15 Song Shuffle

15 Song Shuffle

1. Message In a Bottle – The Police
I spotted the thing sitting on the beach, in one of those old green glass Coke bottles, the ones you’d see on a corner-store shelf in a movie about the 50s, with soda shops and egg creams and fights where people would “put up their dukes” and do their hair with car wax. I looked at the bottle, and I wondered what kind of a person would put a bottle like that, a nice vintage one, in the sea. Maybe it had been at sea for so long that it wasn’t even vintage when they’d put it in, with the message. It must have been one of those poodle skirt girls. I didn’t pick it up. It didn’t seem fair.

2. Burning of the Midnight Lamp—Jimi Hendrix Experience
One of the things that always worried me as a kid—actually, it still worries me now—was fire. Just about every kids’ movie worth its salt has a scene where someone’s house is on fire. Sometimes it’s a forest, too, but basically a well-intention person leaves a candle burning because they fell asleep while they were reading, and within ten minutes, the whole place is up in smoke. No, from day one, I knew fire was a force to be reckoned with. I never played with matches, and if I found some, I’d hide them away in a cool, dark place, for fear that they might accidentally catch fire and my entire family would die as a result.

My dad was annoyed that he had to keep buying new ones, but I knew what I was doing was right.

3. Peel Me a Grape—Some Jazz Lady
Man, this lady is hella lazy. I mean, it’s great not to be a doormat to people, but peeling grapes is demeaning by anyone’s standards. You can eat the skin, after all, it’s not like an orange or pineapple or something... Making tea with rose petals? There’s requests, and then there’s requests. You think plantation workers slaved for years to perfect the perfect boiled leaf beverage so that you can drink flower-water? Jesus.

4. When Doves Cry (a Cappella Mix)—Shocker
I have a secret love of a Cappella mixes, especially those based on songs which originally had synthesizers and guitars and stuff. There’s a full choir “ba-ba-ba”-ing riffs which were designed for something that can play a gazillion notes at once. That’s the problem with voice—only one note at a time. I mean, you can do that head-swing scooping thing that the pop divas do when they need to go up about four octaves at a time, but it’s still one by one (and it sound shit, too.)

Does Prince dig choirs? They’re usually more covered up then backup dancers, but there are also more of them. More ladies = more bums, Prince. Think about it.

5. Tornado—Mindless Self Indulgence
Okay, so I’m a little ashamed of listening to MSI, and this song is really short. All of their songs are really short, actually, except for Mark David Chapman, and Shut Me Up maybe, or... Fuck, guys. The lead singer’s called Jimmy Urine, you know that? He is named after wee.


6. Shameless—the Fratellis
So, shame. Shame is a big deal for a lot of people. They sit around ruminating about what they’ve done wrong, the things that they did on purpose because they thought no one was looking. If someone was looking, it’s not shame, because you can be defensive, and that’s a totally different position to be standing from. Really, shame is worse than defensiveness, because if you’re being defensive, you can just avoid that person or lie and say that they’re a bitch or something. Shame you can’t hide from.

It took me a really long time to work shame out, actually, having come from a non-religious family that felt shame was a weapon of institutions. It is, and it’s really effective in that sense, but even now I need people to remind me that I’m supposed to be ashamed.


7. Online—Gnarls Barkley
This one is also really short (i.e. less than two minutes) but it’s actually good, so I think you should listen to it. It may or may not actually be about the internet, but I like to think it’s about cocaine. “Even when you’re fallin’, just pretend you’re flyin’...” That’s cocaine, right? Right?

8. Conquest—White Stripes
Does anyone know how many bands Jack White is in? I feel like it’s somewhere close to twelve, because he’s looking up at me, all Tim Burton-ish, whenever I browse through my CDs. Yes, I still own CDs, my music is not all pirated from the internet. I actually own upwards of... Well, not really all that many, but a lot of them have Jack White on them. Plus, when you download a song, you attach a picture so that it looks nice when it pops up on shuffle.

I am a little OCD about my song pictures.

9. Burning Car—John Foxx
Ha! How’s this for indie credibility! John Foxx is so indie that I don’t even know who the hell he is. Just looking at it, I think I got the disc in a magazine a while ago. Anyway, it’s full of sweet techno and electronica mix type things.

Sometimes, when I have a spare block and my roommate is in class, I like to dance around like a robot to this song. The beeping and booping is very conductive to that. Also, the car in the song is burning: burning with fury. This could very well be the anthem to the robot revolution, blared through loudspeakers as we desperately salvage our scraps of civilization, so you should at least know how to dance to it.

10. De Anza Jig—Primus
If ever I were to make a band, it would probably end up being exactly like Primus: weird singing, quirky lyrics, making fun of conventional music styles, silly riffs, songs about vaginas on the run, etc. The thing is, I’m really not all that fond of Primus.

They’re not quite novelty, but they’re pretty close.
I mean, that’s okay, I guess.

11. Bank Job—Barenaked Ladies
Among the jobs that I wanted to have as a kid was a bank robber, (probably inspired by the Stopwatch Gang, I think, or Robin Hood.) Bank robbing is generally not seen as a good route of employ for a white, upper-middle class girl, so I eventually had to give it up. Every now and again, though, I kind of wish I could go back to that dream. Did you see the movie The Inside Man? That movie kind of gave me hope.

I was going to have customized masks, and special code names, and the thing is, we’d never actually hurt anyone. Plus, if there were old ladies or kids out with their parents, or pregnant women or new immigrants in the building, we’d let them out before hostage bargaining started. I was going to be a really nice bank robber before life came and shit all over my plans.

12. The Denial Twist—White Stripes
What did I tell you? Jack White is everywhere.

That’d make for a pretty good meme, I think. People would photoshop pictures of Jack into unexpected places: on a cereal box, in a helicopter, under the sea, helping out of Darfur, writing sonnets under a tree... Of course, it’d get dark and there’d be pictures of him slaughtering babies or being born, but that’s the risk you have to take when you create a meme.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am totally willing to take that risk.

13. South Side—Moby
I’m really glad that the East/West divide is breaking down. I wasn’t around for communism, but I hear it was pretty bad if you lived on the shitty side of the Iron Curtain and you wanted jeans or casettes or food that didn’t taste exactly like depression, baked, boiled or stewed.

As for North/South, though... I’ve heard you’re supposed to say that instead of first- and third-world country, nowadays. The Global North are the rich motherfuckers in the Northern Hemisphere, plus Australia and New Zealand, and the Global South is everyone else. What the hell? You tear down a wall and another one pops up right away. God, world. Didn’t your highly-stereotypical-inspirational English teacher ever tell you to build bridges and not walls?

14. Black Hole Sun (Robot Mix)—Relig & Pajot
I’m guessing you all think that I’m a remix freak, now, but I’m really not—I have, like, six, tops. I used to be all hardcore-original-fanatic-as-the-artist-intended, until I realized that none of that shit matters and that you should just listen to whatever sounds good to you.

Hahaha, just kidding.

I know a guy who only listens to bands where at least one of the members is dead by non-natural causes. That’s okay, because he can still listen to Buddy Holly and the Who and stuff, but he said he was really excited to finally get to listen to Kanye West. (?)

15. Pixies—Caribou
I decided that I would end with the first Pixies song I shuffled, but I cheated a bit because “Here Comes Your Man” came second and I just skipped over it. Plus I have run out of semi-funny things to say, and so I must go and try to sleep or whatever it is normal people do at this hour of the night.