My Favourite Game

I love “My Favourite Game” by The Cardigans. Fantastic song, and I remember the video well.

Where many music videos went over the top in an effort to stand out (don’t get me wrong; there were of course some cracking ones at the time) this one stood out because of its simplicity. Just Nina Persson, looking smoking hot and cool as anything, doing nothing but singing and driving. And it was bloody brilliant. Almost like Nothing Compares 2 U in its simplicity, but this made you want to party rather than slit your wrists.

So I was very surprised when I went looking for it on YouTube today to find this video:

It turns out that the original video was a lavish, car-crash studded epic, which cost £220,000 to make. The one that was played on all the UK music channels, the one that I grew up with, the one that I thought was a masterpiece of minimalism, was actually the result of editing out all the violent and irresponsible bits to please the censors.

And yet having now seen the original, I still much prefer the “censored” version.

Pink Floyd Fan’s Guide to Cambridge

Took a quick look at a Pink Floyd Fan’s Guide to Cambridge in a bookshop today, and there were some amusingly tenuous links.

  • Trinity College: Isaac Newton studied here, and also discovered the phenomenon illustrated on the cover of Dark Side of The Moon
  • The Regal: The Beatles played here. Syd Barrett bought a ticket, but never made it to the gig because he had an interview.

Bittersweet bundle of misery

Good grief, Winamp for Android is awesome. MixZing was certainly clever, but was getting increasingly buggy and frustrating. Winamp runs smooth as anything and has a wonderful interface, yet it’s still in beta! Only thing I miss is being able to swipe on the lockscreen to skip tracks, but that’s a minor quibble. Haven’t yet got the wireless sync to work, but if it does then this moves into killer app territory.

So I installed Winamp on the laptop to try and use wireless sync. Had it scan my library, then popped on the “Top Rated” playlist. Eerily it started playing my favourite songs – from about 2 years ago when I last used Winamp – on a different computer! It must save rating/playcount information in the files I guess. Kind of nice, I haven’t listened to some of these songs in a long time and it’s evoking some serious nostalgia.

Amusingly in my library this is just titled “That Music From the Dancing Car Advert”:

It got me thinking, a lot of music listening history is stored on last.fm. It would be nice to be able to say “take me back to 200X” and cue up a playlist of stuff I was listening to then. Maybe pull up some timely photos from Facebook/Flickr to add to the experience, and some old BBC news headlines. Automatically lower the screen resolution to a suitable level – ok, maybe not that.

But won’t it be absurd

Cover songs again. First up, I mentioned Tetrastar’s “Soulja Boy” in a previous post. Well everyone should go to their website and download the free album Songs We Didn’t Write. If Dragonforce, Jonathan Coulton, Modest Mouse, Sparks, and System of a Down cover versions weren’t enough to tempt you, there’s an almost sacrilegious yet strangely brilliant cover of Hallelujah as well. Plus the mindblowing “4 Chord Song”.

Next, the most 80s thing ever (and probably NSFW):
Amanda Lear – Wild Thing

Last, a cover version found in a really odd way. I was listening to the Dandy Warhols 2003 album Welcome to the Monkey House for the first time in ages. At least I was until partway through the opening title track when I noticed the lyrics:

When Michael Jackson dies
We’re covering Blackbird
And won’t it be absurd then
When no one knows what song they just heard
Unless someone on the radio tells them first

So on a whim I googled “dandy warhols blackbird”, and it turns out they kept their promise. And it’s pretty good too:
The Dandy Warhols – Blackbird

Crank That Soulja Boy

I hate the song in the title of this post. Hate it with a passion. I honestly think it might be the worst song I’ve ever heard, representing all that is terrible about modern music, and made worse by its bizarre popularity and almost omnipresence during 2007.

Well, that goes for the original anyway.

But replace the horrendous steel drums with a beautifully fashioned electronic backing (including almost 8-bit sounds), get a sweet young woman singing the bizarre lyrics, and dress up a dog for the video, and you get this. I couldn’t believe anyone could make this song listenable, let alone loveable, but they have.

And then just the other day I found this. It’s proof of Devo’s sheer awesomeness that they can make Soulja Boy sound good. I honestly can’t stop listening to it.