Q: Does MGMT's "Kids" remind you of beer bongs and regular bongs and bonfires and yr halcyon collegiate days?

(And you can tell I'm speaking to The Kids now, because of how I say "yr" where people my age would say "thine." And when I say "The Kids," I of course mean anyone at least 18 months younger than me.)

A: Dear The Kids,

On Monday, I posted a video possibly made by Wesleyan students, or possibly just blogged about by Wesleyan students, hard to know. The backing song to the video was very catchy, but I'd never heard it before. I did a bit of Internet detectiving, and I discovered it to be "Kids" by a Brooklyn band, MGMT, the pride of Cantora Records.

The clown shoe-lookin' muhfuckers of MGMT.

Apparently this song's pretty popular with you, the future of America, perhaps because it's about you; says a commenter on its (totally inaccurate but whatever) SongMeanings lyrics page, "Why wasn't this an enormous hit? This was one of everyone's favorite 3 AM dance party songs freshman year in college." Curious, since I've never heard of it or them, and I'm the coolest cat in all the land.

Anyway, here's the song. If I were dancing high on peyote at 3AM, this would totally do the trick.

MGMT
Kids
Time to Pretend [EP], 2005

Oddly enough, MGMT is touring with Of Montreal and Grand Buffet, two of the only bands I've blogged in recent months. So perhaps MGMT + T.A.M.S.Y. is a match made in heaven 4RL.

(P.S.: If you're a member of MGMT, please say hello. I like the cut of your jib. Also please tell me what your song means, so I can tell The Kids who were asking about it. Unless you're like David Lynch or the Young Michael Stipe and you're disgusted by the very question, which is fine also. Also please don't sue me. In return I promise never to call you synth-pop.)

(P.P.S.: If you're the Josh or Sabrina who made that Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is video, I'd love to know you are. I like the cut of your jib also.)

Q: Oh Mary, can ah run ye hame? (or, What's the meaning of "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice"?)

A: Currently in constant rotation, between my iTunes and my brain, is "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice," an ode to drunken hookups performed in 1966 by Scottish folk-revivalist Hamish Imlach. Between the Scot slang and Imlach's Glaswegian accent, I barely know what half the song means, and yet I find it entirely irresistible.

Hamish Imlach
Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice
Hamish Imlach [OOP], 1966

I'm still getting a bunch of hits for my post on the history and meaning of "For What It's Worth", so I thought it might be useful to do the same for "Cod Liver Oil..." But after Googling (and Urban Dictionary-ing) around for a while, I discovered that extensive annotations are already available. Thanks, the Internet!

According to those notes, the song evolved as a take-off of an American spiritual song, "Virgin Mary Had a Little Baby"; the Mary in "Cod Liver Oil" gets pregnant by entirely non-immaculate means in a slum basement. As may be obvious to Brits and/or old people, cod liver oil and orange juice was a concoction commonly served to promote the health of pregnant women and children during WWII. The cod-liver cocktail is still recommended for sufferers of arthritis, and still tastes terrible.


The song is one of many reasons to check out the wonderfully eclectic Transatlantic Story, a four-disc anthology compiling highlights from a British label, Transatlantic Records, that was a favorite of hippies and other drug addicts in the 60s and 70s. The set is apparently out of print, but it's available via Amazon Marketplace for a cool $20.88.

Q: Best album of the year, so far, probably, off the top of your head?

A: The best album of the year, so far, probably, off the top of my head, is without question the New Pornographers' Challengers. Stereogum has some great behind-the-music coverage of the album, plus two kickass tracks (and a bunch of photos of the band's July 4th performance at NYC's Battery Park).

One of the songs offered is "Myriad Harbor," which has quickly become one of my favorite Daniel Bejar songs ever (GvsB is also a fan). I would link to the lyrics, but they don't seem to exist on the Internet yet, so whatever, here...

MYRIAD HARBOR
written by Daniel Bejar

I took a plane / I took a train
(Who cares? You always end up in the city)
I said to Carl / Look up for once
(See just how the sun sets in the sky)
I said to John / "Do you think the girls here
(...ever wonder how they got so pretty?")
Oh well, I do
Look out upon the myriad harbor (x3)

All the boys with their homemade microphones
(...have very interesting sounds)
All the girls fall into ruin, droppin' out of school, breakin' Daddy's heart
(...just to hang around)
I walked into the local record store and asked for
An American music anthology / It sounds fun
They tore off my skirt (?) and stuck it on the walls at P.S. 1

I took a plane / I took a train
(Who cares? You always end up in the city)
Stranded at Bleecker and Broadway / Looking for something to do
Someone somewhere asked me, "Is there anything in particular I can help you with?"
All I ever wanted help with was you
Look out upon the myriad harbor (x4)

I'd wondered why he was hitting those New York references so hard, since the New Pornographers are Canadian; Scott Stereogum notes the album was recorded partly in Brooklyn, and...

...Well, this is also the NP's New York album. Carl Newman's a Brooklynite now, feels okay talking about the West Village in flames in "Challengers," and even Bejar gets in on the action with the best song on the album, "Myriad Harbour" and its strutting, sexy P.S.1 and Bleeker Avenue namedrops. He's peppered songs with New York in the past -- see "Jackie, Dressed In Cobras," etc. -- but this is the clearest and most addictive...

Newman's biggest New York song, "Unguided," is his longest composition to date. He notes, "It is all about August 2005, everything up in the air, it was very hot, and I was camping out in New York for a week."

(Hey, that sounds eerily like my August '05. Incidentally, the best memory I have from that summer is the day of the Mermaid Parade, which concluded with seeing the New Pornographers play in Prospect Park. Come to think of it, "in turmoil, hot, and semi-homeless" describes pretty much all my experiences with NYC in summer, including last week.)

Wow, I'm really terrible at writing concise blog posts.

One other thing: Of Bejar, Stereogum writes he "always sounds great in this setup, but remains more excellent when given a mile to roam in his solo work." Now, I do love Bejar's Destroyer stuff, but to me, his best work is in these collaborations with Newman, whose predilection for sharp poppy hooks keeps Bejar from drifting too far into art-rock pretension. Newman is sort of the Big Boi to Bejar's Andre 3000 —the Coxon to his Albarn, if you will. The McCartney on weed to his Lennon on acid. DISCUSS. Or just buy the album.

ELSEWHERE: Bryan Ferry reveals bold stance vis a vis the Jews; he is pro-Dylan, anti-Nazi.

Ferry was briefly sort of the Coxon to Brian Eno's Albarn, wasn't he?

Q: Best "pop" song of 2007 (so far)?

A: Speaking of ancient myth, here's my pick for best "pop" (can there really be a such thing as indie pop? isn't that an oxymoron?) song of 2007, so far.

Of Montreal - Heimdalsgate like a Promethean Curse
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, 2007 [buy it]

It's already been blogged to death, but whatever. Great song! And here's the video:

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Q: What does the song "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" mean?

Pitchfork suggests it's a tribute to dualistic inspiring/degenerative powers of drugs, such as they relate to the creative process. I see it in a more innocent light: artist Kevin Barnes' appeal to his own brain chemicals as he struggled with depression while composing the album. But I'll leave it to the SongMeanings community to settle the issue (that link also has the lyrics).

Prometheus: Lit a fire under mankind's ass.

As of this moment, promethean curse is not even spefically mentioned in Prometheus' shoddily written Wikipedia entry (might want to ban Zeus' IP address -- just putting that out there). But the curse is a reference to the burdens of consciousness and creativity, as introduced to mankind when Prometheus smuggled us out some fire. Or something like that.

The acquisition of fire in ancient Greek myth is comparable to Eve's noshing on the fruit of the tree of good and evil in Genesis. Both really pissed off the jerk upstairs (Zeus/God). As punishment, the Old Testament God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden, into a cold, cruel, confusing, naked world, where they were forced them to buy new outfits from Banana Republic at full retail; and he made it so women would have to shoot babies out of their vagina. Zeus' punishment was Pandora's box (not a vaginal reference), and led to the same sort of woe and agony and whining.

But does anyone know what "Heimdalsgate" is? "Heimdalsgade" seems to mean something in Dansk -- which would make sense, since Barnes was in Norway when he made the album (as mentioned specifically in "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger," which begins, I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway). Is it a town? A neighborhood? Where are my Scandanavian readers? Do I have Scandanavian readers?

Heimdal: Like Prometheus, bound.

(The other possibility is that "Heimdalsgate" references some unknown scandal surrounding Scott Heimdal, the 27-year-old treasure hunter kidnapped by Colombian guerillas in 1990, and then rescued when the citizens of Peoria raised $60,000, via bake sales and the like, to pay his ransom. But, you know, that wouldn't really make sense.)

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This is part two in my new series on explaining the significance and meaning of notable songs, by which I mean linking repeatedly to Wikipedia, and rambling. The previous entry was Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth."

Q: Would you please stop, children, asking me what's that sound?

A: In commemoration of the one million billionth person to land on The Answer May Surprise You after having Googled some variation on "stop children what's that sound," I've decided to try and answer whatever the question is they're meaning to ask.

Q: Who sang the song "Stop, Now, What's That Sound"?

A: There is no such song. The song you're thinking of is called "For What It's Worth."

Q: Okay, fine, whatever, who sang the song "For What It's Worth"?

A: Buffalo Springfield.

Q: Wait, isn't that the lady who the only boy who could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man?

A: No, you're thinking of Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, a.k.a. Dusty Springfield, "Britain's greatest pop diva." Buffalo Springfield is the legendary American folk-rock supergroup, comprising Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin.

Their formation is "the stuff of legend," and involves the fact that Neil Young used to drive a hearse (in fact, hearse-related events seem to have prompted most of his early life decisions).

Q: Who wrote "Stop, Children, What's That Sound"?

A: "For What It's Worth," and Stephen Stills.

In its write-up on the song, AMG calls "For What It's Worth" "one of the most representative sounds of the 60s -- even by sheer fact of just the first guitar note and half a dozen drum beats."

That familiar intro has been featured in something like four hundred thousand films and TV shows (including Forrest Gump and The Wonder Years), and was sampled by Public Enemy in 1998's "He Got Game."

Q: What is the song about?

A: The famous Sunset Strip curfew riots of December, 1966. Granted, I have no idea what the curfew riots actually were, because no one has written a Wikipedia entry for them yet. But presumably they involved self-righteous, gun-toting LAPD officers vs a bunch of stoned teenagers, one of whom could have been Stephen Stills, possibly protesting the escalatating Vietnam War.

In short, there was something happening there, but what it was, I'm not exactly clear.

For what it's worth, here are the rest of the lyrics to "For What It's Worth."

Q: Can I download the song from you?

A: No, that would be illegal.

Q: Pleeeeeeease? What if I make out with you?

A: Well. Okay, fine. But you also have to promise to buy the album from which the track was taken, Buffalo Springfield's eponymous debut, on which "For What It's Worth" is the opening track.

Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth
Buffalo Springfield, 1967

Q: Thanks! But can I just buy Retrospective: The Best of Buffalo Springfield? I'm the sort of person who only buys greatest hits albums.

A: Sure. But I wish I had known that about you before we made out.

Q: Jesus, why do you have to be such an elitist dick about everything?

A: Because it helps to combat my underlying self-loathing.

Q: Oh right. Hey, can I leave now?

A: No, you should check out my homepage! Or look at all the other mp3s I've made available for sampling!

Q: Wow, okay, that sounds AMAZING now that you mention it. Should I also click on all of your ads?

A: I can't recommend that explicitly, given the terms of Google AdSense. But if you see something you like, go for it!!!!! Also, feel free to buy a shitload of California wine.

Q: Are you saying that for the 15% referral bonus, or are you trying to get me drunk so we can make out again?

A: A little of column A, a little of column B.