As far as I’m concerned, Youtube is currently the major justification for the internet, especially since I’m between temp jobs and my creative drive is withering and I have this lingering headache and it’s getting hot again and all I want to do is lie around in my underwear and wait for somebody to put food in my open mouth. What I discovered is that (1) not only does YouTube have about nine million amazing videos on it but that (2) I also still have dopey ninth-grade crushes on basically every female musician I admire. Maybe that’s just the summer haze talking though. That or the single talking. WHATEVER, LET’S TOTALLY WATCH SOME VIDEOS!!!!
The Birthday Party: “Release The Bats” (ca. 1982): I know Nick Cave has that little stick to conduct his drummer on the off-time snare hits (why couldn’t it have tassles???), but with that shirt and jacket he really just looks like a magician; a tired, homeless magician. Think about that: He is playing his best band’s best song, and he’s acting like somebody dragged him into a Charlotte Russe with a broken air conditioner. Some things I will never understand. Watch near the end when he starts fencing with the audience and somebody takes his wand and he does a dead-on impression of Will Ferrell doing an impression of Robert Goulet, which is sort of warping my brain into an n-dimensional Moebius Strip, e.g., How Did He Know. In a perfect world, this would be the new hilarious beaten-to-death catchphrase, right up there with “Who wants a body massage,” but considering the raw volume of people I know fervently and diametrically opposed to this song, this will never happen. Unrelatedly: Why do my friends hate fun so much.
Garbage: “Stupid Girl” (ca. 1996 on VH1’s Fashion Awards): Moving past the fact that this aired a decade ago, which just blows my fucking mind, I want to note two things. Thing the first is that Garbage’s first album was totally great, atmospheric in the singular way that having three A-list producers in your band will probably get you and just reminiscent of that The Crow vibe to appeal to me at the age of 14 without being too much like something that would actually appear on the soundtrack The Crow (see: Machines of Loving Grace, ouch), and that every single from that album stands the Alternative Rock test of time, and in fact probably the whole record does, which means I have to go dig it out from wherever I stuffed it to make sure. Thing the second is, of course, the fact that you can totally see her boob at one point in this performance, which, again, at the age of fourteen, booked up my nights for two weeks solid. If this had happened at the Superbowl instead of Janet Jackson’s plurpy debacle, all huge in HDTV or whatever, nobody would have complained to the FCC because everybody would have been beating off.
Bikini Kill: “Rebel Girl” (ca. 1992) : Obviously Kathleen Hanna is the major focal point in this clip, doing cheerleader jumps and pretty much embodying the Aristotlean ideal of the cliché of the super-hot unattainable woman1, but what’s digging at the back of my brain is Tobi Vail, who’s wearing humongous sunglasses and bomping on some drums. Specifically, I want to know what’s up with that Nirvana t-shirt, because I can’t get the idea out of my head that it’s some sort of tender artifact from her Kurt-datin’ days, although Tobi Vail is probably a lot less nostalgic than I am and I should really stop projecting. Seriously though, can’t you just imagine her looking for something to wear before the big festival show and she’s digging through the bottom of her closet and suddenly she finds that shirt and it still sort of smells like him and she gets bummed out and angry and everything all over again, and pulls herself together really indignantly and goes, “Fuck that dude, I’m wearing his fucking shirt,” because who wears their own merch anyway??, and plays a huge festival in it wearing those huge reflective sunglasses like she doesn’t know precisely about whom “Drain You” and “Aneurysm” were written???? Oh man, I want to live in this little projection forever.
Kate Bush: “The Wedding List” (ca. 1979, from some BBC Christmas special): This more or less proves that Kate Bush would probably be the perfect girlfriend. Here is a sample imagined conversation from my relationship with Kate Bush:
Me: “Hey Kate what are you up to”
KB: “I was gonna go on television and perform my song about shooting my friend’s unfaithful husband. Which of these doofy period costumes do you think will best match the set from those BBC Shakespeare productions?”
Me: “That depends on whether or not you are going to strut around like a rusty droid.”
KB: “Of course I am Stephen.”
Me: “Then you had better wear the incomprehensible stomach-corset wedding dress.”
AND THEN SHE’D DO IT! My other proof is that when Fruitopia asked her to write a song for their commercial that was redolent of historic events, she wrote this song, which doesn’t bring to mind the fall of the Berlin Wall so much as it does a young Tatyana Ali eating a sandwich. I’m basically in love.
BONUS SECTION: TERRIBLE VIDEOS FOR TRANSCENDENT SONGS
Les Savy Fav: “We’ll Make A Lover Of You”
Why?: “Rubber Traits”
Both of these songs are really dear to me, since not many people are out there penning lyrics which read on paper like someone’s older brother psyching up either themself or their sibling, and that’s a class of sentiment I’d like expressed more often. Tim Harrington is, of course, more optimistic than Yoni, possibly because Elephant Eyelash was a breakup album and LSF are on perm-hiatus so that, in part, Tim can design pants with his wife. But, okay, look, the two areas of my own life I most often need bombast about are (1) healthy living and (2) renewed dedication to my craft, whatever it is. And these two songs are about that, precisely that! And like what are the odds that they would also both be perfect songs, the former like Tim is personally kneeling on your stomach and punching your ribcage and there’s spittle everywhere and he is yelling GET EXCITED, GET EXCITED at you, and the latter being huge and gorgeous and sounding exactly like the self-defeating dismay pants not fitting anymore feels, which is absolutely impressive.
So what I want to know is why video A looks like a high school junior’s first dry-run at Adobe Aftereffectsing the Zwan album art and video B is all just dogs with superimposed people mouths. Because these songs mean something to me, mean something personal and deep, and I am possessive of them.
1 (e.g., you have statistical proof that you will never ever get to get with her, and even if you did, which you won’t, it would only last for thirty seconds anyway because you’d be so excited, after which she would probably beat you up)
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