Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

My 15th anniversary was yesterday. I got my wife some cool clothes, and she got me a bottle of Valentino Uomo. Friends, I smell like an expensive bitch now. I love it.

Way back when The Number Ones closed out the 80s, some TNOCSers posted their Shallow countdowns of performers with #1s, and mine was topped by Morten Harket of a-ha and Michael Hutchence of INXS, the light and the dark of sheer male beauty. That never changed.

I was pregnant in 1990, and on hot nights when my husband was working late or on the road my friends would come take me out so I could drink free tonic and lime (no bartender ever charges a visibly pregnant woman for soft drinks, at least not in Jersey) and bask in music and air conditioning. "It’s a relic of an era when people still danced to rock bands, and when rock bands made music to facilitate that dancing. There were plenty of 'Suicide Blonde' remixes, but you could imagine a club DJ throwing on the album version without clearing the floor"- Tom nails it. I recall kindergarten best friend and daughter's future godmother sprinting for the floor when this kicked off. If there's ever been such a thing as a banger, "Suicide Blonde" is a banger.

Pre-empting the inevitable comments about the decline of Sam Beam's popularity. I think he was and is great -- a wonderful lyricist and a now criminally underrated songwriter. As I've said before, I blame lazy music journalists, who always going on about his beard and pretend that he's some kind of twee folkie. The guy's songwriting is much, much more than that. It is beautiful, death and religion-haunted stuff. Sam is one of the great American lyricists of this century.

Chastity Belt Are a Band

Been cracking my knuckles for weeks on this one.

Sexual tension is such a rich topic for music. It may be one of the most complex social exchanges we participate in. How can one properly express this push and pull of boundaries, especially when one of the people involved is ostensibly committed?

Well, here's an easy tip:

Do not use a phrase associated with rapists as your main hook

When the guys in this song croon that they "hate these blurred linessss", I don't hear sexy, I hear petulance. In my life I've been followed, grabbed, pretty much anything but outright raped and there is just a whiny baby attitude to all those predators, they can't see past "I want I want I want" and think about literally anyone else but themselves.

And we see this mindset in a song that provides very little interiority for women. She gets one active decision ("The way you grab me / must wanna get nasty") in an entire song of whooping and hollering and backslapping. "I know you want it"? Then why don't we spend any time on her coy glances, the hand on your hand, the hand on your waist? What happened to show don't tell? Oh, right, because these guys don't pay attention to the signals women give them.

And then you're like, well, maybe this is a BDSM feint like "E.T." and all the objectification is part of the fantasy. Except the fantasy fucking sucks because your Dom is whining all over the chorus!

I can't help but read this song as existing within the cultural context of the reactionary "anti SJWs" of the early 2010s. You had to be either oblivious or malicious to release an ode to "dudeeee, the waiter was totally hot for me" in 2013. Personally, based on interviews, I'm thinking oblivious. Oblivious to an irresponsible degree.

5/10 cause it's catchy

Note: Edited out a "fuck you" to the creators of the song, I generally don't think people should be defined by writing something terrible and I was letting my annoyance get the best of me.

Not sure Lars has the acting chops to convincingly play a drummer

I can confirm that INXS remained A Big Deal through 1992. I was in high school when "Suicide Blonde" and "Disappear" dropped, and those singles were everywhere. Even in the summer of 1992 "Not Enough Time" earned plenty of airplay on my college station. It was 1993, yeah, when the bottom fell out. "The Gift" got a couple spins but dat's dat.

INXS' singles collection is one of the glories of the western world.

I can honestly say that I try to find something good in every record that comes down the pike.

But I remember when this one came out. I hated it immediately.

It’s smarmy. The whole project screams AI before we really had AI.

It lifts way too much from the Marvin Gaye record. Unlike effective and successful two-chord songs, it doesn’t even try to be a little inventive with that limitation. Flat as a Denny’s pancake. Which, come to think of it, is a little unfair to Denny’s.

And I know we’re not supposed to consider the video when speaking about the quality of the song and production, but: talk about offensive. And I am of course referring to the, “let’s show how relevant we are and scroll hashtags every 11 seconds.” Yes. We know. You are #THICKE. Because you keep hitting us over the head with it. It somehow reminds me of Jeb Bush’s “ please clap”moment.

At the time, I thought, “Whelp, that’s it. If is what ‘catchy pop music’ is going to be like from now on, I’m not sure how much longer I can hang in with the top 40.”

But just like after “Stars On 45” hit the top of the chart, other things came along to save me from giving up. As they always do.

#getoffmylawn

I don't watch videos much, so for a while I just judged this song on its musical merits. It's a good example of asong that I was enthusiastic about for maybe the first 2 times I heard it. Then I started getting the sense of what the lyrics represented, and started feeling like the song was too repetitive. My opinion of it dropped pretty quickly to the point that I really never wanted to hear it. So I'd give it a 4, just like Tom.

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I'm glad to read Tom's general disappointment of the Gaye estate's lawsuit. I take a pretty liberal stance on borrowing of others' material relative to copyrights. That is, there were already too many lawsuits, usually just people trying to associate themselves with a song to cash in on its profits. Musical (as opposed to lyrical) copying is especially difficult to prove. For example, I do see why George Harrison had to pay for his copy of "He's So Fine", but Ray Parker, Jr.'s "Ghostbusters" doesn't sound nearly close enough to "I Want a New Drug" in my mind to justify paying royalties. There is no universe where the writers of "Blurred Lines" should have had to pay the Gaye's estate. Ripping off a vibe is not royalty-worthy. Now that it is (legally), it just makes everything so much more complicated and encourages more lawsuits.

delete this

can't wait for friday to dig into this dog fest