I Will Follow You into the Blackness of My iTunes Library

Sometimes I worry about how often I listen to a certain song. Or album. Or band. It's all very very worrisome. You have a piece of music that you like so much, you want to hear it over and over again. It happens all the time. However, at some point you have to worry if you are over-saturating yourself with just a single piece of music. You listen to a song fifty times in two weeks and fifty-one might not come for a long time after that, if ever. Thanks to all that there newfangled electronicky shit that I can use, I can teleport my thoughts straight through a CAT-5 cable into my ipod, telling it to pull back the high end juuuuust a little bit. The current battle is between me and the Los Campesinos! addicting song and awesome video "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives":



It shouldn't be very hard to avoid that feeling of fatigue for this song, seeing as I don't have the EP that it comes on (makes it only available through Youtube or through totally legal insanely legal so legal I bought it from a pharmacy download). This takes the all-important iPod question out of the equation. Let's meet a few songs that were in for a worse fate.

"I Will Follow You into the Dark" - Death Cab for Cutie

Siiiigh. Remember, like, how awesome it is to be in love and shit and to play this song over and over again because you love that person SO MUCH and then it's like two summers' later and you haven't spoken to that person in like a year and all you can think of is the fact that LIFE is all DIFFERENT and it's more LAME and SHIT? Yeah, that totally sucks.

This song does not deserve that sort of stigma.

This song is sooo over-the-top sappy/sad/precious that it should live as a beacon for nothing. Not love or happiness or sadness or remorse. This song should only be admired in those most saccharine of moments. Adding this to any moment with your significant other is akin to pouring straight corn syrup onto your Frosted Flakes. Like, yeah it enhances something, but someone's gotta say when sometime.

The video also features animated rabbits. I (rabbit) DCFC!



Last Time Heard: Fairly recently, actually. Mid-June, it looks like. Although I think it was mostly for sleepin'.
Do I Still Like It?: Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's my most listen to song on iTunes, which has to mean something. No, wait, it doesn't. It means I used to love a song that I now hate because of all the crap associated with it. It has become an unpleasant song, which is difficult because it pretty much started off as an unpleasant song.

"Rebellion (Lies)" - The Arcade Fire

Last fall, I had the great fortune to see The Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. It remains the best concert I've ever seen. However, it could have been even better had almost all of the songs they played off of Funeral weren't so overplayed in my personal library. You see, being a young and sudden lad of 18, my parents bought me my first MP3 player, which was a 256 MB one and held, like, 40 songs or something like that. It was akin to about four hours of music, and most of that was taken up by America: The Audiobook. Therefore, I really only had space for one album, which became my recently purchased copy of Funeral. This, compounded with the fact that I listened to my player pretty much every damn place I went in high school, lead to a lot of repetition. For probably a month I did nothing but listen to TAF (also stands for Ira Glass's new show This American Fire, which is mostly about Ira Glass committing random arson).



Also Win Butler has like the sharpest face in the world. Watch out Regine!



Last Time Heard: In an attempt to rekindle my love for the album, I listened to the whole thing in full a couple weeks ago. Didn't really succeed.
Do I Still LIke It?: Probably not, sad to say. Before, that song in particular was just so energetic, and now it's just like the seven-hundredth time I hear the band scream "LIIIIES LIIIIIIIES" and how it sounds like a bunch of muppets.

"Packing Blankets" - Eels

I have a TON of Eels in my top 30 most listened list on iTunes. In actuality, it's only three songs, but for a band that I don't even really like it seems insane to have even that many. I know for a fact that there was a period of time where I was regularly listening to them, in particular Daisies of the Galaxy, it's just that even then I don't think I really liked them all that much. They were...boring? Still are boring. Kinda just seriously totally boring.



Last Time Heard: Not since May.
Do I Still Like It?: As I said above, I'm still not completely convinced I ever did.

"Mary" - Langhorne Slim

the fuck is a langhorne slim is that some sort of maxi pad



Langhorne Slim is actually a very good country singer-songwriter, and this is very short tune is easily one of the catchiest on his debut record When the Sun's Gone Down.

Last Time Heard: Now this is messed up. At 34 plays, this song is currently at #19 on my most listened to playlist. However, I have not listened to it since December 2nd of 2006. Over a year and a half, I have probably at least doubled my albums count on my iTunes, yet this song somehow hangs around. Jesus Christ, he compares a the taste of a woman to corn on the cob!
Do I Still Like It?: That corn on the cob line might be one of the best lyrics ever. Still catchy. .

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Content gone questionable

I feel the need to expound on my previous assertion that Jeph Jacques is a douche. See, in high school, I used to worship the man. After all, he's from Maryland, and I'm from Maryland. He graduated from Hampshire College, and I got $3,000 in financial aid from Hampshire College before deciding it wasn't the right school for me. He's a self-important twit who erroneously believes he's funny and likes namedropping obscure indie bands, and I'm...wait a second.

Where, then, did the romance die? Somewhere during the five years that spanned my development from a fresh-faced Daria emulator to a wizened husk in a Gogol Bordello tour tee, something went horribly awry. And I'm pretty sure the problem wasn't entirely with me.

Looking back on the first comics in the Questionable Content archive, I realized that the early comics are nearly indistinguishable from the recent ones. (Recent here meaning "published after the release of the Jennifer Lopez/Jane Fonda vehicle Monster-in-Law.) The tone is different, the art is different, the subject matter is even different. At its inception, the strip was about the hardships of growing into young manhood, suffering at a crappy job in a state of involuntary celibacy. The art consisted mainly of angular lines and a neutral blue/brown palette; simple, but visually interesting. When the character of Faye was introduced, she played the confident, tough-talking broad to Marten's simpering and wishy-washy sad sack. But as the comic progressed, the two switched roles. Jacques retcons his capable and admirable female lead into a whiny and neurotic idiot who can't make the simplest decision for herself. Later, the supporting character Hannelore is "developed" in the same way.

But that's just the tip of the douche iceberg. As the comic became more popular, Jacques forsook the angular style in order to give Faye a perceived weight problem, thus rendering her more relatable. (Which would work if Faye had the appearance of a weight problem, or even if any of the comic's characters had a single unappealing physical trait. Clearly Jacques has never seen a fat chick outside of badly doctored BBW porn, considering how he gave Faye a visible collarbone. jesus christ.) At present, the art has the look of a badly animated CGI cartoon: spatially round, but dimensionally flat. I wonder what that sounds like? Oh yeah, all of the characters.

The shift in tone is perhaps the most off-putting. Jacques's protagonist once worried about his job, his relationships, and keeping his adorable robot out of trouble. Today, Marten has a fun job at a college library (and no trouble paying his bills! or buying outrageously rocking guitars!), shtups his perfect (but irrational, like all women. amirite?) girlfriend at every conceivable moment, and Pintsize seems to have gone the way of the original iPhone. Why do people keep reading? Is it to see what masturbatory fantasy will manifest next for ol' Marten? To anticipate the day that the art style at last evolves into neo-Impressionism with shapelier tits? Or do people return to Questionable Content for the same reason I do: because I've been reading it since Broken Social Scene and the Arcade Fire seemed obscure, and typing the URL is little more than a habit.

Or could it be the tiny specks of lovingly-drawn ass cracks?





Yeah. Definitely the ass cracks thing.













((art found at http://aod-shadowjester.deviantart.com/art/Questionable-Content-52914830))

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