This week it seems that I'll be covering nothing but tracks that I think have very strong hooks. Earworm tracks if you will. I'm not sure if it's just a symptom of being single, lonely, and anguished that makes me more appreciative of music and more willing to write about it (rut, where you be?) but I'm pretty sure every song I'll be covering this week should get stuck in your head.
We're starting with what I think is the strongest riff-based hook out of the group. Battles' "Ice Cream" is just a deliciously weird song driven entirely by this insane keyboard riff (or is it a guitar? The magic of Battles is that you never fucking know for sure) that sounds like it's probably unplayable by humans. Hilarious enough if you were hoping that the music video would shed some light on how they play it, the keyboardist just smirks crazily, creepily open-mouthed at the camera while randomly slapping the pads. Maybe that is how it's played. Maybe I just don't know.
If the song wasn't already completely amazing, the video makes it more so. It's like a collection of everything cool in the world. The opening bits of kung fu, more of which is used later in the video. The strange visual opposites, like the incredibly awesome upside down heart glasses. There's plain-faced hot looking chicks throughout the entire video. Vocalist-producer Matias Aguayo's bounce and swagger matches his incredible mostly-gibberish vocal turning him into someone I want to be and not just enjoy watching. Hot women fainting! I bet if I was 13 I would totally try to masturbate to this video, but they gotta go and mess with it. There's so many hot women in the final shots, but you can never get a clear view of any of them! 13 year old me is squinting and pausing strategically.
The sections of chicks licking dirty everyday objects is kind of a turn off. But 13 year old me would just skip it.
The rest of the album is pretty good too, but I've been distracted by "Ice Cream". If you like Battles, I bet you'll like this album. If you sort of liked Battles before, you might like them more now, since there is more of the bounce and a bit more of the swagger on this album. It's like they took one step toward Holy Fuck in feel. Gary Numan guests on one track that sounds like it was inspired by The Dark Knight or something, very cinematic, kind of strange but also awesome. However, there is no earworm on the album quite like this one.
If I was to complain it's mainly that the song doesn't need to be four and a half minutes long. For the music video it makes more sense, but I think the album version could get away with being half a minute to a minute shorter. Good songs leave you wanting more. "Ice Cream" can make you feel a little tired of it before the end. Ideally the song should be a perpetual tease, making you want to play it again, haunting you with the memory of that delicious hook. Luckily for Battles, the hook is so strong here it doesn't matter if you're tired of it by the end of the song, you've got it stuck in your head forever.
Despite the fact that I have more failed relationships under my belt than is gentlemanly to admit to, I've actually never really dealt with being dumped in this way. Most prior relationships, by the time the break up happened it was generally due to a mutual exhaustion of all other possible outcomes. Most of the time it was a relief, like, gosh, I'm glad that's over with!
The one time I was sincerely dumped by a woman, it was horrible for me but in a way that defied logic and reason: she never treated me like I was a human being worthy of affection. (Which is, in retrospect, exactly what you need to do to a person who is enamored of you and you only want them to become further enamored to the point of obsession.) Why that broke my heart and left me feeling wounded about it for two years is still a sore point, and it's still beyond my comprehension. By the end of it, though, it was clear even to me that she just wasn't going to let us be happy, so despite my bitterness there was an underlying sweetness to it I couldn't deny.
It's like I was sore because someone took away my favorite toy: the one that punched me repeatedly in the face every time I tried to play with it. I just wanted it back, I didn't care it was bad for me.
This time around I just don't really know how to feel. By the end of this relationship I was feeling pretty happy and secure. After two years of on-again/off-again indecisiveness fueled mainly entirely by my own insecurity and worry, I settled into this spot where, you know what, maybe marriage isn't a bad idea after all. Maybe this woman is enough, and I don't have to feel all the time like there might be something better out there. I mean, there probably is, but the chances are so slim that it's akin to folding A-K suited because you hope there's an A-A combo further along. It's just dumb. Play the hand.
I guess if you wanted to you could say it sounded like I was settling, which is a terribly dirty word to pretty much everyone it seems. I don't know if I was settling, especially in the derogatory way most people spit it, so much as I was just becoming comfortable with the idea of having sex with only one vagina forever. But I am also being untrue, and perhaps insincere. Deep down I had my reservations, but they were always prefixed with: give her a couple years, be a supportive, nurturing, kind boyfriend and if under those wings she doesn't, I don't know, summon a single iota of motivation and personal responsibility and accountability you can just ditch her, and your sexy as fuck 30 year old man body can go out and find someone willing to live up to your expectations.
Which is funny because she would go, "I just don't feel like I measure up to you!" and I'd deny it. I never attempted to make her feel like she didn't, but I guess just being around me and listening to me talk shit on all the other similarly apathetic, unmotivated, self-centered dumb asses in the world made her turn a harsh light on her own innards. Who knows.
So all that said you can imagine that I'm in a bit of internal conundrum. Should I be heartbroken? I was thinking about marrying this girl, and now she's left me. Worst than that, she left me while attempting to make me promise that I'd be willing to take her back in a few months when she wakes the fuck up and realizes that I am the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas all rolled up in one. That left me in a shitty place where I still don't really know if she's going to wake up tomorrow and call me back to her. Should I go? Should I not go?
Then at the same time maybe I should be relieved that she dumped me. Hurrah! I get to shop my sexy ass around town, look for someone amazing to call my own, maybe someone even better than she was. But then what if she comes back? And I'm like, oh, I'm fucking this sub-par girl, and she's like, oh, nevermind then? Will I feel like I fucked up? Oh, the danger of regret.
I'm searching for anger. I want to be angry at her for breaking up with me. I want to be pissed the fuck off that she waited three years until I was at my most vulnerable, and she was at her most stable, to break up with me. Sometimes I feel the emotion bubble up inside me, but my general overwhelming apathy and perhaps ataraxia just shuts it down. I'm not even that sad as much as I just don't know what to feel. Anger would make it clear. It would turn "I'm not sure if I should move on or hang on" into "Fuck that stupid bitch! I'm not going to wait around for that dumb ass to decide I'm as fucking awesome as I am, I'll just go show someone else how awesome I am and then, boom, blowjobs again for me!"
The anger would then turn into optimism, and the optimism would turn into dating, and the dating would turn into confidence, and then we could get to do it all over again. But the anger won't come. I'm trying to force it, but I guess I just have to wait and see. It's just lame that this is all I can think about sometimes: Should I jump on OKCupid and start answering match questions now, or wait, and how long should I wait? It's been three days, have I waited long enough yet? When is she going to call and apologize? When she does, will I be over her, and tell her to fuck off?
The objective part of me, the part that actually cares about me and rarely gets a say, really hopes so.
If this isn't one of the greatest songs you've ever heard, get off my website. You're banned. Go away. You're hogging bandwidth that I pay for out of my own pocket that can go to other people who have better taste in music than you. If, when they do the ZZ Top "'ow-'ow-'ow", you don't grin involuntarily, you're almost just as bad! With that out of the way...
The Presidents of the United States of America are a deeply weird band. Their two big hits, "Lump" and "Peaches", are quirky but not so overtly weird to be obvious. I... hmm. Just not feeling it today. This song really speaks for itself, so I don't think I really need to say much about it.
Despite the general tone of my last post, I didn't intend to convey the idea that I might have wanted my relationship to end. I was hot under the collar, as it were. Despite misgivings in the past, for all intensive porpoises I wanted my relationship to continue on for a long time. I think. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes I was like OMFG REALLY BITCH?, especially toward the end here, but I'm totally digressing.
That said, I totally got dumped last night. Over the phone! At least the three times prior that I dumped her, I did it face to face. Twice. One time it was over instant message but that was the "Uh I cheated on you, ah... hah? :\" kind of break up and I was at work and I mean come on, listening to a girl cry is such a waste of time. I guess you could say that this whole being dumped thing is bittersweet... in that I totally deserve it. It's especially funny because her reasoning is the same "I don't even really want to see anybody else, I just feel like I don't appreciate you, so I think maybe I need to be single," bullshit I used to feed her when I actually meant "I want to go and try to find someone better than you 'cause you're not really cutting it right now, honey." So that's... whatever that is.
There's a lot of perks to being single. I'd been thinking about writing about them recently because of how bizarre it is that I was pretty much totally over the idea of being single. It's funny that the second I'm kind of like, "You know what, a good three or four years of this might be nice, let myself age on the shelf like a fine wine"---which isn't to say I was just going to age my girlfriend and then ditch her for greener pastures... just, if, you know, she didn't age to the same fine quality I plan on getting myself to---I end up getting dumped.
What's also annoying is that she got nearly two and a half years of almost consistently free meals out of me, and then once she gets a job I get maybe two weeks. Two weeks for my two plus years I put in. What a fucking lousy investment. If I've learned something from the incredibly & disappointingly large number of failed personal relationships I've had with women, it's that if you start your relationship with a job and then lose it, you've got about two months before your woman flips the fuck out and dumps you. (And if you start your relationship without a job you've got about 8 months of fucking hell on earth until she dumps you.) Sometimes they say "It's not about you not having a job!" but it's a subconscious thing, uncontrollable. When she was unemployed I was thinking about dumping her all the time, and I only actually did it some of the time.
I had this dream last night. I was sleeping with this pretty little white girl, pixish, short cropped hair. She looked like a prettier, nicer version of a girl I used to sleep with. I was fucking her behind my girlfriend's back, lavishing her with compliments in my bed, when suddenly I was aware my girlfriend was coming home. She came into the room as me and the other girl were buttoning up our clothes, and she seemed totally oblivious. I thought, "Really? Am I really getting away with this?" I told my girlfriend that we were just hanging out, and she reacted plainly. I couldn't believe it, in the dream, that my girlfriend would be so stupid as not see what was clearly in front of her. The dream ended just about there, with my unending shock at my girlfriend's obliviousness waking me from the dream.
After I woke up I signed on to Twitter, and in the process of seeing what my girlfriend was up to on it, I saw a series of tweets in which this guy was flirting with her, and then offering coyly to buy her a $100 purse she tweeted about, and her all too obligingly flirting back at him about it. I thought: what the fuck is going on here? Is she really leading on some internet dude?
So I called her out on it. She was apologetic at first, but then it started to turn into this: "You're leading this guy on, and that's not cool, not to him or me." "No I'm not, I don't use people!" "Then what is getting a $100 purse from some guy on the internet who'll never sleep with you?" "It was just an friendly exchange between friends!" "No it's a guy who wants to fuck you trying to buy you things to win your affection." "He knows we're just friends and we only ever will be." "If he knew that then he wouldn't be trying to buy you things."
And so on and on it goes. I've been over this with my girlfriend before. The last time I got upset at her was because she passed out until 3 a.m. at her ex-boyfriends house after getting too drunk at a party. Yes, that sentence is for real. Of course, she thought that I should just be OK with it. "There were friends of ours there!" OK, like that prevents two people from fucking each other when they want to. "Nothing would ever happen, I love you!" Yeah, and I've heard that one minutes before I found one of my ex-girlfriends with the fingers of another guy buried in her vagina.
Then this always comes up: "You should just trust me!"
Ah, yes, trust. It's that thing people like to say: "You can't have a relationship without trust!" When on the defending end of a situation like this, people hurl it usually in this sort of tone: "Don't you love me? If you loved me, then you'd trust me!" Actually, love and trust have just about nothing in common. I can love someone I don't trust, someone who has broken my trust so many times that I can't possibly ever let myself trust them ever again. Not trusting someone to not be an asshole doesn't mean I don't love them. There are people who used to be in my life that I wouldn't trust alone with my chapstick, but I stupidly still love them.
But that aside, what this points out is something altogether more troubling: if your partner forces you to fall back on trust in order to excuse their behavior, does that person really love you? Should you really be forced to quell what your life experiences tell you, and bottle up all that dread, worry, and anguish, just because your partner tells you that you should trust them and give them a get out of jail free card for all suspicious behavior?
Every single time in my life I have said to myself: "Don't worry, Stuy, she loves you, you should trust her!" in order to calm myself down because of women who are doing things that are clearly suspicious it's turned out that I've been wrong. I shouldn't have trusted her. I shouldn't have trusted the girl who'd go and hang out with her ex-boyfriend late at night and sometimes wake up there in the mornings. Definitely shouldn't have trusted her, and should have broken up with her immediately, the very second she told me that I "should trust her". Turns out she was fucking him for months before we broke up, all because I kept telling myself that I should trust her, that I shouldn't worry.
I try to explain this to my girlfriend. It's my humble opinion that if you love someone you shouldn't make them fall back on trust in order to excuse your behavior. I actually live this rule as fully as I possibly can because I haven't always been the best boyfriend. I don't flirt with women, through the internet or otherwise. I don't stay out late with or hang out one-on-one with women, and if I do it's especially not women I used to sleep with. (I certainly wouldn't let other women buy me expensive presents, but that's not exactly a situation a guy finds himself in ever, if at all.) If I am out with people, I message her every hour or two letting her know I'm thinking about her and that I'm OK. In a long distance relationship, communication like this is incredibly important. I try very hard to make sure my girlfriend is never concerned about or suspicious of me, but it seems like she makes no attempt to do the same for me.
It breaks my heart how many times I've tried to explain this to my girlfriend. It's not about trust, it's not even really about love, but it's about respecting the other person in your life enough to not give them any reason to be suspicious. I'm not unreasonable, go out with your friends, have a good time, but be home at a decent hour, and especially don't stay out until 3 in the morning without checking in with me for four hours.
Situations like that just make me wonder if I'm as big of a chump as my girlfriend was in that dream I had last night. I have to wonder: "Am I really stupid enough to fall for this shit again? How many women have to tell me that I should trust them only to find out they're fucking someone else behind my back until I fucking learn?"
All my experiences tell me that the answer is right in front of my face. The tyranny of "you should trust" is telling me to wait it out. My experiences tell me that waiting it out only makes it hurt worse when you find out the truth. "You should trust" is telling me that there is no truth to find. However my girlfriend's behavior, and generally unapologetic nature about it, tells me that there's probably a lot to find.
Who do I listen to? Myself, or another person... and lord knows people have proven to me over and over again that when someone is doing clearly suspicious shit like passing out til 3 a.m. at an ex's house, or leading other people on through the internet and letting them buy them things, that there is something going on that isn't deserving of my trust.
Who do you listen to? Who do you trust? Should you really trust the person you tell over and over again that they shouldn't make you unhappy, but then they never actively try to keep you happy because it'll impact their carefree lifestyle? Is that wise?
How big of a chump are you comfortable with being? That is how much you "should" trust another person. Me? I don't want to be a chump, so I don't think it's reasonable to ask me to trust clearly suspicious, bullshit behavior, and good lord I am tired of talking until I'm blue in the face about it. I have no idea what the fuck I should do anymore. If you're tired of crying, then you should do something about it, but there's nothing I can do. I don't want to stop loving. I don't want to protect myself. I just want someone to stop hurting me.