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I've got the rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu[*]
It's Friday! It's about three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!
Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap some Fridays this year.
I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be one of the tunes which make me smile, and which have at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.
Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.
If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.
Today you are invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:
Adam Green - Emily
(This is a legit, streamable video download - the link goes to a high-quality Windows Media file. There are also links to a low-quality one, or Real player files in high and low flavours. The video is worksafe, and features an nice, furry cat.)
This track isn't an out-and-out bounce-in-your-seat boogie, more of a gentle, sway-from-side-to-side boogie. Swing At Your Desk, maybe.
A few years ago, Adam Green was one of the leading lights of the New York Antifolk scene (if it means anything to you, he was one half of The Moldy Peaches). Antifolk is what happens When Folk Singers Go Bad. They throw away their fol-de-rols, stop going a-walking out on May mornings, and start writing rambling acoustic songs about subjects you can't write songs about. Antifolk albums are near-universally lo-fi, home-made-looking affairs, usually with sleevenotes that seem to have been knocked up on a geriatric Xerox machine.
Adam Green's first album is, I'm told, a very good antifolk album. I've borrowed a copy and am listening to it today, but am not up to full reviewing-speed yet.
In 2003, his second album was released, and something was clearly Up. The sleevnotes were glossy! They were printed in colour! There was a small string section involved! There seemed to have been... production! A small group of people screamed "Sell Out!" in unison, and I enter the story at this point.
The second album, if, you weren't comparing it to the first, is great. It has gently catchy tunes, and a sort of lounge-singer ambience to it. The strings swoop around, and the whole album has a lush, melodic feel. There is only one thing linking Adam Green to his Antifolk past: the lyrics. They remain by turns unexpected, random, nonsensical, shocking, and childishly obscene. The juxtaposition of the easy-listening, parent-friendly sound and the soft-voiced uttering of Very Rude Words is something I find constantly delightful. If you're likely to be offended by a song which begins "There's no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs", you might not like this album - though the same song also contains the beautifully expressed "Loving you are the two best things in a world that's skipping town".
This week's track is a single from his new album, Gemstones, which is released in the UK next week. I think Emily probably only scores around 0.3 Debasers of Impenetrability which, for Adam Green, is pretty good going.
[*] OK, it's a Grateful Dead song. But the interweb says Aerosmith covered it, and that's good enough for me :)
Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap some Fridays this year.
I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be one of the tunes which make me smile, and which have at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.
Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.
If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.
Today you are invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:
Adam Green - Emily
(This is a legit, streamable video download - the link goes to a high-quality Windows Media file. There are also links to a low-quality one, or Real player files in high and low flavours. The video is worksafe, and features an nice, furry cat.)
This track isn't an out-and-out bounce-in-your-seat boogie, more of a gentle, sway-from-side-to-side boogie. Swing At Your Desk, maybe.
A few years ago, Adam Green was one of the leading lights of the New York Antifolk scene (if it means anything to you, he was one half of The Moldy Peaches). Antifolk is what happens When Folk Singers Go Bad. They throw away their fol-de-rols, stop going a-walking out on May mornings, and start writing rambling acoustic songs about subjects you can't write songs about. Antifolk albums are near-universally lo-fi, home-made-looking affairs, usually with sleevenotes that seem to have been knocked up on a geriatric Xerox machine.
Adam Green's first album is, I'm told, a very good antifolk album. I've borrowed a copy and am listening to it today, but am not up to full reviewing-speed yet.
In 2003, his second album was released, and something was clearly Up. The sleevnotes were glossy! They were printed in colour! There was a small string section involved! There seemed to have been... production! A small group of people screamed "Sell Out!" in unison, and I enter the story at this point.
The second album, if, you weren't comparing it to the first, is great. It has gently catchy tunes, and a sort of lounge-singer ambience to it. The strings swoop around, and the whole album has a lush, melodic feel. There is only one thing linking Adam Green to his Antifolk past: the lyrics. They remain by turns unexpected, random, nonsensical, shocking, and childishly obscene. The juxtaposition of the easy-listening, parent-friendly sound and the soft-voiced uttering of Very Rude Words is something I find constantly delightful. If you're likely to be offended by a song which begins "There's no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs", you might not like this album - though the same song also contains the beautifully expressed "Loving you are the two best things in a world that's skipping town".
This week's track is a single from his new album, Gemstones, which is released in the UK next week. I think Emily probably only scores around 0.3 Debasers of Impenetrability which, for Adam Green, is pretty good going.
[*] OK, it's a Grateful Dead song. But the interweb says Aerosmith covered it, and that's good enough for me :)
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No, it's not; they covered it, too, but they didn't write it. They played it a bit in the early 70s. Well, OK, they played it five times between May and October of '72...
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Yes, but it scares me.
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I do, however, have some comments about the music video:
I've got the rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu
Unfortunately, work environment is entirely unfriendly to "Boogie at Your Desk", so it has to be "Boogie at Tea Time", which is just not funky :/ Still, that doesn't spoil the music, and Adam Green is now definitely on my acquisitions list :)
Of course, you do realise that "Boogie at Your Desk" marks the start to the weekend for your readers, don't you ? Once you've posted it's official, and we can start having fun :)
Re: I've got the rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu
Oooh, no, I didn't realise that. I'm honoured to have become an important chronological feature :)
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[*] OK, it's a Grateful Dead song. But the interweb says Aerosmith covered it, and that's good enough for me :)
*cough* My Dad has this on vinyl by Hughy (sp?) Piano Smith well before this; one of the tracks I used to listen to as a young 'un, trawling the parents vinyl on a Sunday, hence my love for Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee, CCR, early Elvis...