I went to PS 112 in Astoria to vote this morning, and while the school’s lobby was bake-sale-free, casting my ballot and walking to the subway put me in a good mood. The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and the promise of not being bombarded with election-related speculation was close on the horizon, at least until some idiot commentator utters the word “2012” while scrambling to fill space on whatever cable-news channel has given him airtime. Which is probably why I had Andrew WK’s “Party Hard” in my head: Sure, it was barely after nine in the morning and I was on my way back to work, instead of heading out for the evening, but my heart felt right–like it was enjoying some wine, canapes, and total fucking raging. And isn’t that what matters? A counterpoint party song, and a rundown of some notable stories that got lost in the Election Day shuffle, after the jump.
The occasionally reliable NME reports today that Simon Cowell is kicking around the idea of purchasing England’s venerable Top of the Pops brand, which was largely abandoned by the BBC in 2006. While even the idea of a television show on a major network featuring “live” music from chart-topping acts (and nationalized health insurance) fills me with this-side-of-the-ocean jealousy, I have to wonder what a Cowell-captained TOTP would look like.
Wednesday night I spent $16 on jukeboxes at two establishments in New York City. Sixteen dollars! That could buy, I don’t know, three pints of ice cream at the bodega down the block. But I felt like the investment was worth it, particularly at the second bar I visited, where six Washingtons allowed me to blare 19 songs throughout the bar and my friend and I were pretty much the only customers left in the place. Not that other patrons would have stopped me from playing the Monkees’ “Valleri” and the Raincoats’ “In Love”*; after all, the huge catalogs of the Internet-jukebox era have made it a lot easier to impose your tastes on others, even if doing so costs you an extra credit per song. So this weekend, I wonder: What songs will you always play on a jukebox if you have some unused dollar bills rustling around your wallet? Five songs that I have no problem dropping 25 to 100 cents on after the jump.
The man who kindly asked listeners to not read the lyric booklet while listening to his band’s masterpiece Different Class–perhaps because he was drunk while writing 90% of said words, and nursing a hell of a hangover whle penning the remaining 10%–may seem like an odd choice for a symposium on… More »
The are many witty/goofy sites out there right now offering various détournements of classic comic strips/books, but it’s going to take effort to top the cast of Archie doing a dramatic reading of the lyrics to Pulp’s “Common People.” More »
From today’s “it’s hardly new, but I kinda needed to post it” files: There’s not a Pulp record from His ‘N Hers onward that you shouldn’t have near your nightstand for when one of those late-night, blackly sardonic moods hits, but the way-way-way (way) underrated We Love Life might be my favorite… More »
Arrrgh! It was bad enough that the New York city DJ crew MisShapes had to MisAppropriate one of our favorite Pulp songs; now, they’re even starting to crib their fashion, too. Why hasn’t Jarvis done anything about this/ Is he out shopping for oversized novelty spectacles again? More »
Former Pulp lead singer Jarvis Cocker’s new album, Jarvis, comes out in the UK on Nov. 13; we haven’t heard anything about a US release date, but if the shoddy treatment received by Pulp’s final album is any indication, some Stateside label will probably wait six months or so… More »
Last night, we were listening to a copy of Pulp’s recently remastered Different Class album–it’s an import, though you can get it super cheap at CD-WOW–and when the first song came on, we… More »
