This Time. I'm Losin' My Mind, This Time: Third Time's Far from Charming

Hammering out a couple posts today as time's been a bit scarce lately, but, uh we'll get that fixed here soonish. Round one looked something like this, and round two this. The skinny is this: Bad songs get stuck in my head. I don't know how they get there, and I don't know how to get them out. Sometimes they're there, quiet and fading, before my feet hit the floor in the morning. And by the time I'm in the shower, they're blasting like the nine-song rotation at the strip club.

Usually, I've had the fortune of at least one good song getting stuck in my head. Last week was not so usual.

5. "Dixieland Delight" by Alabama



Life isn't fair. It really isn't. Every once in a while, though, a bit of grace lands in our lap. Kind of like the rhythm of this song, which if you think about it, serves as a nice little ice-pick-to-the-forehead metronome. Get stabbin'!

4. "We Are Siamese" from the Lady and the Tramp soundtrack



Don't ask. I've no idea.

3. "Pull Me Under" by Dream Theater



My freshman year of college was spent at a school called Pittsburg State University. I lived in Tanner Hall, room 201. Two doors down was the most immaculate mullet you have ever seen, and it was attached to a guy who'd been nicknamed "Lightning Arms." Or "Kid Lightning," or something like that. I think his name was actually Ryan, but the kid could play the bejeezus outta some drums. And he was a huge Dream Theater fan. Wait. Sorry. He was the huge Dream Theater fan. Anyway, I guess the Dream Theater drummer was really good. Or is. I dunno. That was the first, and last, time I ever heard anybody willfully talk about Dream Theater.

I don't really have anything else to say about this song or that band, except for the fact that this number was once, for a minute, on the radio rotations.

I wish it hadn't been.

2. "Hard Habit to Break" by Chicago



I'm not going to sit here and knock on Chicago. I know Chicago has always had a pretty big fan base. That said, this song is terrible, and if I can figure out what it was I did to deserve having this one plugged into the old cortex, believe me: I'd hire Matlock, Magmum P.I., Kojak, and David Carradine to get on the case so that I could plead forgiveness. Jiminy Christmas is this song terrible. It's so far off the soulful spectrum that Christopher Cross recently called Chicago the whitest band in America after his Spotify account pulled up "Hard Habit to Break."

1. "Something to Believe in" by Poison



Every once in a while, I'll walk into the men's room of a local bar and there will be these framed advertisements on the wall above the toilet. You know what I'm talking about? They're usually matted into four panes, and each vertical rectangle has an ad for a particular company. There's usually one for a local restaurant corporation, one for a radio station, one for some smutty cable channel that doesn't have a you-can-hide-it-from-the-wife footnote, and one for some kind of medical study they're looking to conduct that requires you to come stay overnight twice and eat a handfull of pills for money.

This last one is always the ad that prompts me to double-take. Go sleep in a hospital bed for two nights, get studied and get paid? (Note to these companies: Put a text-us option on these ads. Really.)

I always walk out of the restroom, though, thinking about signing up for that action. I never do it, but I think about it. With the other three ads, I think about the money those poor saps wasted thinking they were going to influence me to ponder something, but with the medical-study ads, I'm usually exiting the can rubbing my chin with my thumb and forefinger.

I never follow through, but you know what would get me to write those details down? I'll tell you.

Remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I'd settle my tab and drive straight to the hospital if one of those ads boasted a study that involved some drugs or a technique that would forever burn Poison and Bret Michaels and everything associated with both from the folds of my brain.

Forget Poison.

Forget the ever-loving spunk out of them.

That is all.

As you were.
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This Time. I'm Losin' My Mind, This Time: Take Two

If you missed the inaugural installment of this feature, peep it here. The genesis of it is this: Bad songs find their way into my head every day, and I can't, for the life of me, figure out how they get there. After the first post, the reverse effect of trying to make some sense of it occurred, and I spent the next 36 hours with Barenaked Ladies pulsing through my brain, which is to say I spent the next 36 hours using coping skills one might file in a manila folder labeled "How Not to Get Thrown in Jail for Mass Murder." The quirk is that songs that have been recently heard, read, or viewed may not be included, and the asterisk is that, in order to avoid complete insanity, my mind is kind enough to include one song that doesn't suck.

5. "Mr. Charlie" by The Grateful Dead



I have no beef admitting that I love the Dead. Call me a hippie if it makes you feel better about yourself. This song kicks all the tail.

4. "Take Me Home" by Phil Collins



I don't have a beef with Phil Collins, either. Rather, I didn't have a beef with him growing up. In fact, I probably enjoyed his stuff, but never enough to purchase any. I mean, the guy was in Genesis, so he gets a little cred', right? Most of his solo cuts, though, are the embodiment of what this feature epitomizes: garbage that runs through your head for no reason whatsoever, but hangs around long enough to drive you batty. This song gets on my last nerve with that ticky-tacky drumming running through it and for the fact that it's six God-damned minutes long. Phil -- I think we had you about 3:30 in, bro. Let's call it a wrap.

3. "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)" by Christopher Cross



There's not a legitimate reason for me to hate Christopher Cross. Oh, wait. Yes there is. It's called his musical career. I mean, what a load of sap-steeped '80s sewage. I'm sorry. I've made a valiant effort not to be negative in the last pile of months, but good lord did this era of music whiten the whiteness of white people. Between this track, and "Sailing," and "Ride Like the Wind" all the poetry I wrote in college sounds like Pulitzer material. I mean, I don't wanna say my verse was bad, but I've tried to build campfires and had mini tepees of tinder spit out crumpled pages of my stanzas. And I don't wanna spend too much more time on Cross, but top chemists in Clorox labs used to sit around in meeting rooms and play Cross' greatest hits as inspiration for projects titled "How Can We Get Clothes to Come out That White."

2. "Mercedes Benz" by Janis Joplin



When the first kernels of my hippiedom felt the heat of the gas burner below, I thought Janis Joplin was pretty cool. Cool as in, You know, this movement needed a woman. Then I bought a copy of Pearl. I don't think I made it through two full listens. She was absolutely atrocious and anyone that says otherwise is high on paint fumes. There's one kind of person in this world that thinks Janis rocked, and that's the kind of person that thinks Stevie Nicks made Fleetwood Mac great. I have ideas for what we should do with those people, but...you know...tryin' to keep it positive here.

1. "Let's Hear it for the Boy" by Deniece Williams



I've probably mentioned this before, but we never had cable growing up. I think that our household was one of, like, one household in a 97-square-mile radius that didn't because the cable company came around and gave us cable free for a month about four times a year. There's that and there's this: We used to travel to Florida to visit my grandparents with mild frequency, and in both the free-cable and grandparent-visit scenarios, I did one thing: try to soak up as much MTV as humanly possible. I've probably seen this video as many times as I've seen the original Star Wars, which is one of the most shameful things I could ever admit, but that's how powerful MTV used to be. Know what's not powerful? Deniece Williams. Or the length of her discography. Or this video. Or whatever the message of having that kid actually wear a dunce cap was supposed to be.

So those are the songs that found their way into my head last week. Weeeeeee.



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This Time. I'm Losin' My Mind, This Time: Inaugural Installment

You can't lie to me. I won't believe you.

You're not special, and you can't pretend it doesn't happen. You can't sit there and tell me that, at least once a day, some garbage song doesn't, for no apparent reason, wind up planted in your dome. It happens to us all, and because I don't live inside your brain, I've begun to feel like lately, that it happens more often to me.

With that, I give you the latest feature of irregular publication: "This Time. I Losin' My Mind, This Time" wherein we'll take a quick look at the random ditties that seeped out of memory vault the previous week.

A few notes first, though: a) This is a fascinating phenomenon, and I challenge you to get all psychoanalytic on yourself and figure out how songs get into your head, and how much variation there is between songs regarding duration within your melon (and by God, if you come up with a good tactic for evacuating them, please share). b) Songs that you hear, sing, see, or say do not count. c) Not all songs that pop into your head suck, but on the whole it seems that most of them do.

5. "Subdivisions" by Rush



Rush has to have one of the strangest followings around. I mean, most hard-core Rush fans are pretty goofy dudes, are they not? You know: There's that sort of stuck-in-a-time-warp, loneristic aspect to them. I'm not judging. Hell, I think Rush kicks all the ass. You know what kicks all the all the ass, though? Geddy Lee's mullet in that video.

4. "Lightnin' Strikes" by Lou Christie

In 1980 my mom and her sister Suzi bought matching Toyota Corollas. My aunt lived with us at the time, and so these things were parked side-by-side in our driveway. There were two primary differences between the two: My aunt's was silver on the outside with a black interior, while my mom's had an orange exterior, was beige on the inside.



More importantly, my mom's had only AM radio. My mom also had this car for about eight years, which meant that for most of a decade, Oldies 71 WHB was hammered day and night into my brain. I like the oldies. Don't get me wrong. It's just that 30 years later, I don't need Lou Christie screaming between my ears at random moments of my day.

3. "So Long, Farewell" from the The Sound of Music soundtrack

I don't really have much to say about this one. It's a touch embarrassing, and I can't for the life of me figure out how it got there.



All I know is that I was washing my hair and bam! -- there it was, at like five o'clock in the morning. Really? It's not even light out and the friggin' Von Trapp family's waltzing around in my noggin. At least let a guy get a cup of coffee first. I haven't even watched that movie in like 20 years. Stupid brain.

Make no mistake, though. I'd go musical/soundtrack all day and night if it kept me safe from the likes of number two:

2. "Blue Morning, Blue Day" by Foreigner



Know what's worse than Foreigner? I'll tell you: Having been a kid who at one point actually thought Foreigner was good, a kid that actually owned some Foreigner. If you're still on the fence, let me clear it up for you: Foreginer blows. Everything about them. I'm serious. I don't care if you like to jump off the dining room table while you air guitar "Jukebox Hero" or if you think the riff from "Urgent" is cool, or if you gave up the V-card to "Waiting for a Girl Like You." This band is terrible (Editor's Note: If you want to make an exception for "Star Rider," I'll hear you out.). I hear them and I want to pierce my temples with rusty shears.

That said, Foreigner is the best band in rock history when you compare them with my last week's number one:

1. "If I Had a Million Dollars" by the Barenaked Ladies



Please. I'm begging you. If you're going to click the play icon on that video, do everyone within earshot a favor first, and murder them.

Part of me was tempted to do a touch of research for each of these songs. You know, tell you what year they came out, the name of the album they were on, what kind of sales the album had, and maybe even where the song reached on the charts.

Here's what stopped me, though: It's bad enough to have a God-damned Barenaked Ladies song in your head, and it's even worse to know a few of their tracks. What's intolerable, though, is having some BNL trivia wedged in your folds for the rest of forever.

I mean, what happens if I'm drunk at a party and the opportunity arises to wax Barenaked, and I jump on it without thinking twice? That's a fall from social grace I don't think I'm equipped to handle. Plus, the thought of discussing them in public is making me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Anyway, though. Those are last week's cuts. We'll do this again next week with this week's. See how this works? Pretty easy.
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