Whistling: It’s The New Black! Or At Least The New Coke Blak!

noah | August 27, 2007 3:00 am
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The week before Labor Day ranks somewhere around the week between Christmas and New Year’s as far as slow music-news weeks go–everyone’s out of town, or dreaming about being out of town, or getting blind drunk in order to be mentally ready for the MTV Video Music Awards. But still, no slow music-news week is so slow, it requires three stories about the new trend of whistling and how said boomlet was inspired by the Swedish pop group Peter, Bjorn & John, and their catchy-beyond-all-hell track “Young Folks.” The proof? A quote from someone who runs a whistler-aficionado Yahoo! Group and a bunch of twentysomethings who were presumably found while swinging on the flippity-flop. (Ah, trend stories! Your stone-soup something-outta-nothingness made you my favorite things to write during my brief stint in journalism school.)

Sure, they’re playing Boston next week, and this is a cute way to preview that gig (if a little early, since the show isn’t until Sept. 7). But was the “how to whistle” sidebar necessary? Or the list of songs that feature whistling, even though it does fill a void left by Wikipedia?

On the bright side, maybe now that the art of whistling is being picked up again, PB&J will be able to find ringers in each city to handle the trickier parts of “Young Folks.”

Finally! Whistling is cool again [boston.com, via Gawker]