Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

Fugazi jokes aside, this is some serious integrity and more so coming from a guy who lives in a trailer. It still won't get me to listen to his music, though.

I'm on record predicting that Tom would give this Beatlesesque charmer a low rating, and I feel vindicated now. (It's either an 8 or 9 for me, depending on my current mood). I did not, however, predict a 10 for "Round and Round," a perfectly fine song that I still think is the weakest in an amazing run of late 80s New Order singles. (The harsh dance beats don't really work with Barney Sumner's soft vocals and nursery-rhyme lyrics, IMO).

"He was just being a cop, you know?"

That is one scary phrase right there

25 years before today’s virtual #1 song…

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It’s February 1986 and the #1 song is “How Will I Know?” by Whitney Houston. Her second chart topper. This one much peppier and happy than her first. Did Tom like it?

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https://www.stereogum.com/2107774/the-number-ones-whitney-houstons-how-will-i-know/columns/the-number-ones/

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Tom gave it a 9. It is a wonder of powerful, controlled singing. It is as joyful as can be imagined. I can probably give it a 7 or 8. Having reviewed her music here over the years, I agree that happy, dancing Whitney is much easier to like than ballad Whitney. 

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3-hY-hlhBg

“He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis says in the book of Musk, who offered to be her sperm donor so that, as Isaacson writes, “the kids would be genetically his.”

So we can preface each new article with "admitted eugenicist Elon Musk" right?

I guess as far as Thom's favorite singers go, 3 + 3 = 5.

this guy is speedrunning a country music career

Techno Mechanicus

Somebody please cut off this man's testicles.

After so much time spent reading Tom's The Number Ones column, I had a strong feeling XTC was not his bag, baby, but man, I was still so happy to read a piece on this song. And I laughed at the description of the bass player teacher, because yeah, that's a fair cop on a lot of XTC fans I knew growing up (as a girl who loved XTC I was somewhat of an outlier in my area).

I posted a couple weeks ago about my now-husband wooing me by launching into this song at a party (because he'd seen me wearing an old XTC Skylarking T-shirt months before), but I didn't tell the second part- when he opened with those little arpeggios I immediately blurted, "You play guitar?PLEASE TEACH ME."(I had wanted to learn as a teenager but my dad was not big on the idea and discouraged it- it's okay, I still miss you, Dad).Anyway, I promptly forgot about my request to my new guy, but a couple months later, at our first Christmas as a couple, he gave me a guitar.And my first few lessons. I thought about that this summer when we went to see Barbie and Ken has that great line, "Come on in, I'll play guitar at you."And I was grateful all over again to have met someone who understood that girls and women like to learn to do cool things themselves, too, not just watch someone else do them.I'll never be a great guitarist, but I'm happy every time I take it out to practice.For that alone, this song will always be a 10 for me.

(I still loved this read today, though, and now I've got to go listen to this song and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" back to back.)

The Tennessean and USA Today need to hire a Moby journalist to get to the bottom of this.