posted by Guest Writer on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 7:00am
[Today, a consideration of Taylor Swift by frequent contributor Trevor Seigler. —Ed.]
By about the third or fourth time (well, maybe the three hundredth or four hundredth time) I’d heard Taylor Swift’s hit single “You Belong With Me,” I began to think she might be mentally unstable. You can’t miss the song, it’s on the radio constantly and so catchy in its own right that you’ll be unwillingly humming it to yourself for days. But the lyrics leave Ms. Swift open to the possibility that she might be some sort of passive-aggressive stalker.
posted by Think Tank on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 10:53am
We had something else on deck for Think Tank today—something to do with Bon Jovi’s lyrics, as I recall. But we couldn’t let Michael Jackson’s passing go unremarked. Here, the Overthinkers share memories, favorite songs, and a sense of Michael Jackson’s cultural impact.
Belinkie
When I was six, I was obsessed with Thriller. I used to put it on my Fisher Price record player and breakdance through the entire thing. Even the slow songs. Especially the slow songs.
I don’t have anything brilliant and new to say here. Yes, he was a genius. Yes, he never had a childhood, and he spent his whole life trying to compensate for that. Yes, I’m surprised at how sad I am.
I mainly just wanted to share a video. It’s from the Free to Be television special in 1974. That would make Michael 16. The song’s called “When We Grow Up,” and the refrain is “We don’t have to change at all.” Yes, the irony is crushing, but that’s not why I’m sharing it. I just like the song.
(The girl, by the way, is Roberta Flack. This is the year after she won three Grammy’s for “Killing Me Softly.”)
Shechner
A few years back, I used to front “The Max Fünk Institut,” a funk band made up of five biology graduate students and a dude we found on Craigslist.I like to think that we were about as funky as a bunch of white Ph.D. students could possibly be, which (all of us combined) is about as funky as some of MJ’s nail clippings.
One of the highlights of our brief career as working musicians came during the gig that ultimately proved to be our last. We were brought up to Waterville Valley, NH, to provide the evening’s entertainment for the annual retreat of the group then-called The MIT Center for Cancer Research. An outsider might assume that this’d be about as exciting as playing for a filing cabinet, but he’d be deeply mistaken. Remember, scientists are good at distilling, synthesizing, or growing things. All sorts of interesting things.
But I digress. The members of MFI suspected that this might be our last gig together, and we wanted to pull out all the stops. Closing our first set, we’d finally tear out a cover for a song all of us had loved as kids, and only much later realized was the funkiest goddamn piece of music not to have droppoed out of P-Funk or Mr. J.B. I’m talking, of course, about Billie Jean.
posted by fenzel on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 8:20pm
The greatest recording artist of all time and the dominant fantasy woman of two decades of American life died today, Thursday, June 25, 2009. On the way to their rest, they followed not too far behind the hero of Kung Fu, a man who himself had become enough of a mystery that a great film was built around metacasting him.
I would wish none of their three deaths on my worst enemy. These were not people who died “ripe” in the way of pre-Shakespearean Lear, surrounded by family and friends and comforted that their lives were taken neither cruelly nor too soon. For their reasons, these were ugly deaths. I will not go into further detail on them, but it bears note, because in our day of media saturation, this is a big part of their stories and what these lives, looking back, mean to all of us.
When Bea Arthur passed, I felt I lost someone I knew. As a performer, she connected with people on the level of a cogent internal and external identity. She crafted human characters in a way that reinforced our mutual humility and dignity. Performers often comfort us by shedding light on the mysteries of identity and stitching together the broken parts of our common experience. Watching Bea Arthur act, and hearing she died, made it easy to be human.
Losing Michael Jackson like this, Farrah Fawcett like this, and David Carradine like this does no such thing.
posted by Think Tank on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 11:34am
[Can you take me higher? Today, the Overthinkers enter the Think Tank to tackle the greatest key change in popular music. Read the four entries and vote for your favorite at the end. —Ed.]
Fenzel, The Thong Song
Pop songs often lie, and that’s fine. There’s something aspirational about pop music — it’s escapist, and it hopes for a world much different from our own. In this world, Britney is a Slave 4 U, everybody gets to be immortal with the Oasis Brothers, and Whitney Houston will always love Kevin Costner. It’s liberating, sort of. At the very least, it relieves us a bit of the mundanity of the real world.
But Sisqo gives us a special sort of delusion. At the peak of a mounting cascade of modulations that wails to the heavens with a fury and pathos no undergarment ever deserved, Sisqo belts out the greatest counterfactual in all of music.
posted by Matthew Wrather on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 2:24am
Matthew Wrather hosts a panel including Mark Lee, Peter Fenzel, and Ryan Sheely (with special guest John Levin) to overthink the moderate suck-fest that is the Grammys and our recent visit to New York Comic-Con.
Comments? Rants? Raves? Email podcast at overthinkingit dot com or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401).
