Mike made me do this.

So let's ramble about for awhile. I've been sitting in the dark void of my parents house for almost a week now on vacation. My brain is mush. There's a crazy lady installing cable here. She's been here for four hours, I know she has two kids named brandy and monica, she's gettng subway for dinner and she wears a red scarf.
Ok so Mike wanted to know why Deerhoof was a good band. I could go into how they are mainstreaming deconstructionist japanese metal into a popular "listanable" format. That's a long boring discussion and most of you have never heard of The boredoms...aside from their drummer Yoshmi who has a whole album about her killing pink robots. So let me just say thet Deerhoof are great because they are fucking hillarious. They have a song in which the chorus is Panda pan-pan-pan-da panda panda-pan-da-China- Night light. Come on. How is that not beautiful. They aren't all up on their high horse claiming to be beautiful experimentalists. They just like noise rock and twee music and mixing the two together.I listen to Deerhoof when I need to not think about the crazy shit in my life. Or really organised thought at all. Anyway the point is this. Music has lots of different sides to it. As does all art. Deerhoof is abstract joy. It's not for everyone. A lot of people would look at it and say my kid could do that... and a bunch of kids did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9OXHToasy8 So I find Deerhoof to be this totally unrelentless machine of unfiltered joy. Like a bunch of kids running around at chucke cheese loaded up on red bull. They are so full of energy and anything and everything they do puts a smile on their face. And also there's a shitload of screaming. This of course is to be taken in moderation. Usually I listen to the new deerhoof when it comes out, put it on the shelf after a couple of weeks, then pull it out when i need like an hour of their specific medecine. Those times alone when we allow ourselves to be utterly unhinged. Yes I have jumped around my apartent in only my boxers screaming out every word of Apple'o. And then reality came back and I had to do something shitty like go to work. But for that glorious 31.2 minutes i was a careless child. And that's why they're an awsome band. They have the ability to move your brain into a whole different sphere of thinking if you let them. And no drugs are involved...well your brain is pumping all sorts of shit out on it's own. So there as incoherent as i can make it... Deerhoof is good because it makes me happy. Put that in your philosophical book of proofs and smoke it. And really in the end who cares...Totally not doing spell checker...or editting this...

EDIT: Mike's 104 Songs to Hear Before You Die: Song #1

So two things, both inspired by Dan. The first was a great couple of mix CDs he made me. Although it wasn't all my style, I liked listening to the things he thought were worthy of a mixtape, and almost every song was new to me. There were a few gems, and in fact the first 3 songs on the 2nd disc went great together, so I wanted to post them:
MP3: The Airborne Toxic Event - Sometime Around Midnight
MP3: Leona Naess - Unnamed (This Song Makes Me Happy)
MP3: Jens Lekman - Kanske Är Jag Kär I Dig

He also mentioned the free mp3 of the day at Spinner, and I was intrigued, because I'm always a fan of free music. So I headed over and checked it out. I was a little disappointed just because it's an AOL run site with not a lot going on, but they had a segment called I "F'in love that song," and it invited people to submit the song they freakin' love. So I couldn't help it, and I submitted the first great song that came to my head. Since they haven't posted a new one in over a month, I think it may have been a waste, which is too bad, because I love writing about why I love a song. So here is my first submission, and I plan to do some more (I think Sun Kil Moon "Glenn Tipton" will be next.)

"Muzzle," The Smashing Pumpkins
From 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

You know that friend you have who thinks they know good music because
they can sing all the words off whatever Top 40 radio song is playing
at the moment. Well that was me. I loved listening to music, but I
was misguided as to what made a song "good." Enter The Smashing
Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness". I hadn't even
heard the soon to be ubiquitous "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" yet, and
knew the band in name alone when a friend bought me their double album
for my birthday. Although Siamese Dream is usually argued to be their
strongest effort, for a junior high kid with all the emotional drama
that goes along with it, the roller coaster ride of Mellon Collie
seared itself onto my soul as a personal soundtrack. The album lead
to the realization that there was music being made out there that
could really speak to me on a personal level, which, at the age of
fourteen, is an exciting thing to learn. No song wrapped me in its
own self-importance more so than Muzzle. From Billy Corgan's nasal
yelp of "I fear that I am ordinary just like everyone," to the
over-the-top, pounding drum roll in the second verse, the song thrust
me into true teenagerdom. I remember writing the lyrics out on
notebook paper, daily, during study hall, including the litany of
things Billy claims he "knows" at the end of the song. I think I, and
every teenager who has ever been oppressed by the emptiness of youth,
knew the silence of the world, too.

I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone
To lie here and die among the sorrows
Adrift among the days
For everything I ever said
And everything Ive ever done is gone and dead

(chorus)
As all things must surely have to end
And great loves will one day have to part
I know that I am meant for this world

My life has been extraordinary
Blessed and cursed and won
Time heals but Im forever broken
By and by the way...
Have you ever heard the words
Im singing in these songs?
Its for the girl Ive loved all along
Can a taste of love be so wrong

(chorus)

And in my mind as I was floating
Far above the clouds
Some children laughed Id fall for certain
For thinking that Id last forever

But I knew exactly where I was
And I knew the meaning of it all
And I knew the distance to the sun
And I knew the echo that is love
And I knew the the secrets in your spires
And I knew the emptiness of youth
And I knew the solitude of heart
And I knew the murmurs of the soul
And the world is drawn into your hands
And the world is etched upon your heart
And the world so hard to understand
Is the world you cant live without
And I knew the silence of the world

What Is It Good For?

So when I was growing up my mom always used to give me a hard time that my generation stole everything from her generation (bell bottoms were back in style, movies and music covers were rampant, and she thought most of our music sounded like copycats of her music growing up) and we didn't have any original material. Good thing for her I wasn't into gangsta rap or goth music I guess. Anyways, there is a grain of truth to what she said, because most of the bands I like wear their influences on their respective sleeves, but she also mentioned that her generation's music had great protest songs that our generation could never duplicate. Well, I think I can make a strong argument against that, although I think much of my generation, and easily most everybody else, have no idea the great protest songs that have come into being in post-9/11 America. So on the eve of the most historic election in generations, here are some of my generation's memos to The Man.

(P.S. - I love doing playlists like this, but I always (a) forget something I meant to include (b) forget something that I should have thought of and (c) am introduced to something I had no idea about but would be a perfect match to the list. So, please, comments or posts with your own protest songs)

Protest Songs Playlist :
1) Wilco - War on War
2) Rilo Kiley - It's a Hit
3) The Decemberists - 16 Military Wives
4) The Thermals - Power Doesn't Run on Nothing
5) System of a Down - B.Y.O.B.
6) Nine Inch Nails - Capital G
7) Drive-By Truckers - That Man I Shot
8) Mike Doughty - Move On
9) Elliott Smith - A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free
10) Bright Eyes - Land Locked Blues
11) Tom Waits - Day After Tomorrow
12) Outkast - Love in War
13) TV on the Radio - Red Dress
14) Bruce Springsteen - Last to Die
15) John Fogerty - I Can't Take It No More
16) Radiohead - 2+2=5 (The Lukewarm.)
17) The Smashing Pumpkins - United States
18) System of a Down - Boom!
19) Green Day - American Idiot
20) The Arcade Fire - Windowsill
21) Devendra Banhart - Heard Somebody Say
22) Drive-By Truckers - The Homefront
23) TV on the Radio - I Was A Lover
24) Mike Doughty - Fort Hood
25) Bright Eyes - Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and Be Loved)
26) Pearl Jam - World Wide Suicide
27) System of a Down - F*** the System
28) Bloc Party - Helicopter
29) M.I.A. - Pull Up The People
30) Outkast - War
31) Blitzen Trapper - Furr

Expect an embedded playlist and some mp3s to follow, but I just want to get this up for now...