I Hate You And It Never Ends!

Does Kim Gordon really hate Britney Spears, or is she just being silly and ironic when she slips her name into “Plastic Sun”? According to Josh, yeah, she does. This makes me completely re-think the nature of the Ciccone Youth album…

I Want You To Know

Flaming Lips fans should check out their live session/interview on Morning Becomes Eclectic, which you can listen to in the real audio archive linked. The interview is very good; they talk about titles, how Yoshimi was written, cover versions, and death. Wayne Coyne and Steve Drozdz are nice, articulate guys who say the word ‘gal’ a lot.

The Lips’ cover of “Knives Out” is really great, I think it improves upon Radiohead’s original. Their arrangement drops the Marr-ish guitars, and is mostly piano and drums. It’s not that far off from the arrangement Radiohead used for “Life In A Glass House” and “Pyramid Song”, and I’d be interested in hearing Radiohead performing this version themselves. Maybe it’s just the fact that Wayne Coyne has a much warmer voice than Thom Yorke, but the solemnity of the lyrics come out more in the Flaming Lips version, and the song sounds much more sad to my ears, rather than just dark and gloomy as it is in the Radiohead original.

They also do Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” as a slow, brooding dirge, which I don’t think works quite as well as the original. Wayne said before they played it that they wanted to show how sad the song is, how it’s a well-written song about obsessive longing; and on those terms I think their version is a success. They played “Do You Realize” and “In The Morning Of The Magicians” with arrangements fairly close to the album versions, but those aren’t nearly as great as the piano-ballad renditions of “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1” and “One More Robot”, both of which I need to find copies of online.

“You Know What I Did? I BALLED Her!”

“I Treat Your Coochie Like A Maze” by Gold Chains has got to be the most disturbing pop song I’ve heard in a long time. It’s techno pop, with Gold Chains shouting in his drill sergeant voice “get that coochie over here, I want to fuck it all year/ see that coochie looking tight, I wanna lick it all night” over and over before rapping through the middle of the song. Now, the guy’s voice is scary enough as it is, but he saw fit to add some distortion to his voice, making him sound like Cookie Monster on a rape spree. It’s just awful – I can’t imagine any woman on earth finding this song even remotely sexy, and I’m quite sure that Gold Chains intended this song to be that way. It makes me think of the part of Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster’s “The Gorch” sketch in which the title character, a thug from the 50s, insists that women love it when you “holler at ’em”.

Note: I added new ‘recommended songs of the week’ yesterday, and a ‘comments’ option today. I do this because I love you.