BIBJ Playlist of the 2000s entry #58: Kim and Jessie by M83

SIX VIDEOS INCORPORATING THE ART OF SKATING

"Kim and Jessie" by M83

Oh they have a secret world, alright.  A secret world involving creepy eyebrows, homages to Thriller and The Big Lebowski, and a variety of ways to resist each others charms, intertwined limbs and all.  Bonus points for the subtle social commentary of having the girls switch to rollerblades for the second half. 

"Get Myself Into It" by The Rapture

Well of course!  The hipsters wearing white suits are OBVIOUSLY going to throw the biggest multi-cultural skating party you've ever been to!  They hang out with the guy wearing the Patrick Ewing jersey all the time!  For you to suggest anything else makes YOU the asshole.  Their friend in the fedora totally has their back.  We're gonna meet back up with him later for some clowning.

Side note:  Skating while playing a saxophone will land your ass in Roller Cave jail faster than you can say "Hey mom, why cook?"


 

"Kissing the Lipless" by The Shins

I don't know how it got started, but it's always there.  Anytime I see a man ice skating by himself, something inside me really wants to see him fall.  ESPECIALLY if he's wearing an "outfit."  I've accepted that this is the way it is, and ultimately I blame Chris Farley.
 

"Medicine" by Orbit

The graceful ice ingenue who pulled off a triple salchow into one Ross MacLochness' heart.  It's all in the hips.

"Nothin' My Love Can't Fix" by Joey Lawrence

This video is like a documentary of my adolescence.  Every weekend, me and my friends would make our way to the wrong side of town.  It was covered in graffiti and despair, so it was the perfect place to dance on skates, practice floor exercises, and fill up buckets with acrylic paint then dump them out for no reason! Once we had our fill of chillin' on scaffolding, we'd head to the beach for a football game, where I would play both quarterback AND wide receiver.  And I haven't even gotten to the giant disorientation globe that we'd spin in!  Most people only ride in those at Space Camp, but we always just had one with us.  It's how we roll.  One time the flannel shirt I had around my waist got caught in one of the rings at the playground.  Whoa, indeed.

"Fully Flared" by Spike Jonze

Nobody is wearing skates here.  And technically, this isn't a music video.  It's the intro to a skating video that Spike Jonze directed.  However, it might as well be an M83 video since the soundtrack is their song "Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun" (full circle!) That said, this video is five minutes of jumps and explosions, all in slow motion.  Having read that last sentence, you're probably saying to yourself, "There's nothing in that description that doesn't sound ridiculously awesome!"  And you are right.

BIBJ Playlist of the 2000s entry #47: Against All Odds by the Postal Service

The #1 single on iTunes is a song called “Fireflies” by something called Owl City. The first time I had heard of Owl City revolved around news of merchandising footie pajamas to adults (congrats on out-doing Weezer on embarrassing wearable fabric!) so naturally I expected terrible things. But I severely underestimated the overall shittiness of this garbage:

Ugh. What’s the worst thing about this charade? The nonsensically vapid lyrics? The ridiculously calculated visual affect of a kitsch-filled bedroom to artificially create nostalgia? Or the fact that EVERYTHING related to the melody, beats, and vocal affectation is wholesale stolen from the Postal Service (if the Postal Service were terrible at music). And for some reason this clown is UPSET by people continually bringing this up in interviews? Use your footie pajamas to hang yourself from that disco ball, you diaper faced plagiarist.  I hope you get beaten with a Speak & Spell.

Good Lord. If only someone could help me calm down from this intense rage burning through my bloodstream. Someone like…Phil Collins?

Look, everyone realizes that 98% of the Phil Collins catalogue is awful. But that other 2% is “In the Air Tonight” and “Against All Odds,” the latter of which served as a centerpiece for one of my favorite This American Life segments, and also may have served as a video inspiration for an earlier playlist entry.

The song itself is overbearingly earnest, but then again so are break-ups in general. The Postal Service cover features Gibbard handling the lyrics without any cynicism, but layered with less outright sadness and more wistfulness and mystery, the opening verse sounding like it's coming through AM radio.  The unintentionally hilarious video (edited from the movie "Wicker Park") only adds to the mystique.  Josh Harnett is a terrible actor even when he's doing nothing but staring!  Or caressing a phone!

The TV disappears but the IKEA furniture cart remains!  I wonder if the hipsters inside Debonair vanished too?

If recent history is any indication, we can probably expect an Owl City cover of "Sussudio" before too long. 

BIBJ Playlist of the 2000s entry #93: Fort Hood by Mike Doughty

Mike Doughty - New Music - More Music Videos

Mike Doughty wrote about the meaning behind the song "Fort Hood," released in 2008.  He further elaborated on Stereogum:

I wouldn't call this an anti-war song, because I'm not gonna rail about who lied about what. Too late for that. I'm concerned about lost innocence, and damaged young bodies and minds. I think I say it most directly in the bridge: "You should be getting stoned with a prom dress girl...You should blast Young Jeezy with your friends in a parking lot." 

Not to mention my own guilt at being able to live a normal life while that nightmare is going on over there.
The USO invited me to Walter Reed a couple years back; I met a bunch of guys who had lost their limbs. Young guys. But I know that you don't have to be wounded to be scarred by war.

My Dad was in the Army, and I grew up in the 70s on Army bases; he, and basically all the adult men around, had been in Vietnam. There was a lot of weird, angry behavior that was baffling to me as a kid, but now I recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. That's what I wonder about when I see guys in uniform coming back from the war, sitting around an airport; what's in this guy's head? What has he witnessed? What kind of terrible images is he burdened with?

It's oddball in indie-rock-land to steal a chorus and repurpose it; I grew up with house and hiphop music, so sampling seems very natural to me, the only difference is that I'm actually singing it. Actually, I downloaded (OK, stole) an MP3 of the Japanese cast of Hair. The verses were hilarious and strange, of course, but when the chorus came in, it suddenly switched to English: let the sunshine in, let the sunshine in. I was listening to it on the D train over the Manhattan bridge and suddenly I found myself tearing up, extremely moved.

While this song might now become inadvertently infamous, it'll pale in comparison to the overall eeriness and timing that marked Ryan Adams' "New York, New York."   But sometimes on occasions like Thursday, even the hackneyed cheesy refrain from Hair can seem oddly life-affirming. Sometimes that's the best you can hope for.

BIBJ Playlist of the 2000s entry #11: White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes

Ah, stop motion.  It's retro chic in Fleet Foxes videos or when Wes Anderson is making movies, but where was all the trendy buzz in the heyday of the California Raisins?

This video teaches an important life lesson.  We've all at one time or another developed a a magical spinning crank for the purpose of spinning time backwards, thus reverting our physical appearance to that of fifty years in the past.  But when doing so, KEEP YOUR HANDS ON THE DAMN WHEEL or you'll ruin everything and end up once again a beardy old man living in the forest.

The more you know.

BIBJ Playlist of the 2000s entry #10: Come Pick Me Up by Ryan Adams

Ever so often a publication of one form or another will inevitably do a ranking of top films, and it's inevitable that Citizen Kane tops the list time after time.  Yet nobody watches Citizen Kane with any frequency, not the way people still occasionally watch The Godfather or Gone With the Wind.  Film critics are all too eager to rattle off the laundry list of groundbreaking techniques that Orson Welles introduced as a 25-year-old (!) writer/director, but I can't imagine that anyone watches the film repeatedly the way other classics are viewed.  Nevertheless, I'm often curious as to how Welles handled the fact that every movie he directed the rest of his live (13 in total) would inevitably fail to measure up with the first. He made a number of other excellent films, but he wouldn't ever top that debut, and so it is that he is, fairly or not, viewed as someone who a) peaked at 25, and b) later became infamous as a drunken pitchman.
 
If it weren't for Heartbreaker, Ryan Adams wouldn't catch half the shit he does now.  It's easy for people to say that he's too prolific with his output the last several years, but that's really just a nice way of saying that the majority of his recent work hasn't been very good.  After all, Jack White has released eight albums the last ten years, but nobody accuses him of needing to self-edit (most likely because he's consistently put out good/great albums.)

But in many respects it's tough to blame Adams.  It's not as if his albums have been bad, and in reality most are better than average.  Unfortunately, like Welles, he happened to put together a masterpiece when he was 25 years old, and at this point he's unlikely to top it.  Again, this isn't necessarily his fault, as over 99% of albums recorded by anyone since Heartbreaker came out are inferior to Adams' debut.  (However, he'd make it much tougher for people to write him off if he would go back to listening to Gram Parsons instead of the Grateful Dead.)  One edge that I'll give Adams over Welles:  Heartbreaker ages much better than Kane.

A side note about "Come Pick Me Up": This probably says more about me than it does about the song, but within the airing of grievances voiced by Adams, the line "steal my records" always strikes me as the most evil. That's against the law, you heartless harlot! 



Ryan Adams - Come Pick Me Up (mp3)