Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.
Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?
Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?
I think in many ways I’ve done my best to avoid this week’s theme. Rarely do I find opportunities for music to worm its way into my life unfiltered. I’ve insulated myself against the radio, last.fms, and Pandoras of the world allowing me to remain unapologetic about my musical tastes, though that doesn’t stop other people from, perhaps, being embarrassed for me.
Now, I realize that this seems unrepentantly snobbish but much of this defensive attitude towards music comes not from a desire to be shameless in my tastes but is the result of both a disturbing propensity for my mind to latch onto the lyrics of any given song — causing them to repeat themselves endlessly until I am mumbling them to myself and rocking back and forth like an autistic child — and the way I listen to music, which at best can be considered myopic, as I usually listen to an album for weeks on end until I know it so well that I lose all interest in it. My cd collection is actually comprised of a recent purchase and dozens that will most likely never be played again.
With that in mind then I can say that most of my guilt, as far as music is concerned, is relegated to the past. Looking back on the history of my music purchases I shudder, chilled to the bone by my overwhelming shame. The Spin Doctors? Seriously? Oh, gods, the horror! However, try as I might to keep myself safe from ear worms and embarrassment, some things still sneak in.
Take this song for instance. It’s infectious rhythm and insipid lyrics instantly fused themselves to my brain sending me into my usual, meditative fits. The video makes no sense, consisting mainly of imagery from what is most likely a gay man’s acid trip, featuring a man who dresses exactly like Brownlee singing like the unholy, bastard child of Elton John and Barry Gibb. It is truly awful but I can’t help but like it. That said I must go now, the only way to exercise such musical gremlins is to change all the lyrics to something about monkeys and that takes at least an hour.
If you were to wander into ectochat most days, what you’d discover is a foul-mouthed Algonquin Round Table of smug, self-satisfied musical transgressives, complimenting one another on their Last.fm profiles with the most sublime and perfect bon mot image macro 4Chan has to offer. I hate these assholes.
It’s not really their fault: I hate Last.fm too. It’s basically a dynamically updated blackmail document open to everyone who wants to browbeat me about my listening habits. For example, my profile page on Last.fm indicates that I have listened to Gwen Stefani’s “What U Waitin’ For” almost a hundred times since I joined. Oh, sure, I have an excuse: my computer was muted and I didn’t realize I had iTunes on repeat. But the damage was done: I will never, ever be able to listen to another song enough times to topple Gwen Stefani from my number on spot.
My iTunes collection contains eight thousand, five hundred and eighty tracks, dammit! I am a musicological supertaster, effortlessly skipping from obscure sub-genre to sub-genre, with a profundity of appreciation only match by the synesthetic splendor of my aural genius. But every time Qais sees me, he leans over and whispers “Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock” in my ear, and no matter how many of his shattered teeth get crammed down his pale slender throat by my fist, he just won’t stop.
Still, I feel slightly less guilty about my second most played track on Last.fm, Local H’s “California Songs.” It’s delightfully meta: what Local H have accomplished here in their angry manifesto against California is, ironically, the most rocking song written about California since Brian Wilson ballooned to five hundred pounds and started stirring cocaine into his mayonnaise.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
