Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

Here's the issue I have with "Harlem Shake" being a number one song on the Hot 100: people weren't listening to the SONG.

"Gangham Style" was clearly the most popular song in America during at least some of the time it was at number 2, even with very limited airplay. When people watched it, by and large they watched the original artist video, they watched and thus heard most if not all of the song, and the record got airplay.

In contract, there wasn't even an artist video for "Harlem Shake,' with people watching a whole bunch of different videos instead. They didn't hear the whole song, just 30 second clips. And the song got no radio airplay and if I recall only got up to #3 on the sales chart so there wasn't much impact on other metrics. I don't think it even got many streams.

So this wasn't a hit song. It was a fad. When people heard it, they were hearing it because they were watching a funny video, not because they wanted to hear the song.

If this counted towards the Hot 100, so too should use of a song in a TV or streaming show that a lot of people were watching; for example, since "Wednesday" is one of the biggest Netflix shows of all time, its views should have counted towards chart points for "Goo Goo Muck." And how many millions of people still hear the theme from "Friends" every week? Should that count toward the chart?

I do think some YouTube views should count for the charts, but they should distinguish between views to listen to the song itself or other uses. Clearly the artist's original music video should count. But if, say, the last scene of "Breaking Bad" went viral for some reason, then those views should not count towards chart points for "Baby Blue" by Badfinger. If Billboard actually cared enough (which they don't), I'm sure they could figure something out to make this work.

OK, rant over.

I know that this album isn't explicitly about substance abuse, but this is what I think about when I listen to it. I'm ashamed to say that I listened to this album a lot while drunk off my ass, and I would cry a lot and feel really bad for myself and generally act self-destructive. I'm sober for almost a year now (anniversary is mid-March), and I'm still listening to Home, like Noplace Is There, and still doing a fair share of crying to it, but it's more grateful tears. I hear sadness in these songs, but I hear value in the sadness, like it meant something, and was helpful to me in some way. I don't know, I'm still trying to figure it out exactly how I feel. But I know for sure that there is such power here, and I feel so strongly when I listen. It was important to me when I was a mess, but I think it's my favorite album of all time in sobriety, if that makes sense (I don't know if it does).

I'm kind of intimidated by any GY!BE fan hardcore enough to actually discern if a song they perform is new.

And Now For Something Completely Different: And now we’re up to a song that Tom hates. Granted, Dan Smith’s tortured choirboy voice might be an acquired taste, but “Pompeii” is all about that great chanted “Eh-eheu-eheu” and kettledrums galore. Wonderfully depressive refrains like “ How am I gonna be an optimist about this?” and “Where do we begin: the rubble or our sins?” are just the cherry on top.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=F90Cw4l-8NY

It is not especially hard to criticize Israel or Zionism without being anti-Semitic and also while remaining intellectually consistent.

But, dear Lord, folks seem to fucking dance across that line.

Finally! An album about German sausage

A before-and-after record for me. I’ve cried to these songs more times than I can count on one hand. Such powerful writing all over this record. I think I saw em 3 times in a year or so after I first heard it. The best one was a show in a cafe in suburban chicago. There’s not really much quite like shouting along to your favorite emo songs with a couple hundred people.

I remember meeting Mark Ibold at a bar in Brooklyn a few years after Pavement broke up and asked what he was up to on the music front and he basically said not much because he’s just a bass player so he waits around for some band to ask him to play with them.

A few years later he was playing with Sonic Youth. Worth the wait.

"I’m the bass player. The bass players always are the last people to find out about shit like that"

Bass players everywhere shed one single tear upon reading

But can you karaoke it?

No.

"Harlem Shake" does not get a single microphone.

All right, all right, no need to brag about the length of your organ piece