Dang, Christina!

So number one, Workplace Soundtrack Blogfuck Series Uno (possibly the most ambitious and important project in the history of the internet) has been dereailed by the running beef between my hard drive and the rest of the computer. We will be back this weekend, back with a vengeance.
Number two, I really did not mean to bump into Christina Milian, especially to bump into her so roughly. It's just that I don't look at where I'm walking a lot of the time, and she really is kind of magnetic in a literal sense, so I couldn't help it. I did however give her an on-purpose cocked-eyebrow-and-smile combo, because if there's anything funnier than pissing off a celebrity it is to mack on them after you piss them off. I meant to spit more serious game at Christina Applegate when she came in the day after that, but girl is looking a little bit roughed-up these days.
Number three is that I have to take off now to go take care of some catsitting and the attendant liquor-and-food-raiding activities that go along with the job.
Number four: please listen to Demon's Claws' self-titled album (Dead Canary Records, DCR004).

Tegan & Sara - "I Hear Noises"

Before this month all I knew about Tegan & Sara was that they were Canadian, sisters, and either lesbians or had a lot of lesbians as fans. And that they are totally cutes.
Now I know that they don't actually make the earthy pop-folk typically associated with lesbians or people who may or may not in fact be lesbians or may or may not have some sort of lesbian fan base. They instead make, at least in the case of "I Hear Noises", songs that press Rentals-style three-chord pop stratospherics against slinky/stuttery almost-Chrissie-Hynde vocal lines in a way that is kind of hot and might even be sexy if it was possible for Canadian bands to evoke sexiness in songs.
This song is the one for this month, the one that I get a little amped for when the song that precedes it comes on and I get even a little coiled up and ready to sing along with it and rock out to it on the sales floor in a way that might be embarrassing if I gave a fuck about how cool I come across in the eyes of dozens of roving packs of Midwestern moms/daughters and bad-hair-decision emo kids. Each month I have one song that does that, and they tend to be hook-intensive pop songs by predominantly female groups. We will discuss the reasons behind this trend in later entries (spec. Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" and the George Michael single), but basically I have the same psychophysiological reaction to pop music as 13 year-old girls and club-crazy gay men.

Workplace Music War

I really wanted to go more in-depth about Northern State yesterday, but Blogger was jacking up and I don't have the patience to deal with that. You know.
But so that song is on the soundtrack at my work, along with some real miserable garbage and a few gems tossed in here and there to keep employees like myself from clawing our eardrums out. So I've decided to spend the rest of February, or as long as our current workplace soundtrack stays in effect (possibly into early March) blogging daily reviews of songs from the 2-hour DVD that loops nonstop throughout my workday. 2 hours per DVD x 40 hours per week working x 4 weeks a month = a deep understanding of each and every song on the thing that ordinary critics can't hope to touch. Here is entry number 2 in the Workplace Soundtrack Blog-ation:
Shine - "Explosive" (audio clip available here [You should really listen. It's incredible in a fashion.])
This is what nouveau riche Miami real estate golden boys think their sexmaking sounds like.

Thank you.

Quick Note About Rap:

"At The Party" by Northern State is the worst rap song ever. It is worse than "Addams Family Groove", any rap song performed by cartoons, Rappin' Grannies, animals or babies with computer-animated mouths, or the Game. It's like some suburban AP student's idea of a wacky and inventive class project but something's gone horribly wrong and people take them seriously, and the worst part of it is that music magazines can only cover two female MCs/groups per fiscal year [it's a legal thing], so every piece on Northern State is a wasted opportunity to cover Jean Grae or Psalm One or any other woman who actually deserves praise and pay for what they do on a microphone.

What is going on tomorrow night.

Tomorrow night I'm taking a break from my blossoming modelling career (look for me starting March 1 on the side of the bus that takes you to your crap job downtown [mine too!]) and plotting to throw blindingly hot parties with Hopper in order to go out and get famously drunk in celebration of my 28th birthday. We're partying it up at Stella's on Western Ave at Walton in Chicago's infamous Ukrainian Village. Gifts of Winston Lights, rechargable AA batteries, and 2 Live Crew 12"s are encouraged. I am also registered at Barney's and at the Citgo station on Western.

#1776 with a bullet

Booyashaka.

Wheels

I'm feeling totes eem today, so I tried to OC it out and listen to Earlimart, looking for the Elliott Smith that reviews I've read have lead me to believe spoons inside the grasp of their music, but for as much as Earlimart approximates E.Smith melody-wise, their lyrics are fucking terrible and what really makes Mr. Smith's songs important are the lyrics which are so Right There with you when you're sad or drunk or thinking about stabbing yourself repeatedly in the chest. What I realized I was looking for is the same thing that millions upon billions throughout human history have sought and found in religion, which is the invocation of something far greater than themselves and the submission before a power beyond the reaches of their comprehension. Which is why I've been listening to Black Sabbath on headphone blast walking around in February piss-rain, genuflecting, in my head and heart if not in actual physical practice, before the multitracked Living God of Tony Iommi's SG-through-Marshall-stacks power chord, and letting Ozzy be the paranoid head-twisted Christ for my internal torment.
My birthday is Thursday.

Soon the days went passing into years
Happiness just didn't even come so easy
Life was born of fairy tales and daydreams
Innocence was just another word
Was it illusion?
- Sabbath, "Wheels Of Confusion"

Freedom, apparently.

"The federal government and a powerful local Republican congressman have been pushing for years to fortify the 3 1/2-mile stretch of border just north of Tijuana, Mexico. Their plan is opposed by California coastal regulators and environmentalists who say it could harm a fragile Pacific estuary. Now supporters may be getting closer to victory. A provision in an immigration bill expected to pass the House next week would give the homeland security secretary authority to move forward with the project regardless of any laws that stand in the way, and would bar courts from hearing lawsuits against it."
-From Wired

"The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking."
-From The American Conservative. For real. American Conservative magazine is basically calling the Bush Admin. pseudo-facist. That's how fucked up shit is right now.

Breakdown of the usage frequency of the word "freedom" in Bush's State Of The Union addresses. 17 sentences in 2005 used it. Breakdown overlapping usage frequency of "freedom" and "irony" in Bush's SOUs. O sentences using the word "irony".

Who is this person who is marginally more of a loser than I am?

Who the fuck sets eSniper up on auctions for Antioch Arrow records?

(Partial) Tracklist: DJ Yves St. LeRoc at Binoculars III (with notes)

Phoenix - "Everything Is Everything (Remix by Jack Lahana)"1
TV On The Radio - "New Health Rock"
Interpol - "Slow Hands (Britt Daniel Remix)"2
Diplo - "Rhythm"3
Elastica - "Stutter"
Gwen Stefani - "What You Waiting For (Felix Da Housecat's 'The Rude Ho' Remix)4
Touchin' Bass - "Krunk"
Nas - "Made You Look"
Electrelane - "On Parade"
Bush Tetras - "You Can't Be Funky"5
M.I.A. - "Galang"6
Jay-Z - "Dirt Off Your Shoulders (Afrostreet Remix)7
Weird War - "AK-47"
Rolling Stones - "Everything Is Turning To Gold"8

1 - The original has a nice "white boy with an expensive haircut" silky funk vibe. The remix is surprisingly fucked/crunked up and good, flipping it into a chant-along burner.
2 - Again, the remix cuts the hair product-y guitar out and keeps most of the track on a vocals/bass/beat-only tip that is way funkier. Brought out to the front, you can tell why Carlos D gets all of the vampire sex he wants.
3 - If you are spinning this track, do not get over-hypnotized by the amazing kid-rapping-in-Portuguese verse that's the real killer shit here because there's no 16-bar outro and you'll miss your transition like I did.
4 - So after something like 8 months straight of No Doubt on my work's soundtrack I was primed and ready to get brainwashed by the new Stefani, which is just about funky and lyrically neurotic and strange to justify it being stuck in my head 78% of my waking time.
5 - Yeah, I'm kind of over skritchy guitar white people disco too, but it's hard to get out of the habit.
6 - People should be losing shit completely on the first bass kick like they used to for "Work It", but maybe "Galang" hasn't penetrated the pop consciousness enough for that yet, or maybe the 29-38 $50K+ demographic isn't about losing their shit to the funk or something, so the crowd did not, in fact, lose any of their shit at all. We played it twice just to make sure. Nope.
7 - Off of the Reworked 3 bootleg 12". Dang, putting Hov over a real twisted horn line that comes from somewhere between West Africa and a tricked-out Mexican car horn is a pretty good idea.
8 - Their disco-era work is the most universally hated part of the Stones canon (this track coming from the Sucking In The 70s compilation, and I came to it out of ironic love of the immense badness of "Emotional Rescue" but stayed for the combination of painfully simple Watts drumming, between-cocaine-binges Jagger boredom and swagger, and heavily-effected K.Richards guitar parts. "Everything Is Turning To Gold" is every good late-70s Stones trick jammed into one track, and it totally rules. And for some reason it is almost always one of the most successful songs in my set in terms of getting people to actually dance. Dunno.