Ways to waste a holiday.

1) Philadelphia radio has gotten really awful. WXPN, my chosen station, has somehow regressed to a mixture of un-listenable and very, very white contemporary adult alternative, and seventies proggish crap. It’s unnerving how little I want to listen to them. Even my favorite DJs have been playing too much Jethro Tull and My Morning Jacket for their own good.
This failure means I’ve been tuning in to a lot of the pop hit stations in Philadelphia. These stations seem to play two things, which share in common their ability to totally baffle and amaze me in their Dadaist poppiness. The first is the song “Fergalicious”, which is the second single from Fergie’s Album The Dutchess [sic]. AHHHHHHHHHHH. In this song, Fegie extols the virtue of her own body in roughly the following order: she’s not sleazy because boys can only look at her (no touching), but she’s accessible (“Fergalicious/ but I ain’t promiscuous/ I blow kisses/ that gets them boys on rock-rock/ And they’re lining down the block/ just to watch what I got”). She also is “up in the gym just working on my fitness” quite frequently. Fergie is also apparently “tastey” [sic, and it IS spelled out) and “delicious”. Aside from teaching spelling errors and a bizarre love of the gym, and also encouraging girls to not be “treated like clientele”, “Fergalicious” doesn’t seem to have a point. However, the song does include a quick Spanish lesson (“4, tres, 2, uno”) and an assurance that Fergie is not trying to take your man. Just in case you were worried. However, “Fergalicious” has a catchy (infectious) beat and is highly entertaining in its strangeness.
Unlike the Fray, which is just baffling.
The other bizarre pop single frequently played in Philly is the Fray’s “How to Save a Life”. The Fray have been boggling my mind since this summer, when they had a hit on Maine radio with a chorus that displayed a completely arbitrary attention to detail and a weird grasp of both the English language and narrative structure: “Everybody knows I’m in over my head/ with eight seconds left in overtime/ She’s on your mind”. Huh. I don’t even know where to start analyzing that. “How to Save a Life” is similarly strange, though according to the comments on songmeanings.net it is about a father and a crack-addicted teenager. This makes some sense, as the Fray do evoke many clichés about knowing best and “talking”. However, this song also switches person extensively, and could be about almost anything. So even if the crack epidemic in America is a problem, its bland evocations of God and “where did I go wrong?” could fit just about any problem (say a stampeding elephant or the apocalypse or a sex addict?). It's amazing how nondescript music can get.

2) Do you want to know exactly what James Bond drinks in each and every installation of his book series? I never did, but in the throes of a family holiday, it can get very interesting. For instance, in Casino Royale he tries to order a 1945 Taittinger and is told by the sommelier to drink a 1943 Brut Blanc de Blanc instead—and he complies. Shocker. Visit: www.atomicmartini.com/007

3) Pitchfork came out with their list of top 50 albums and top 100 songs of 2006 a few days ago. It is completely awful. I can’t start with how much I dislike Pitchfork’s esoterically and triumphantly hip yet horribly cliché coverage of most indie rock. They often ignore actual quality in favor of weird hip factors which don’t quite add up. However, I should note that I often (unconsciously) do the same thing, so I acknowledge how difficult it is not to do. Though with Pitchfork’s Pazz and Jop style of ranking (everyone on staff does a list and point values are assigned to make a final compilation, sort of like a mix tape by committee), one would think this would be avoided. I forgot to post it here, but I had a top five albums list published a few weeks ago in the University of Chicago Maroon. Find it here. Despite the thought I put into it (a significant amount), it is actually not quite representative of what meant a lot to me in the past year. I’ve done a detailed write up of that for the past few years. See them directly below.