suggesting “I Want To Be Evil” by Eartha Kitt.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 14: A Song No one Would Expect Me to Love

Or maybe, after seeing the first 13 days of these, it won’t be so surprising that I adore “One of Us” by Joan Osborne. Or maybe, if you know me pretty well and have read my blog for a while, it’s not so shocking to you that I don’t share the rabid atheist, anti-theist beliefs of many of my political compatriots. (I will freely and gleefully mock and deride the cruelly un-Christ-like behavior and personages of demagogues and loons like Kirk Cameron, Tony Perkins, Miles McPherson, Maggie Gallagher, Jim Garlow, William Donohue, and their hideous friends. Donahue, who is an opponent to free thought, compassion, love, and anything remotely Jesus-like, attacked the song for being anti-Catholic, though he couldn’t explain how referencing the Pope talking to God on the telephone would be considered anti-Catholic. That said, I don’t have any need to be anything but appreciative and amazed and just a tad jealous of the non-fundie faithful.) And this song makes the quest for the belief in God into a searching, questioning, and deeply populist process, which as an agnostic and someone often told he’s going to Hell, I find quite endearing, even moving. Also, the tune has a hook and a melody that make it singalong-in-the-car awesome.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 13: A Guilty Pleasure

I think it may seem weird, even hypocritical, of me to trash KISS in my previous post for being so commercial, so pandering towards a tasteless demographic and then declare that “Tell Him” by Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand is my guilty pleasure. But when I hear Dion sing, I completely believe her. I know she’s cheesy, and I know her songs were written by committees that got their instructions from focus groups and corporate suits, but Dion could sing the phone book and I’d believe that every number mattered. The woman owns her cheese like no one else. (Check out the great little book on her cheesiness, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.) She’s an unabashed dork, and the video for this song, which features all of her kooky facial expressions and jerky neck twitches, warms my dorky soul. As for Barbra, I don’t feel guilty for loving her at all. The woman is unarguably one of the greatest singers of the last 50 years, just as Dion is in her own special way, and when they harmonize, it’s like butter.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 12: A Song From A Band I Hate

There are single artists that I dislike a great deal — sampling-crazed hacks like Jason Derulo, or politically abhorrent creeps like Toby Keith — but most of the bands that irritate me just irritate me. Nickelback’s almost creepily catchy milquetoast really grates on me, and the Black Eyes Peas have create some of the most cynical, over-sampled and misguided pop songs of the last 10 years. (“I Gotta Feeling“? “The Time (Dirty Bit)“? “Don’t Phunk With My Heart“? Horrid.) But the former band is just boring, and the latter created “The Boogie That Be” and “My Humps,” a song so awesome that they get a Get Out Of Jail Free card for a long time. I think when it comes to crimes against music, KISS is the most villainous to me. What Bing Crosby did to jazz and Pat Boone to early rock and roll, KISS did to 70s hard rock. They took everything that was edgy, interesting, and subversive about Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones and packaged it for the teen-aged masses with about as much authenticity as a Backstreet Boys reunion tour. I went to a KISS concert in the late 90s, and it was fun in the way that Michael Bay movies can be fun. Pretty lights! Loud music! Screaming fans! Here’s a video of one of their wretched double entendre anthems, “Lovegun.”

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 11: A Song From My Favorite Band

A “30 Day Song Challenge” blurb isn’t enough to — isn’t the right place for — describing my love and awe for Arcade Fire, which is arguably the greatest rock band in the world right now. Not only is their music gorgeous, complex, inventive, and yet still populist, it is also relevant, in the best sense of the word. They make music about something, not just love, sex, and revenge, like most bands you find of pop and rock radio; they create work that deals with politics, war, sprawl, ennui, hope, and want. They are the heirs of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and REM. And they’ve probably recorded 10 or 15 songs for the ages, but the one the gets me in the gut is the great anti-war anthem “Intervention,” from Neon Bible. The first video is a fan-made video that uses clips from The Battleship Potemkin and the second is the band performing live in Paris.

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