Once again, Overthinkingit hops into the saddle for Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl Film Club. This month’s pick:  The Car.

Can we all just take a minute to consider how stupid that title is, by the way?  Sure, there’s a proud tradition of naming horror movies after the thing that’s doing the killing:  “Anaconda,” “Piranha,” “Bats,” “Orca,” “Leeches!,” etc.  etc.  These all work as titles because the things they refer to are scary, or at least used to be until Free Willy came out. I get nervous when I see an anaconda at the zoo.  I twitch a little when I type the word piranha – have you seen pictures of these bastards?  “The Car” isn’t going to do the trick.

Yes, I know carbon emissions are destroying the planet.  Don’t care.  I know that drunk driving is the number one killer of Americans aged 1-29.  Still don’t care.  Cars aren’t scary.  It doesn’t matter how many people they kill.  I mean, would you go to see a horror movie called “The Heart Disease?”  At the very least, they could have used this for the tagline…

Fugu is a pretty outstanding band, you guys! Although that might stretch the definition of the word band: Fugu is basically the French multi-instrumentalist Mehdi Zannad and an enormous rotating cast of studio musicians. Track and links after the jump.

Last week, I was sitting in a bar in the village of Ngare Ndare in northern Kenya, nursing a Krest Bitter Lemon, and listening to the radio. The radio was tuned to Metro FM, “Kenya’s House of Reggae.” Amidst the chain of nondescript contemporary reggae hits, the refrain of one song in particular caught my attention: “Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, woi wooooi” As soon as I got back to my computer, I learned that the song is by Jamaican reggae artist Cocoa Tea, whose substantial back catalogue is only probably familiar to reggae and dancehall enthusiasts. Despite Cocoa Tea’s relative obscurity in the US, the song is already becoming massively popular in Kenya, even though it was only released sometime last week. (MP3 after the jump.)

In the mid 1960s, Cambodian musicians began to combine the scales and instrumentation of traditional Khmer music with surf guitar, farfisa organ, rock beats and balls-out vocals, all drenched with echo and distortion. The result is quite simply the most exciting garage rock I have ever heard. Audio files after the jump.

I know this isn’t news: Anyone who really pays attention to hip-hop probably knows about the new Clipse mixtape already. But hey, we all have busy schedules. So just consider this a friendly reminder to download We Got It 4 Cheap III (via the always-worth-reading Sasha Frere-Jones).

You might also enjoy reading the review at Pitchfork, which would have you believe that the crown jewel in Clipse’s impressive list of achievements is their ability to entertain “indie kids.” Pitchfork is always good for touching off a bout of hipster-self-loathing. (Apparently it’s hyphen day here on over-thinking-it-dot-com. Just roll with it.)

I’ve always appreciated the honesty of this song. Rather than the posturing and posing that characterized much of 1990s hip-hop, I always believed Daddy Mac and Mac Daddy wrote about what they knew on this track- no gangsta posturing, no “smacking bitches”, just the pure anxiety of two kids who overslept for school.