Last night, on my TweetDeck, I saw this, from @tedleo:
First night in while I don't have to stay up past...now. So do watch St. Vin on Lttrmn, or hit the sack & check it out on Videogum tomorrow?
Hey, Ted Leo! Of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists! Ted Leo of the "Since U Been Gone/Maps" cover! He's famous! But St. Vincent is more of a Stereogum thing. No offense to any Monster St. Vincent Heads out there, it's just that I stopped paying very close attention to developments in popular music after the dissolution of my second marriage, 34 years ago. You remember, right before my hip surgery. Here, if you pick the trouser pocket lint off of this hard candy you can have it. And anyway, that's what Stereogum is for! For the kids. And so I thought that this Twitter from @tedleo was in the vein of the many people who (still) seem to think that Videogum is simply a music-video extension of Stereogum. It's not! It's actually very different! But this is a frequent confusion that people seem to have. You should see some of the emails we get. Long story short, these emails assume that we are simply a music-video extension of Stereogum, which we are not.
But after some @back and @forth, it turned out that Ted Leo was just giving us a shout out, and using his desire to watch St. Vincent on David Letterman as the structure on which to build that shout out. Nice! Thank you for the shout out, Ted Leo. In return, here is the St. Vincent on David Letterman you requested*:
Help! Bjork's voice is trapped in Kristen Schaal's body! We need a gypsy!
Do you know what this sounds like? At least to me? It sounds like a band from the future but from the past. Like, if in Back to the Future 2 Marty McFly had been in his mid-20s rather than in high school, and wandered (via hoverboard) into some Hill Valley dive bar in 2015, this would be the house band. Or really the house band in the dive bar in the future of any movie made in the late '80s or early '90s. I'm pretty sure "Marrow" was the song that Bill and Ted played to win the Battle of the Bands and bring everlasting peace to all of mankind.
Ow, my arthritic hands! Rains a-comin!
(You can find out more about St. Vincent at their website. I did!)
*It's called a "quid pro quo," which is Latin for "if you get a nice Twitter from someone you respect**, respond with a nice blog post pro quo."
**Who is famous, not just some civilian***.
***Because you, like everyone else, place a disordinate amount of importance on fame****, because you live in the world as it is, and you're subject just like everyone else to the demands and suggestions of popular culture*****.
****And you recognize that you probably wouldn't have the same reaction to a Twitter message (just for example) from one of your loyal readers, who is certainly just as deserving if not more so of your attention and consideration, and it's a relationship that you have to the social power structure that you should probably examine at some point, but you like to think that it is at least a good first step to acknowledge that it's there and that you have these reactions to it.
*****But also so what! So what if you are!
