Laura Jane

The Ten Most Beloved Songs I Hate [Part 2]

[Read Part 1 | Illustration by Jen May]

Are people stupid? Are people getting stupider? Is that a real thing that’s happening? Is the Internet ruining our brains? Do babies have iPhones? What is the world like? Is Cher Lloyd because of climate change?

Cher Lloyd is very thin and very young. She was born when I was eight. Whenever I hear of a celebrity being born in the early nineties I imagine my child self cradling said celebrity as a newborn baby in my child arms, and then I resent them for making more money than I do.

“Want U Back” is upsetting. It begins with Cher expelling a guttural monkey sound: she’s MAD. Oh my god she’s so mad. She wants him back so bad!!!!! But then she giggles moments later. She’s confused. She doesn’t know how she feels! The narrative begins with Cher breaking up with a dude because he didn’t “have much game,” but then he starts dating another girl, she sees them “walking all over town,” eating at “restaurants,” and now she’s jealous- she wants him back. She’s irrationally convincing herself that his relationship with the other girl is all a ploy to get her attention, but I don’t really think that’s true about him. Cher is crazy; she’s vindictive. She’s saying that the new girl wears ugly jeans. Now a rapper named Astro who appears to be eight years old is backing up her stupid point in a rap. Both Astro and Cher Lloyd, I’ve learned, were contestants on the TV show The X Factor. The song ends with Cher making a bzzzzzz noise with her lips and breaking the fourth wall, asking her audience, “Do I sound like a helicopter?”

Bzzzzzzzzz. Do we live in a Dystopia?

Continue reading The Ten Most Beloved Songs I Hate [Part 2] →

Laura Jane

The Ten Most Beloved Songs I Hate [Part 1]

[Read Part 2 | Illustration by Jen May]

As far as my ears are concerned, it’s 1967. I very rarely listen to music made after 1970, and I almost never listen to music made after 1982 (the year Combat Rock by the Clash was released). I have only the vaguest understanding of what contemporary popular music sounds like; as I’ve always seen it, what’s the point of going out of my way to listen to music I don’t like when I can listen to music I love whenever I want?

Because, I guess, I’m curious. I don’t expect myself to like the music I’m about to be exposed to, but I’m a big believer in not knocking things ‘til I’ve tried them. If you’re going to knock something, you’ve got to knock it with authority.

On the evening of Monday, July 30th, 2012, I cold-listened to the Top Ten most downloaded songs on American iTunes and wrote down how they made me feel. As follows are my findings.

Continue reading The Ten Most Beloved Songs I Hate [Part 1] →

Laura Jane

My Take on Kitty Pryde is that I Love Kitty Pryde

Editor’s Note: We are honored to feature a guest post from the one-and-only Laura Jane Faulds of the fantastically fun-filled new music blog, Strawberry Fields Whatever. I assume you just want to jump in after reading the title of this post, and jump you should, but I need to thank my pal Sarahspy for demanding I follow Faulds on Twitter. Because the rest, my friends, was history. [Illustration by Jen May.]

My Take on Kitty Pryde is that I Love Kitty Pryde

by Laura Jane Faulds

This one goes out to all the teenage girls.

There are millions of them, everywhere: locked up in their bedrooms, listening to Lil B, drinking pop rock-flavored vodka, trying to figure out what blow jobs are. Staying up all night talking to their best friends in hushed voices on the rhinestone-studded Hello Kitty iPhones they didn’t work to buy, trash-talking their math teacher’s mom-jeans and saying cunt because they can. Their lives are so endearingly pointless, endearingly because they can’t see it- it’s all life and death, and yes: they will marry him. They’ll take everything they can from anyone who has it, offering nothing in return but empty Frappuccino cups and the cloying scent of vanilla.

I would like every teenage girl in the world to assemble in a wide open space- ideally, a field- and I would like Kitty Pryde to stand before them, on a podium, on a stage. I would like her to speak into several microphones, like Geri Halliwell in the video for “Spice Up Your Life.”

She is drinking a Big Gulp, and speaks exclusively in Emojis; somehow, she has made it possible for that to happen. When she opens her mouth, the Emojis fly out: the happy face whose mouth is a heart, blowing a kiss. The Bento box, the dolphin, the koala face. The eggplant, the princess, the ATM machine. Everyone knows exactly what she means. If she must make a sound, it’s her eeeee from Orion’s Belt, heard first at 1:12 seconds in: a noise simultaneously unbearable and adorable, a noise impossible for any human being over the age of twenty to make.

When she eeeees, the assemblage of teenage girls eeeee back. It’s their emblem, their anthem. They are a cult, and she is their leader. They are a country, a culture, a population, and I am anointing her their king.

Continue reading My Take on Kitty Pryde is that I Love Kitty Pryde →