Category: music

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Two Tune Tuesday: Tears for Fears


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“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is permanently a summer song for me, maybe because that’s when it came out or when it got a lot of airtime or because of the video, I don’t know. Some songs just go with seasons, too.

The lyrics of “Head Over Heels” always struck me as bittersweet and maybe a little (emotionally) masochistic.

I wanted to be with you alone and talk about the weather
But traditions I can trace against the child in your face
Won’t escape my attention
You keep your distance with a system of touch and gentle persuasion
I’m lost in admiration, could I need you this much
Oh, you’re wasting my time, you’re just, just, just wasting time

Something happens and I’m head over heels
I never find out till I’m head over heels
Ah, don’t take my heart, don’t break my heart
Don’t, don’t, don’t throw it away

Apparently summer’s finally here if these are the songs I find myself humming.

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Apologies for Autoplay

For whatever reason, my embedded playlist.com players are shooting straight to autoplay and I have no idea why. From what I can tell from their forums, they’d removed autoplay and there was a lot of pushback from users, so now they seem to have “over fixed” the problem, and it’s ONLY able to auto play.

I won’t be posting new playlists until they fix this option, & will disable the ones on my page for now (& only provide links, so you can still go listen to the music).

Apologies for anyone who was unpleasantly surprised (as I was).

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Two Tune Tuesday: Grief, Grace, & Hope

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Friday night I listened to the Buckley; I knew Aeneas was going soon, & wow did I not want to let him go, but Buckley’s voice is so beautiful in this one; it’s more a cri de coeur than a song. Then yesterday, out of nowhere, I heard Matt Johnson’s voice in my head, found myself humming this song which I haven’t listened to in a long, long time:

In our lives we hunger for those we cannot touch
All the thoughts unuttered and all the feelings unexpressed
Play upon our hearts like the mist upon our breath

It seems a particular good song for summer solstice, too, seasonal in its grief.

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Two Tune Tuesday: Sweetness & Light

A friend put this Cake song up on Facebook the other day, & I wanted to find another similar kind of joyous song & came up with this one by April Smith, whose songs make me happy in a goofy sort of way.


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(That Cake bassline is so Queen, though, isn’t it? Another one eats the Cake. )

Sweetness for the last Tuesday in May because spring has finally come to our corner of Wisconsin, and frankly I think the sun has gone to my head: it’s either that or all the end-of-academic-year parties.

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Two Tune Tuesday: Poly Styrene’s Descendents

I’m a day late, but it’s the 10th week of a 10 week term, so cut me a break.

Here are two recent songs I’ve heard recently that make me think about Poly Styrene’s impact on music. Altered Images is from the 80s, and Clare Grogan’s vocals were a direct inheritor of what Styrene was up to:


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How can you not love “you make me go ooooh ooooh with the things that you do you do you do“?! Echoes of Cole Porter are never a bad thing.

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Two Tune Tuesday: [Insert Clever Euphemism Here]


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I’ve been researching some for a class I’m teaching next year on sexuality, and was reading a few things about autosexuality, and I wondered, with all those songs about sex, are there any about self-pleasure? These are the few I thought of. And no, “Turning Japanese” doesn’t count; I never bought that argument & The Vapors have said it wasn’t, too. “Dancing with Myself” doesn’t count either (because it’s about a Japanese disco) and even Berry’s “Dingaling” seems more about his bits than about what he’s doing with them. So, others? There are certainly references to masturbation – like in Prince’s “Darling Nikki” – but that isn’t what the song is actually about.

Interesting that the only ones I could come up with are written/performed by women, no? I wouldn’t have expected that.

For the record, masturbation & autosexuality aren’t the same thing. Masturbation is a way to practice autosexuality, but plenty of people who are other kinds of -sexuals also masturbate. Hope that helps. I had to add the Jack Off Jill version of The Divinyls because — well, they’ve got the whole idea built into their name.