Happy Thanksgiving!

This Girls Aloud live performance of "Watch Me Go" is what I'm thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Return of the Mashup!

I have just started working on an epic mashup project, but it will take awhile. To tide you over, here is a mashup I made actually back in September, just for my own listening pleasure. It is my favorite mashup so far. I figured it was time to share it.

Kate Bush - "Hounds of Love (Alternate)" v. Kylie Minogue - "Speakerphone"

Mariah Loves Roland

Roland Barthes, that is. My microwave:


You probably can't read that, because: pink colored pencil + my bad handwriting + blurry camera phone photo, so here is what Mariah is saying:

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

This is my favorite Roland Barthes quote. It's from page 12 of Mythologies.

Circus

I was going to write a whole little essay about Circus full of hopefully insightful thoughts. I started writing it on Wednesday and then stopped because I felt like I was just blabbering on and not capturing what's so great about it. I still don't really know how to write about what I love about pop music. All I really want to say is that it's not as good as Blackout, but it comes pretty darn close, and I love it and it was exactly what I needed right now in my life. When it comes out a week from Tuesday, go buy a copy.

Two of my three favorite songs, "Circus" and bonus track "Trouble" (I already posted about the third, "Phonography"):

My Least Favorite Song

This week my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, finally took a stand against my least favorite song of all time, "Stupid Girls" by Pink. Yes, the song is over two years old. But it was sort of topical because Sasha Frere-Jones, their pop music critic, was reviewing her new album Funhouse. He writes:

Two songs on "I'm Not Dead" showed the strain of constructing the perfectly balanced anti-commercial commercial act. ... More troubling yet was "Stupid Girls," a song that tries to recapture the mission-statement feeling of "Missundaztood" but fails owing to a lack of generosity. The song and the video seek to distinguish Pink from Lindsay, Paris, and Jessica, and the lyrics sincerely ask, "Where, oh were, have the smart people gone?" Pink has shown no small amount of flesh in her rise to the top, so calling out anyone else's bra tactics is a highly suspect move. She's no stranger to the Hilton Doctrine ("I'll do what I want, cuz I can"). And "Smart" isn't really Pink's stock-in-trade. She's a female version of Aerosmioth's Steven Tyler, a skilled ham, long on humor, spritz, and vigor, but hardly a visionary.

What I like about this is that he's not saying it's bad that she's showed skin or that she follows the Hilton Doctrine, just that it's "ungenerous" of her to criticize others for doing so. What I don't like about this review is that it isn't negative enough.

Here is the offending song.

I get so angry whenever I hear this song being recommended as a feminist pop song, and that's obviously what Pink thinks she's making. But, really, how hard is it to figure out that a feminist song wouldn't and shouldn't be called "Stupid Girls"? Is this the reason that there's not a female president? Because girls are stupid? This is the worst feminist song ever!

From the wikipedia page about the song:

The single was praised by Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling on her official website. She wrote, "'Stupid Girls', is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness."

Good point, J.K. Rowling. The antidote to all of the negative messages about thinness in our culture that cause girls to have eating disorders is to call girls who want to be thin stupid. How did no one figure this out before?

Also from wikipedia:

According to International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, the song "highlights the culture's relentless and unrealistic pursuit of thinness and unattainable drive for physical beauty".

Yeah, it highlights it by mocking people who have bulimia and portraying them as brain-dead idiots. Seriously, if you haven't watched the video, there's a skit in the middle where Pink pretends to be a stupid bulimic woman, complete with retching sounds. I don't really know much about the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and I'm sure they do really good work, but I'm so dissapointed that they would promote a song that mocks people with eating disorders and call them stupid. Is that how eating disorder professionals deal with their patients one on one? Do skits about them being airheads? Did Pink not consider that a skit of someone vomiting in the middle of her music video could be triggering? Did she not consider that low self esteem is one of the causes of eating disorders, so maybe a whole song about how people who have eating disorders are stupid may not be a solution?

It's the bulimia skit in the middle that really makes this my least favorite song ever. I can't even give Pink credit for good intentions. This song is just her congratulating herself for being smarter than other women. That is not feminism.

In order to cleanse my palate from blogging about this awful song, I will post this song that I've really been enjoying a lot this month. What It Is by Sophia Fresh ft. Kanye West:

Phonography!

One of my favorite songs from the just-leaked Circus is a bonus track, Phonography. Some lyrics:

And I make no apologies, (Uh-uh)
I’m into phonography, (Uh-uh)
And I like my bluetooth buttons comin’ loose,
I need my hands free,
Then I let my mind roam,
Playing with my ringtone.

I love music that is about technology. In fact, I spent a whole quarter writing a paper about it this past winter. Phonography has inspired me to do a list of songs about technology, arranged by technology, of course.

Songs about 808s:

"808" by Blaque (embedding disabled)

"Luv Songs" by The-Dream:



(In looking for Luv Songs on youtube, I also found a chopped and screwed version!! It is amazingly great, actually. Please go listen to it.)

Songs about Phones:

"Beep Me 911" by Missy Elliott featuring 702 and Magoo



"Speakerphone" by Kylie Minogue



What a difference ten years makes in terms of telephonic technologies, huh? Instead of beepers we all have speakerphones in our pockets now ... Actually, I didn't ever have a beeper.

Songs about Musical Technologies

"Mute" by Jessa Luna



"Rewind" by Asia Cruise ft. Fabolous



"Feedback" by Janet Jackson



A Song about Webcams, I think:

"Digital Getdown" by Nsync



I love how people on youtube just can't stand it when their favorite song doesn't have a video. (Sidenote: the first time I saw the video for "Give It To Me," I totally thought it was a fan-made video of this sort. I was like, "Hey, sometimes the lipsyncing almost matches up!" Whoops.)

A Song about Just Technology in General

"Ayo Technology" by 50 Cent ft. Justin Timberlake and Timbaland



I've written before about how this song is super gay, and also how it's secretly about Tomorrow's Eve. Which brings us to ...

A Song About the Phonograph:

"Phonography" by Britney Spears



(Okay, that video will probably dissapear in ten minutes ...)

The phonograph, of course, was invented by Thomas Edison. If you had told me a few weeks ago that there would be a song on "Circus" that was more about Tomorrow's Eve than "Ayo Technology" is, I wouldn't have believed you. And yet, there is ...

Watch Dynasty

I watched the first season of Dynasty last winter. A classmate in my critique group was writing an amazing paper on portrayals of non-normative characters in soap operas, including Dynasty. She loaned me her DVDs of the first season and I watched the whole thing. So I could give her better feedback. No other reason, of course. The common opinion about Dynasty seems to be that the first season, before Joan Collins joins the cast, is boring. Well, if the first season is boring, I can't wait to watch the rest, because I thought it was fantastic. If Joan Collins' Alexis is half as great as her daughter, Fallon, then I will be thrilled.

Last night, much to my excitement, I discovered that CBS.com has full episodes of the first two seasons that you can watch for free. Scroll over "Shows" and look under "TV Classics" on the far right. I watched the first episode of season two, and it was great. Fans of campy soap operas might want to note that they also have the first 4 seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 and the first season of Melrose Place.

If you want to read my classmate's paper, you can find it and my review of it on the Fashioning the Body website. It's "Framing the Body" by Ella Bowman. It also covers Melrose Place.

Gay comics!

I just discovered the blog Comics Should Be Good, which is doing a post each day in November for a series called Month of Good LGBT Comics. Definitely worth checking out.

Science is Both Sexist and the Worst

Next time someone tries to tell you either 1) that science isn't sexist; or 2) that science isn't the worst, show them this article from today's New York Times: In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes are in Competition. For example:

Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression.

Yep, those men with their mechanical systems and their lack of social development, and those women with their hypersensitivity and psychosis!

For the record, the article doesn't give any evidence why genes from the father lead to the autistic spectrum and genes from the mother lead to the psychotic spectrum. I guess we're just supposed to take it for granted?

ATC: Gayer Than Steps!

My sheer joy at discovering this German pop band from the early 2000s has prompted me to post on this blog for the first time in almost 5 months.

"My Heart Beats Like a Drum" by ATC



"Around the World" by ATC



A comment found on this youtube video: "This is obviously a big advert for Homosexuality"