There's definitely something to be said about putting dance club music on before the sun is even up. Almost as good as a hot cup of Blue Mountain caffeine to get the blood pumping.
So anyways, while loading my iPod for the day, for some reason I suddenly got this overpowering urge to listen to an obscure alternative track that kept playing at the edge of my consciousness all morning. No problem, lemme just do a quick scroll thru my music library and find it... except I had no idea what the song was, who did it, the words to the song, where I'd first heard it, nothing except a chord progression that kept repeating in my head, a faint memory of chanted lyrics, and one single question being asked over and over. The question was the key; if I could only remember what it was, everything else would come to me.... but the question kept dancing maddeningly on the tip of my tongue and slipping away right when I almost had it. It eventually did come to me later that morning, after some hard mental concentration and using every mnemonic device I knew, and when it finally came to the surface it was appropriate in so many ways. "Where is my mind?" Four short words with worlds of meaning. After that, the rest began to fall in place... I quickly jumped on Google and did a search for that phrase, and came up with the name of the band and where I'd heard that song before... Pixies, from the Fight Club soundtrack, yes, that was it, the final scene, right after Edward Norton's character (who was never named, interestingly) has just killed Tyler Durden by blowing his own medulla oblongata out, and he and Marla stand in an empty office building watching the international headquarters of several major credit card companies implode in one single glorious act of econo-terrorism. Project Mayhem: reset the credit rating of every single person on Earth back to zero by wiping the international financial slate clean. No more rich and poor. No more haves and have-nots, upper- and lower-class, white collar blue collar. No more First and Third World. Reset button at the trigger of a detonator. Then Where Is My Mind? starts playing and the end credits roll. Fight Club is one of the greatest movies ever made.
So now that I finally had the name of the elusive track, I opened up Shareaza to download the song right away... but from the opening "wooo-hoooo" I realised that the original Pixies version, although brilliant, wasn't the one that had been itching my brain all morning. So what was the song that had now become an earworm in my mind? This was starting to drive me crazy. A quick check with Wikipedia revealed that Where Is My Mind (which, incidentally, Pixies lead singer Frank Black was inspired to write as a college student while on a scuba dive in the Caribbean) is one of those excellent songs that have been covered, remade, refixed, mashed-up etc. by about a zillion bands and artists since it was first recorded. It's cited as one of the pivotal tracks in the evolution of modern alternative rock, and listening to it I can certainly agree... one can sense right away the influence Pixies would have on later grunge and alternative bands of the 90s like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Radiohead, and of course Nirvana... one can literally picture a teenage Kurt Cobain somewhere in a Seattle garage bobbing his head to this one right before an after-school impromptu jam session. No wonder there have been no less than seven Pixies tribute albums. I came across about a dozen different versions of Where Is My Mind, my favourite three of which I've listed below:
But this was getting me no closer to the specific version of the song that had tunneled into my skull by this time.... and what did Rihanna have to do with any of it? All I could think of were six infectious chords that sounded like a synth version of Orgy's cover of New Order's Blue Monday...
...and there, at last, was the answer. Shut Up And Drive, the tune that had jolted me out of bed, samples Blue Monday right from the electric opening riff. The chords I was thinking of were the actual chords from the same song. So I was basically looking for a remake of Pixies' Where Is My Mind? over a slowed-down, synthed up version of New Order's Blue Monday, with hip-hop/dancehall/techno lyrics.... but where the hell had I ever heard such a song? On a hunch, I went to my trusty old Google toolbar, input "where is my mind" and "blue monday" (in quotes so I would get an exact match)... and good old Google gave me the answer right away. It was M.I.A. - 20 Dollar, off her Kala album, one of the five best releases of 2007 in ANY genre. I had listened to the album straight through at least nineteen times before but the connection hadn't clicked until that very moment.
Brilliant on so many levels: a song about brutal poverty-driven violence and genocide in Africa facilitated by First World apathy, penned by the Sri-Lankan teenage daughter of one of the founders of the Tamil Tigers (considered a terrorist organisation by US and UK intelligence), who has Education for Darfur as her number 1 friend on MySpace, is rumoured to be on a C.I.A. watch list, and was recently denied entry to perform in the US. In other words, militant hardcore rebel music..... disguised as Rihanna-esque danceable pop. God, this girl is genius. Needless to say, I had Kala (and her 2005 album Arular) on repeat all day Thursday.
OK, now it's Six Degrees of Separation time. They both sampled Blue Monday for dance-pop releases in roughly the same period last year. Apart from being on my list of Top 12 women in the world I'd most want to wake up next to, what else do Rihanna and M.I.A. have in common? Answer: They've also both done collabos with Vybz Kartel. And as I finish up this entry, I've just watched Fight Club on cable for the twentieth time, and the original Pixies version of Where Is My Mind? is playing right at this very moment. I am Jack's complete circle.
1 comment:
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