the message in the bottle is the booze

Day 09 - A Song That You Can Dance To

I don't dance.

Day 10 - A Song That Makes You Fall Asleep

I don't sleep.

Day 11 - A Song From Your Favorite Band

I don't have a favorite band.

Day 12 - A Song From A Band That You Hate

I'm going to assume I can rag on an artist (and not a band) here.

Yesterday I saw this video ("We R Who We R") by Ke$ha. I'm usually out of the loop when it comes to popular music, since I don't listen to the radio or watch TV. I was shocked. This is a popular artist? It's so awful!

Now, I do enjoy a lot of awful music. I'm not going to sit here and sniff and say that people are only allowed to enjoy music with artistic merit, or something. The thing is, the awful music I like is still, generally, put out by people with talent who are just having fun.

There is no talent here. The lyrics are terrible. The dancing is terrible. The production itself is moderately catchy, but I question how much Ke$ha had to do with that. All she brings to the table is, apparently, an attractive face that can pose painfully for the camera. It's hard not to laugh when she's vamping it up in that glittery blue lipstick. Can we say trying too hard?

She epitomizes everything that makes pop music today so boring. It's so bad - and so carefully calculated for maximum commercial success - that it's not fun.

Day 04 - A Song that Makes You Sad

Iyomante Upopo - Ando Umeko

This is a song in Ainu, the language of the indigenous people of Japan. The Wikipedia article on the Ainu people will explain their history and their struggle to retain their culture better than I can.

The Ainu language is moribund--likely to go extinct very soon. There are language revitalization efforts, but that's no guarantee that Ainu will be around in, say, ten or twenty years.

Ando Umeko, an Ainu folk musician, died in 2004.

Day 01 - Your Least Favorite Song

Generally, if I don't like a song, I endeavor not to hear it again--and wallah!* Like magic, I forget all about it. It saves me a lot of rage.

However, there's a song that I hate not so much because of how it sounds, but because it's very existence and popularity offends me. Not listening to it doesn't make that go away. It's still out there, being wrong.

I'm talking, of course, about Katy Perry's fucking stupid cover of "I Kissed a Girl," which took a cute song about kissing a girl and turned it into a piece of fuax bisexual play-lesbian-for-the-male-gaze piece of voyeuristic porn-culture bullshit.

I'm not even going to link to a video on youtube; I'd be too tempted to be one of those youtube comments haters, all "WARGHLBBBBLE katy perry succccckkks sesame street's too good for her."

( cross off the list )

* I found out recently that some people spell it like this. That's awesome.