Friday CJ Random 11

It's one more random than 10!

It was five degrees when I woke up this morning. Five degrees. I haven't even put up the Christmas tree yet. The other day during our first winter storm, the wind was blowing so hard that the house was vibrating and the monitor on my desk was actually shaking a little. That's what we call in layman's terms, "fucked up." I wouldn't pull the lever for a Republican (or pull the lever of a Republican, no matter how much he taps), but voting for someone with a pro-global warming agenda sounds pretty enticing right now. I would feel really bad for New Yorkers being flooded out, but look at the bright side, the rising tides would wash away that urine smell in the summers.

1) "53rd & 3rd," The Ramones. Speaking of washing away the urine smell of New York… I lived in New York during the Guilani years, when the city was getting cleaned up (read: Disneyfied), so I can only imagine the grungy scariness of 70s New York portrayed in this song.

2) "Back on the Chain Gang," Pretenders. I love the guitar rift and Chrissie Hynde's vocals. One of their best songs.

3) "Grindstone," Uncle Tupelo. I started out as a classic rock/metal kid, eventually widening my rock horizons to stuff like The Cure and New Order, and then getting into classic punk late in high school and during college. But it took a long time before I could listen to anything that sounded like country music, especially anything that had a prominent steel guitar the way this song does. I preferred Uncle Tupelo's punky songs much more than the traditional Americana they played later on. But over time, that changed to where I liked their sad, twangy songs a little more than their fast, angry songs. Maybe it's because country music sounds more lived in, and I had to do a little more living to appreciate it. Or maybe it's because you can't be 14 forever, no matter how hard I try to do that.

4) "Outsiders," Franz Ferdinand. Sometimes you just have to shake your booty. Franz Ferdinand is a group that completely understands that need. I would find it impossible to keep my hands below my head if I was dancing to this.

5) "Von," Sigur Ros. The way The Ramones sound like New York, Sigur Ros sound like Iceland. There's a soft, icy beauty to this, like a winter sunrise. Which I can appreciate much better now that I live in the Artic Circle.

6) "Far Cry," Rush. And this sounds like Canadian bacon. Mmmm, hammy. This is one of those classic cases where you buy an album, love love love the first song, and then wish the rest of the songs had sounded like that first song. Oh well, they have brought me enough geeky air drumming happiness over the last 26 years that I automatically contribute to their IRA by buying the new album.

7) "Crazy Rhythms," The Feelies. Like a methed-up Talking Heads. And I mean that as a compliment, as I always thought the one thing missing from the Talking Heads was more meth. As opposed to more cowbell.

8) "Dogs Got a Bone," The Beta Band. If you ever just want to chill, sit on the deck on a sunny day and pop open a beer like you're starring in your own Corona commercial, this is a pretty damn good song to play. In fact, most of the songs on The Three EPs album occupy that laconic, groovy frequency that induces involuntary head bobbing. You can see it in action in Hi Fidelity, where John Cusack says "I will now sell four copies of The Three EPs by The Beta Band" and gets everyone in the record store shuffling in synch.

9) "More Human Than Human," White Zombie. Okay, so I can't be 14 forever, but I can still tickle my inner Beavis with the diaphragm-pounding thump of Rob Zombie's monster mashes.

10) "Copperhead Road," Steve Earle. A much better song about a smuggler's blues than Glenn Fry's "Smuggler's Blues." Probably because he was an actual desperado instead of a fake one.

11) "Save a Secret for the Moon," The Magnetic Fields. I could hear this happy, bouncy song playing over the closing credits of a romantic teen comedy, where a boy (Superbad's Christopher Mintz-Plasse, showing his McLovin' range) realizes he's been mistakenly chasing the pretty blonde popular girl (Heroes' Hayden Panettiere), when he really loves his geeky brunette female friend (Hillary Duff, showing her range by dyeing her hair and wearing corrective lenses), who becomes just as pretty once she takes off her glasses! They kiss as this song plays over the credits, while the boy's dad (Eugene Levy) dances to the song with the boy's mother (Jaime Lee Curtis), who became attracted to Levy without him having to remove his glasses or wax anything, because female scriptwriters don't write this shit.

Have a great weekend. And go Mizzou!