Noise du Jour’s Guilty Pleasures: “California Songs” by Local H

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.

California Songs [YouTube]