Waking Ear

Blur/"Coffee and TV" -- "Do you feel like a chainstore?" What a great line.

I'll forever associate this song with the video, y'know, with the little milk carton walking around trying not to get smushed. Remember those Jimmy the Cab Driver promos on MTV? I'll do my best to recall what Jimmy said here: "You know what's so great about the MTV? You might have a movie in your brain about a song or something, y'know, a movie about your mom or whatever, and what the MTV is does for you is it says you're all wrong, hahahaha y'know? It tells you the movie, it tells you what you're supposed to be thinking, it's easy for me."

To be fair, MTV didn't play this video that much. Which is too bad, because it's a great pop song. It took me a long time to figure out that pop could be art. I'm not talking about pop art, Warhol-esque stuff. I'm talking about actually making a song that can be enjoyed almost universally, at least until it's played too many times by your local Clear Channel station. That's a talent.

I dreamt last night that there were squirrels in my house. Two. I was talking to my roommate in the kitchen, and these squirrels came in through a pipe that was connected to the outside of the house. One of them crawled right up on my shoulder, and I remember being concerned about rabies. Anyway, we chased them back into the pipe, and then my roommate stuck his entire head in the pipe. Don't know what to make of that one.

More on the music piracy. (Via This Modern World.)

More on Prefuse 73 from my favorite review site. Highly recommended. I haven't checked out any of Scott Herron's other stuff, but it sounds promising. Oh, and Aesop Rock guests on Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives.

Prefuse 73/"Back In Time" -- This was playing in my car on the way home this morning. It's from this album, one of the best CDs I've bought recently. Mellow hip-hop sliced and diced to perfection, with enough surprises to keep you guessing.

White Stripes/"Fell In Love With a Girl" -- Yesterday I was listening to De Stijl, the 'Stripes second album. It's actually better than White Blood Cells in some ways, but I still like the latter's lo-fi, fuzzed-out guitar sound more. And "Fell In Love With a Girl," which is even getting airplay on crappy radio stations, is one of the greatest songs I've heard in a long time.

I went to see the Vines last night. Not my cup of tea. Pretty generic, but the lead singer did have some spark. Anyway, I started thinking -- this current crop of bands that critics have lumped together is kind of like another movement we saw early in the last decade. Which, despite some of the mimicry going around, really excites me. We could be in for some good music.

"I Like It Like That" -- I have no idea why. I'm referring to the mambo song with the guy going, "I got soul, I got soul." I can't tell if there's a seminal recording of it out there. I don't even really like the song that much. But I do got soul.

By the way, visitors to the site: feel free to tell me what song you have in your head in the morning, or, hell, right now. Expand my horizons.

Tori Amos/"Space Dog" -- She's underrated, folks. I downloaded a copy of the six-song promotional disc for her new album, which comes out end of October. A little more poppy than I'm used to, but it's growing on me. You have to let Tori simmer. A friend in high school -- actually a girl that I wanted to date really bad -- got a copy of Under the Pink, and I didn't like it. It actually bored me a little bit. But Boys for Pele really turned me on to her phrasing and her psychology. I went back, and Under the Pink was a different experience.

I woke up from a fucked up dream. I dreamt I was watching TV, like, CNN or something, and they were showing this horrible tragedy. John Sayles had been found floating in the ocean, his body cut up beyond repair. In fact, they only found the upper half of his body. It turned out he had fallen into the propeller of the boat or something like that. Then I wake up, my heart pounding, and "Space Dog" is in my head. What the hell does that mean? Any theories out there?

You can hear some of Ms. Akre's last album here. Wasn't too impressed with the MP3s, but a couple of the other songs held promise. And, really, the voice is nice and theatrical.

Carrie Akre/"Catch Me If You Can" -- I woke up to the radio this morning, thanks to my alarm clock, and this woman's voice immediately caught my attention. Apparently she's been around Seattle forever, and she even did a side project with Mike McCready. It's basically her husky, pouting voice over some electronic bombast, somewhere in between Nikka Costa and Portishead. This song intrigued me enough to look for other stuff.

I had a dream last night that everybody else had cleaned their room except me. That's because everybody I know really has cleaned their room except me.

It's hot out therre.

Nelly/"Hot in Herre" -- That's not a typo. The name is officially, inexplicably misspelled. I mean, I know it's hip-hop to misspell, but that one doesn't make any type of sense whatsoever. It looks German. (Warning: turn down your volume if you're at work.)

This is the song where Nelly, he of the kind-of-annoying Southern-esque St. Louis sound, remarks at how hot it is in the club and suggests that his ladyfriend (or any female present) take off all her clothes. To which a sultry female voice replies, "I am getting so hot/ I wanna take my clothes off." This is a great summer song, and I love imagining the hot, sweaty club and the naked bodies grinding away.

Yes, I'm a little, er, lonely right now. My girlfriend's been out of town all week. Gets back Saturday, thank Jesus.

This is what I was going to say. I was going to say that the particular part of this song that I had in my head was the cheesy '80s keyboard minor key refrain, kind of Scooby Doo music. I really like it. Also, I like this lyric: "And then silence... it was a whole new day/ I thought, huh, I wasn't scared of him anyway/ But then I saw those rips in my sheets/ And that was proof that there had been a nightmare -- on my street!" We should've all known Will Smith would be a successful actor. The guy could deliver a line back in the day.

Oh, and who can forget this classic line: "I'm your DJ now, Princie."

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince/"Nightmare on My Street" -- I still haven't quite figured out this BlogSpot thing, I guess. I just wrote a whole long post and got it erased. Fuck. Oh well. This will be shorter because I have to get to work. I guess it's apropos that I had a song ostensibly about nightmares as my first waking-ear post. I have no idea why. Perhaps the song went through my head as I was thinking about names for this site. I had thought of several titles -- Radiohead's "Morning Bell" was taken -- and I think I thought of "nightmare" songs at some point. Maybe that's it.

I did have a nightmare, sort of, last night, which I described in great detail when I tried to post before. But now it's lost in the ether. Sorry.

So, yeah, you can see the basic description. But again, what I'm trying to do here is this -- I always have a song in my head in the morning. Some days it's something I listened to the day before, some days it's totally out of the blue. Some days it's a great song, some days it's hideous. So I'm going to -- on as close to a daily basis as I can -- write down what's in my head each morning. That should reveal something about me, and, if other people look at my site, maybe they'll be able to shed some light. And they can share their morning head-songs, and all that. So that's the idea. We'll see how it goes.
Basically, I just wanted to do a blog. All the cool people are doing it. I wanted to come up with an original idea, and I think this is one. So we'll see if it works.