Top 5 Songs with Terrible Lyrics

Since I professed my love yesterday for songs with awful lyrics that happen to be catchy as hell, today’s hastily assembled Top 5 list is about songs with much worse lyrics than Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and will probably be famous for much longer. So turn down the hate, folks.

5. "Peaches" by Presidents of the United States of America – I love this song and let’s be honest, these lyrics are very stupid. Some people try to claim there’s a deeper meaning to them (sex) but there’s not. PUSA confirms it; this really is just a song about eating peaches.

4. "The Sign" by Ace of Base – As a kid, I listened to this cassette pretty much every day. And if I had the chance, I might do it today. They actually won awards for this song, and it’s awful. Random phrases like “under the pale moon, where I see a lot of stars” lead absolutely nowhere. Doesn’t matter. Everybody got into this jam.

3. "Catch My Disease" by Ben Lee – Maybe less famous than others, but just as nonsensical. I love Ben Lee, but this has to be the dumbest of his songs, which is probably why it was his biggest hit. Bubbly pop, a sing-song chorus, and instantaneous feel-good music (with clapping!) will bury this song in your head all day. I know it’s wrong, but I love it so.

2. "We Built This City" by Starship – I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t turn the radio up when this song comes on. It’s the best. And the worst. It was co-written by the great lyricist Bernie Taupin, which is shocking. This disappointing turn for the once great Jefferson Airplane has terrible lyrics. But it's got fantastic vocal harmony and it’s totally danceable! It makes you say “Hey you’re right! We did build this city on rock and roll! Defiance!”

1. "MMMBop" by Hanson – The ultimate nonsense song that heroically plagued a nation. It’s not easy to do, but “MMMBop” does it beautifully. But then again, these boys are from Tulsa, so you know, they’re badasses. The verses reach for some kind of meaning, but they never achieve it. And the chorus, as you know, is just a jumble of letters. They might mean something, after all “in an mmm bop they’re gone,” but they don’t. This song just gets better with age. If you haven’t listened to it in years, do yourself a favor and do so now. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Obsessions and Lessons

I’d like to make up for selfishly spending my time having fun in March instead of dutifully serving the readers of my blog, most of whom are curious European websurfers led here by accident (hi guys!). As I’m working to catch up on four weeks’ worth of podcasts and wasting time on the computer, I’ll be in blogging overdrive. Up first, because it’s been a while, this week’s obsessions are as follows:

This “Friday” Cover - I haven’t heard Rebecca Black singing “Friday” but like everyone else, I’ve seen the malicious backlash against it, and frankly I don’t get it. If you don’t like the song, ignore it. It’s not hurting you. From the lyrics I heard in this cover, it’s just a high school version of so many Ke$ha songs. It’s not clever, but get over yourself. I have a soft spot for songs that aren’t that good but are catchy as hell, because it takes some skill to write a hook that gets a song stuck in your head incessantly (See: “Hook” by Blues Traveler, an ode to the mad skillz it takes to say absolutely nothing and make you love it).

This cover is likable though, because this girl can sing pretty well, and she’s so darn adorable. Polka dots, black nail polish and west side bangs, girl you are so Wicker Park. Let’s talk about Etsy sometime. Her performance gets the whole point of a nothing song that just makes you smile, and her ad-lib is sweet. “Forget the hate that you may have read, and replace it with all kinds of love instead.” Amen.

3eanuts – It’s a tumblr page hosting classic Peanuts comics with the last panel removed, to highlight the existential malaise of the young gang. This is genius: taking away the joke becomes the joke. How perfect is that? Looking at how dead on the comics were sans punchlines, it's a good reminder that Charles Schultz was the Man.

Whatever the Opposite of Prince William’s Wedding Is – Coming from someone who has a lot of time to waste on inconsequential nonsense and has a serious obsession with weddings, I don’t care.

Talking to People on the Subway – I talk to people on the train all the time. I talk to people on the way to the train, walking down the sidewalk. But the maker of this short film has a point, which is that people don’t. His daring is greater than just the outgoing among us who make friends for ten minutes though, because he decides to overcome the separateness of commuters by tackling the kind of deep questions that insist upon connection. Even those that don’t want to participate are made to acknowledge their fellow passengers, and I’d like to think their interest was piqued to listen to their interviews. This video is provocative, at least for its 12 minutes.

NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament playing “Born This Way” like, all the time – I thought of this last week when I caught Victoria Jackson blabbering on Showbiz Tonight about how Glee turns kids into homos or something. She’s turned into a real jackass since her SNL days. Finding religion ≠ turning into a bigot. I turned the t.v. off; I don’t know why we tune in to crazy instead of tuning out (ahem Charlie Sheen) but there was some talk of it the next day. I thought of this: Victoria Jackson can go on Showbiz Tonight and rattle off her hate, but CBS Sports is repeatedly playing “Born This Way” over their slam dunk montages and poster shots. Who has the bigger audience? Would such a song have been played over the tourney 15 years ago? There’s some social change for your bitch ass, Victoria.

**Bonus! Top 5 List!**

Since Top 5 Lists are the easiest way to make up for sparse posting, I’ll have one for every day this week! I started a new job last week that I’m pretending has kept me busy, but really I only worked 26 hours, which is much less than half of what I used to work when I had a real grown-up job. I work for a fancy butcher shop, but my job is to tend their small meat counter at a grocery store, and it’s boring. I took it for two reasons:  a) It leaves me plenty of time to take my dad to his doctor’s appointments and physical therapy, and make him sandwiches;  b) I don’t have much experience with meat (hardy har okay maybe a third reason is meat jokes). So I’m attempting to learn a few things, and in honor of this, here are the Top 5 Things I’ve Learned At My New Job:

5. Sirloin is the squishiest kind of beef.

4. English people pronounce the word “filet” as “fill-it”.

3. Nobody out there knows how to cook flank steak. Except me, because this is the one cut of beef I’m very familiar with. The rest of y’all are fools. If you eat meat, this is one worth learning, folks. If you don’t like it, you’re doing it wrong (this maxim applies to more than just meat).

2. The butcher actually has all his fingers, but his thumb has been re-attached (sliced off by bone saw).

1. I do not want to be a butcher.

A Very Important Matter of Taste

I watched The Godfather with my parents tonight, because my mother doesn’t like it. That seems nonsensical, but it’s very important to me, actually, that my mother likes The Godfather. We got into a discussion the other day where she admitted that she didn’t like it, and I set out to make a believer out of her. I made marinara sauce, like Clemenza, to win her over with spaghetti and meatballs. I convinced myself that if she were in the right mood, and I could build enough excitement, she’d enjoy it. She’d get it. She’d realize how wrong she was to write it off when she saw it in the theater 40 years ago. It didn’t work. She said it was boring. The Godfather is not boring. It demands an acute attentiveness which, if given properly, rewards you with one of the most engrossing movie experiences you can find. She didn’t get it.

Why is it so important to us that our loved ones share our interests? It’s nice to have things in common, to discuss and share, and it’s nice to have different favorite movies, like different bands and read different books to keep things interesting. But don’t we all have one or two things we value enough that it’s an outright problem if someone we respect doesn’t appreciate them? I mean, could you love someone who doesn’t love Otis Redding? Could you respect someone who doesn’t like The Godfather? Could I marry someone who doesn’t like Southern poetry?  It’s so silly, but so easy to get hung up on these things. This whole ordeal with my mom just makes me think of how hard it would be to put up with a guy who didn’t like the right things, brings up my fear that I really will get attached to someone who doesn’t like Miller Williams or Robert Penn Warren. Wouldn’t that be a problem?

If your affection for High Fidelity is as intense as mine (if it isn’t, I probably have a problem with that) you know what I’m talking about. Nick Hornby says, and it feels so true, that what matters is what you like, more than what you are like. I’ve agreed and disagreed with this, back and forth over the years. The first gut reaction is “yes! of course!” but as I grew out of being as pretentious and judgmental about artistic tastes as I once was, I sort of let it go. Rob Gordon and company are pretentious and judgmental and were exactly what I wanted to be, what my asshole friends and I prided ourselves on being back in college. But that’s all bullshit. It’s such a snobbish way to walk through the world, looking down on people for owning Julio Iglesias albums. When I got more comfortable with liking things that weren’t high brow or obscure, enjoying things because they were enjoyable, not just because they were good, I decided that what matters isn’t what you like as much as why you like it. That’s where the good stuff is. Liking terrible music because you listened to it with your parents on car trips; watching crappy movies because you always watch them with the same person. The relationship someone has with the things they like is way more interesting than a list of all the right favorite things.

But that only goes so far. I still can’t get past it when someone doesn’t love what I love. What you dislike, that matters. It matters what you like when it doesn’t include The Godfather. To say that “it’s no good pretending any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party” is placing too much importance on approving of your counterpart’s interests. Let that stuff go. The troublesome stuff is this: when that which you connect to most deeply in the world is totally unaffecting to someone you care about. The art that you’re most passionate about in the world, the books, the movies, the music you love, these things define you as a person. They’re part of you. I don’t want someone who thinks I’m funny or nice or smart, I want someone who knows what I’m talking about when I talk about the last verse of “Oh My Sweet Carolina.”  Sharing that with somebody – that’s the point.

I’ve run into the problem of having too much in common with a guy. It’s boring. There’s never anything to argue about, and you don’t learn anything new. Maybe we should just let go of the compulsion to impose our favorite things onto other people. So what if they don’t like what we do? What does it hurt? Surely we can find other points to relate on. But there’s something so satisfying about that moment when someone tells you they love what you do, so reassuring. And there’s something so great about falling for something that someone else loves, and passes on to you. Is it enough? Is going without it enough?

I’m not a person with a lot of answers. I told my mom to try and dream about The Godfather and we’d talk in the morning. Last night after my sister read The Great Gatsby for the first time and said she didn’t like it, I spent ten minutes telling her why I loved it and what’s so great about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and by the end she was telling me all her favorite things about it, saying that talking about it had changed it for her. I have a friend who doesn’t like High Fidelity, but I haven’t resigned the idea that I can win him over. And that’s the part that makes me feel okay about not having any answers. There’s hope in believing that you can still help to change someone’s mind, but even better than that is knowing that you still want to.

This Is What I Did Today

It’s been a lazy Sunday, and I spent a good part of it shopping the internet for free music, as has become my habit. And since I’m a thoughtful, sharing person, I thought I’d parlay my hard work into your reward and give you the best free music I’ve downloaded this week. You’re welcome.

Low Rising by the Swell Season – This single is over a year old, but it showed up as a free download on the 93XRT website earlier this week for some reason. Doesn’t matter why, because this is one of my favorite songs, and I jumped on that immediately. If you loved Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in Once singing “Falling Slowly” you’ll love this song as well. The instrumentation and Hansard’s voice combine perfectly – this is one of the sexiest songs you’ll hear today.

Violin by Amos Lee – iTunes has this one off of Lee’s brand new album Mission Bell as their free Discovery Download of the week. Lee’s vocal is great on this song, which doesn’t really sound like anything new, but it doesn’t really have to. You want it anyway.

Get Some by LykkeLi – This is one badass Swedish broad crooning “don’t make demands, I don’t take none.” The percussion on this song and her unmistakably European sing-song voice will have this one interminably stuck in your head. The bright side is that it sounds really, really good.

Cousins by Mumford and Sons – Vampire Weekend’s upbeat ditty “Cousins” gets made over with Mumford and Son’s signature folk/bluegrass sound and it works perfectly. Marcus Mumford’s deep, gritty voice is the opposite of Ezra Koening’s peppy style. Combined with the earthy arrangement, it sounds like any song you’d hear in a backwoods barn dance. And I would know.

Black and Gold by Wale – I am a big fan of Sam Sparro’s “Black and Gold” – just try to sit still while listening to it – but to my surprise Wale managed to make it way better by rapping over it. I love this right now.

99 Problems by Jay-Z with the Dap Kings – Continuing the remixes. This song is not new at all, but I just found it today, and this is what my life has been missing. The hard-rocking original is irreplaceable, but it’s definitely a welcome change to hear this Prince Ballard incarnation. Where the original was an incensed, driven rock, this relaxed version sounds like Jay-Z is just sitting across the room, telling you a story about his bullshit day while the jazzy soul sound of the Dap Kings crackles from your record player. That’s my new favorite daydream. As a bonus there’s a super sexy photo of the man to admire while you download.

Rolling in the Deep/Childish Gambino Remix by Jamie XX – I’m loving this mash-up of Adele’s latest single combined with raps by the alter ego of Community’s Donald Glover. Despite his age, Glover has a teenager’s voice with no hint of swagger, but his wit and smart rhymes make him worth listening to. The layering of both artist’s songs to lost lovers is what’s compelling here. Adele can get revenge on anybody with those pipes, and Childish Gambino uses a sharp tongue to put his ex in her place. When you get to the end of this, you just think “somebody just got told off good.”

Also, if you haven’t heard Adele’s “Rolling In the Deep” yet, get your head out of your ass. The video is here, and it will give you goose bumps.

This Week's Obsessions Are As Follows

These photos from the Kingston Lounge – This photo essay of an abandoned quarantine hospital on North Brother Island in New York’s East river is incredible. The history he includes is very cool and the photos are both beautiful and interesting. I keep going back to this over and over. Eventually I’ll get to the rest of the blog.

Kids Politics – Last Friday's episode of This American Life centers around children learning about democracy and trying to practice self-governance, and it’s even more moving and compelling than usual. Maybe just because I’m a sucker for stories about kids. But it’s hard to not want to hug these youngsters who want to create a world according to their vision of fairness and goodness. The segments about the Reagan library (there is no better voice to tell this story than Starlee Kine <3 ) and the young Glenn Beck devotee conjure a discouraging skepticism about these students’ prospects of navigating a complicated and demanding political landscape in the coming years. The frustration in their voices is heartbreaking, and reminds me of my own desperate wish for a system that doesn’t seem to always be defeating us instead of making progress. But where I hear a premature resigned cynicism in my own voice, I hear the passion in theirs that only comes with not even having thought about giving up yet. It’s almost worse, knowing what they’re in for.

Discouraging skepticism is not really something I’m in short supply of, having spent a good amount of time on Sunday discussing “kids today” and how unfortunate they are to have all those damn cell phones and Rihanna romanticizing getting the shit knocked out of her (if you’ve not heard my “Love the Way You Lie” rant, you are luckier than a lot of people at the Blue Dome Diner). So it’s a really good thing Ira begins and ends with uplifting segments that let us cuddle with the warm and fuzzy hope that the youth will change the world for the better. A third grade class – in CHINA – practices democracy and somehow manages to independently invent and destroy negative smear campaigns, realizing that they feel better when they are nice to each other. If you’re not getting verklempt yet, the story about the kooky-hippie-experimental-free school where the kids call all the shots will get to you. Even though this is a test tube with a small population that miraculously makes it happen, students who have a say in their rules actually self-correct the amount of time they spend on computers and gadgets and decide to not call each other whores. It’s amazing.

This left me feeling mostly great, with just a few reservations, which is nice. I guess the scary stuff is good for you, and that small percentage of me that’s not totally dejected really wants to try and save the world. I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way (unless you’re going to teach them wrong, scary Reagan library people, then just shut the hell up).

College Radio – I really don’t know how or why I got into this, but I can’t stop. I’ve stumbled upon a curiosity to know what kind of music college radio stations across the country are playing and how good they are at it. But it’s become sort of a train wreck of a hobby. Once I find a good station it is really hard to turn away. With Pandora, I turn it off and it stops existing. But with the radio I just know I’m going to miss something good, and listening to far off and distant college stations seems like accidentally finding a frequency on a ham radio that you probably shouldn’t have, and maybe never will again.

I don’t listen to Ivy League stations – I don’t need their condescension. “Not only do I go to Princeton but I know about all the indie bands you don’t.” Pass. I like community and regional colleges a lot. This blog post was composed while listening to KVSC 88.1FM from St. Cloud State University. I like listening to Chicago stations, to remind me of my dear city. I feel like I know these people. Radio DePaul is the best I’ve found, but this familiarity has gotten me into trouble.

I really should not listen to college radio because now that I’m old and uncool, I get way too jealous of any girl d.j. with good taste in music who also plays video games and knows cool stuff about comic books or geeky genre movies and probably has a perfect pair of cat-eye glasses, because I know she must have no trouble scoring with all the nerd guys that I pined for in college. It’s ridiculous to be jealous of the anonymous DePaul student on the computer radio hundreds of miles away, but it’s also ridiculous to get choked up and a little teary when she plays a Yellowcard song I used to listen to freshman year. It happened anyway. I just know she looks like Ellen Page and when she makes an offhand remark about dancing around in her underwear to hellogoodbye you can almost hear her co-host guy falling in love with her as he mutters “Um, uh... we should talk about something else.”

But it’s nice to remind myself, when she says to him “Oh you’re 21, you’re old now” that they are just kids. And when she plays a Format song that I once played on my college radio show four years ago, I see it all coming full circle. One day a few years from now she’ll be a single 25-year-old trying to figure out how to meet people in Chicago after all her friends have moved away, wondering where all the cute, non-married guys who don’t wear Axe or cutoff shorts are. At least, I hope she’s got those problems. If 29-year-old me actually does have to compete with a perfect, smart, manic pixie dream girl 25-year-old her, I’m going to be fucking pissed.

Top Ten Obsessions of 2010

10 Backwash – I’ve loved Josh Malina forever but this web series he wrote and starred in was one of the most unexpected pleasures of the year. Every moment of the 13 episodes was a surprise, and though it got off to a slow start and dragged at times, it was refreshingly imaginative and incredibly stupid. But like, in a good way. Claymation, opera singing, plenty of physical comedy and cheap sight gags fill the story while a cast of guest hosts hold their own as reason enough to tune in. The best is Jon Hamm, and the reappearance of his springtime beard was certainly welcome. Notice how so many of the other hosts talk about him? Who can stop themselves? But Michael Vartan and John Cho were hilarious, and Dulé Hill tap danced. Add those to Michael Ian Black’s flamboyant ice cream truck driver and you’ve got the makings of a top notch way to kill time.

9 Psych’s homage to Twin Peaks – May have more to do with the fact that Twin Peaks was one of my biggest obsessions in 2010; frankly this wasn’t the best episode of Psych this year. Nonetheless, it was fun. And two decades later, Sherilyn Fenn is still hot.

8 Jenny Wade (@jenny_wade) on twitter – The star of Fox’s The Good Guys is hilarious. In a really unfair sort of way. But she’s incredibly smart and irreverent, and you could spend forever scrolling through her old tweets and laughing out loud (and I have).

7 Mark Paul Gosselaar’s guest appearance on Weeds – We should never take it for granted that Mark Paul Gosselaar is hot. We should be reminded of it every day. He’s that hot. Breathtaking at times. And what better reminder than to watch him have his way with Mary Louise Parker in the most graphic sex scene the show has ever done? The much-talked-about scene was too much for some people, and well, just enough for others. The tension Nancy is feeling being alone is drawn out in great scenes with Gosselaar and Parker sharing chemistry and pushing one another’s buttons in a dark, empty bar. Then their charged “no smoking” argument is almost hotter than the sex scene itself. Almost. This is what TiVo was invented for.

6 Secretly Memorizing Ke$ha songs – There is this recurring daydream I have whenever I hear a Ke$ha song on the radio that involves a riotous party where out of nowhere one of Ke$ha’s interchangeable dance anthems comes over the speakers and my friends and I get to gleefully belt out the terrible lyrics (I mean, you guys have heard “Take It Off” right?) with the joyful abandon of youth. Nevermind that I don’t go to riotous parties anymore and have, mostly, bid farewell to the joyful abandon of youth. I still can’t help but listen when I’m alone in my car and succumb to the catchy hooks and danceable beat. Oh, what life must look like covered in glitter…

5 True Grit – I didn’t really have a great year at the movies. Despite my best laid plans, I didn’t see Inception, or The Social Network, or even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I saw Twilight something or other. In my defense I was a guest and it was free, and you know, I was going in to hide from a rainstorm, or something… Anyway, by the end of the year I was ready to see at least one of the important movies, and I’ve been obsessing over True Grit since I first heard about it. And it’s great. It’s not the Coens’ best film by a long shot, and it’s probably not the best movie of the year, but it’s good. It’s not as heavy handed as it threatened to be, but strikes a great balance between humor and intensity and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Matt Damon plays the best part in the film, even if no one is talking about it. My love for it though mostly has to do with setting my feet back down in Arkansas, and hearing a familiar history on screen, told by warm accents that are endearing, not mocking. True Grit is everything it promised to be, and a little better.

4 Sleepwalk With Me – Mike Birbiglia’s book of comedic memoirs, Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories, based on his 2009 off-Broadway one man show of the same name, deserves all the praise it’s gotten from his comic peers Lewis Black and Eddie Izzard, as well as This American Life host Ira Glass and fellow contributors. Birbiglia toes the line between stand-up comic and American illuminary, and his book is both laugh-out-loud funny and personally affecting. I obsessed about the play when I knew I could never see it. When I learned it was going to print, I waited anxiously for most of the year for the chance to read it, and was so glad to find out how well it delivers. The hilarious stories of “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” and his mom’s quip “Like Fun” are familiar, but new stories about his relationship and reaction to Mitch Hedberg’s death and his sleepwalking disorder are surprising and moving.

3 Community – From the beginning, Community was a creative comedy with an ensemble cast of players who ALL manage to be funny, but as time went on Dan Harmon and company continually pushed the envelope with high-concept theme episodes that pay off in spades to the viewer who can give them the leeway to do it. The zombie nightmare Halloween episode, a secret garden with a magic trampoline, and “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” make Community one of the best shows on television. I just wish I could get Jeff and Britta’s awkward, super French kiss from the season premiere out of my head.

2 Sally Draper – Mad Men didn’t lose stride at all during season 4, but instead managed to go broader and more daring with the growth of characters. And as nice as it was to see Don Draper working on self-improvement, this year was all about the women (see “The Beautiful Girls”). Joan faced new levels of disrespect, sexism, and personal drama as her career reached new heights; Peggy struggled to find a balance between her career and personal life and found she could never please everyone. Over and over we were shown that these women would have to face their struggles alone (We saw Faye left high and dry by Don Draper, but if we know anything about Don, it doesn’t look all that hopeful that Megan won’t have a life of loneliness ahead of her). Surprisingly the biggest standout this year though is Sally, who it seems has a snowball’s chance in hell of growing up well-adjusted. It’s one thing to be among the first of her peers to have divorced parents but she’s got a self-involved, workaholic lush for a father and an emotionally-stunted mother who shows no qualms about slapping her hard across the face. Not to mention stifling Sally’s maturity and growth to save her the inconvenience. Sally was the most compelling character in a room full of intrigues, and I can’t wait to see what happens to her next year.

1 Joe Pug – I haven’t been able to shut up about Joe Pug all year, though I promise I’ve tried. His full length album Messenger dropped at the beginning of the year and I’ve been drooling over it ever since. Pug’s introspective, prophetic brand of Americana music is the kind you can’t seem to shake. He sings with the intensity of a man who has a message he desperately has to get out, and songs like “Not So Sure” and “Bury Me Far (from my uniform)” display a wisdom far beyond his years. The pain and regret he so eloquently conveys in “Not So Sure” are haunting, and whether listening to Messenger or last year’s Nation of Heat EP, it’s impossible to hear Joe Pug and be unaffected. He inspires the kind of pensive self-reflection that has to make other writers jealous, not just songwriters. Also, “Speak Plainly, Diana” is virtually impossible to get out of your head. Resistance is futile.

Runners Up: Tulsa, obvs. And watching videos of puppies on YouTube.

This Week's Obsessions Are As Follows:

Top Ten Lists

Lists of value judgments are always a favorite, and this time of year provides plenty of them. My own Top Ten List won’t be published until tomorrow, but it will be my Top Ten Obsessions of 2010. It will be like today’s list but exponentially more awesome. Until then, here are my favorite lists of the recent past:

GQ's Top Ten New Restaurants in America – I love GQ’s food writing as well as anyone’s, and I take their word on almost anything. I knew before reading this list that Longman & Eagle would be on it, but still managed some giddiness when I saw it spelled out. L&E is the Logan Square bar that no one will stop talking about, which opened earlier this year 2 ½ blocks from my old apartment. The whiskey list is pretty intimidating, and frankly most of the food intimidates me just the same, but I’m still a groupie. It’s also the home of the urban lumberjack - all the guys who work there wear plaid and have beards. You’ll think you’re being served by the Brawny man. Quintessential Logan Square.

XRT's Top Ten Live Performances of 2010– One of the best radio stations in the country does a phenomenal job of promoting live music and getting the best performances from the most talented acts around. And they hold on to it - their live archives have recordings from the birth of the station, including performances from the Grateful Dead. This year’s list of their favorite performances includes a great set by Mumford and Sons, a feel-good number by Peoria band Back Yard Tire Fire (whom I’ve really come to love) and some videos of Everest that look like Guitar Heaven. There are some notable performances from this year that seem to be missing, but these videos are all pretty great. I even like Chelsea Dagger again…

This Video by Volkswagen/The Fun Theory

There’s no way to watch this and not think back ruefully at all the times you emerged from a subway tunnel on boring old concrete stairs. I want.

Patrick Sweany Band

They are playing White Water Tavern tonight, so congrats to all the lucky assholes who will be there. Jealous.

Addendum: This is awesome.

Just found this What's Your State Good At list (with fun pictures!) and had to add it. I've known about Arkansas' rice production, but seeing Illinois represented by a gun sure does make me proud. I love the neutrality here - if you're lucky enough to be in Vermont, you're the smartest in the nation! If you live in Nevada, congrats on all the teen pregnancies and meth use. Rhode Island is clearly the best place to party, but Oregon is the most bi-curious. So if that's your kind of party...  I just feel sad for the states who rank number 1 in potential. Snooze. What fun is being the hottest if you're not getting any?