On special request from Posephus, I thought I’d include the tunes I was obsessing over as of late.

This week is the single busiest week of my whole entire life (not exaggerating) and, even though all the things I’ve been up to are proactive and forward-moving and positive and glee-inducing, I’ve still been in need of some sort of outlet/distraction. And, since RuPauls’ Drag Race ended in such a disaster, I thought I’d take a brief moment to compile a list or two for the sake of taking my mind off the insanity going on around me.

So, recently I’ve just started putting up a daily musical greeting as a Facebook status update and the week has been a little brighter as I’ve been delving back into my personal memory archives and pulling out the tunes that embellished an era. At the moment, the theme is mid-90’s r&b and, frankly, I could go on forever but then I’d start looking like one of those white kids they make fun of on StuffWhitePeopleLike.com under the “Black People Music that Black People Don’t Even Like Anymore” category. So I’m sticking to a few that changed things for me and then leaving it at that. I know I’m being mainstream and just scratching the surface; this isn’t an art exhibition after years of in depth research - it’s just me, posting slightly-forgotten videos to the delight of a few friends. Nothing serious.

But then I started thinking about expounding on this practice and bringing out a new theme every week, starting with “Early-90’s Dance Tracks” in celebration of all my friends who will be graduating next week. (There will be Crystal Waters and Cece Peniston and the Real McCoy. Get Excited.) And now, because my mind has started this weird obsession with this miniature, completely unnecessary and barely relevant project, I have pages of notes in different genres of 90’s music that I could use for, like, forever.

But knowing me, I really should just get all of it out there without trying to attempt a long-term commitment on a sudden, temporary idea.

so without further rambling ado, I give you the
SHAMELESS OBSCURE 90′S MUSIC EXPLORATION BY RANDOM CATEGORY Project

This installment is “Decent but forgettable alt-rock songs you’ll never think of right off”

The first section is “Little-Known Chick Rock tracks that weren’t terrible/pretentious.”
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~ Letters to Cleo “Here and Now”
Love it. I just think it embodies the 1990’s as a girl. Completely

~ Anouk “Nobody’s Wife”
Say what you want about Alanis, Anouk was just perfect to scream along to and I sure did. I still do even though the lyrics don’t really apply anymore… but they did for a while. (Also, that video had to cost $10 at most. It’s TERRIBLE.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuaFNQ8K5A

~ Holly McNarland “Elmo”
OhGoodLordinHeaven, after I saw McNarland on a side stage at Lilith Fair (just after K’s Choice!) I was hooked. I wailed along to this song every night for at least 6 months, like I was being paid for my performance. Even now I’ll crack her out and wail along, although I’m hardly able to conjure as much anger as I could when I was 15.

~ JoyDrop “Beautiful”
Oh God, I lived for this song (really more in 2000 but it counts) and all the symbolism it had in my deep, tortured adolescent existence. MAAAAUUGHH!
… anyway.
I liked it. I think it’s powerful and it speaks to every girl and it helped move me forward, even a little.

~Luscious Jackson “Naked Eye”
I don’t know any of the words except the chorus but she’s still magic. And I soooo wanted that haaaiir.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIAAx2vAxic
(Embedding disabled)

~ Jill Sobule “I Kissed a Girl”
Everyone was wigging out about Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and I was kinda appalled because that song was SO 15 years ago. Stupid kids thinking they’re all radical and original…

~ Bif Naked “Moment of Weakness”
It’s obvious she wanted to be Gwen but this song was still pretty great

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWuddKPLXSw
(Embedding disabled)

~ And Marcheeba’s “Big Calm” album was the most important one in my late 90’s but “The Sea” got me the most.

(Not actual video but you muuuust liiiiisten. It’ll change you.)

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And then this section is “Pop-ish Dude Alt Rock Songs You’re Probably Going to go “AAwww!! I forgot this one!!” About Even if it’s Terrible”

~ Placebo “Pure Morning”
It’s beautiful. It’s poignant. The video will cover you in chills. I still listen to it when I need to conjure a powerful mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbHkwrGgsoA
(Embedding disabled but you HHAAAVE to watch it. You really do. It’s beautiful.)

~ Reef “Place Your Hands”
Try not to sing and jump along the second time you listen to it. Try. Also, the jumping and splashy water effects are pretty rad, too.

~ Spacehog “In the Meantime”
Love. Lovelove. It’s part of the 90’s canon as far as I’m concerned. It moves my heart. It makes me want to dance and love people. I love it. Have I mentioned that?

~New Radicals “You Get What You Give”
I’m glad they made their money and got out of the game before it stunted them; that’s admirable. I saw them open for the Goo Goo Dolls and they were tons of fun. Highly recommended.

~ Local H “Down to the Floor”

It’s like they were allllmost sad enough to be Grunge but noooott quite. I think that’s what I liked about them, actually. Also, I’ll take any reason to scream “COPACETIC!!”

~White Town “Your Woman”
Nobody had any idea what the song was about and nobody really figured anything out from the video. But it’s still got an amazing sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU
(Embedding disabled)

~ Tripping Daisy “I Gotta Girl”
I’ll be shocked if anyone can remember this one. Because it’s trippy.

~ Harvey Danger “Flagpole Sittah”
Remember when everyone thought they were going to be the new hot shit like Supersonic (”closing time”) or Eve 6 (ugh… that “heart in a blender” song killed me from the start) or Marcy Playground (why they had a hit was beyond me) and, instead they only got into a preview for some Katie Holmes movie and then they were out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBgmC_USeoM
(Not the actual video but is the actual song)

~ Barenaked Ladies “Brian Wilson”
Before “stunt” came out, they were actually a fantastically genius college-y band (I normally don’t even like college-y) whose songs were amazing and whose concerts were the funniest damned things I’d ever been to. And LISTEN to that jam session/piano solo at the end. Daaaaaamn. (If you gt a chance, listen to their “Rock Spectacle” album. It’s pretty amazing.)

~ Dishwalla “Counting Blue Cars”
With sounds and lyrics like this I really thought we’d be watching them for a while. Ah well. Lines from this song are still among my favorite lyrics. (Also, this video might be THE MOST 90’s of the ones posted here.)

~Primitive Radio Gods “Standing Outside a Broken Phonebooth with Money in my Hand”
I just wanted to meet the soul brother wailing in the background; screw that wussy lead singer.

~Cowboy Mouth “Jenny Says”

NEVER a more energetic band to watch. Music = meh. Concerts - YYYYYYYYEAAAAAHHH!

~ Soul Coughing “Circles”
I laughed at every one of my friends who bought this terrible album. Because if this was the best song they could pick from the list, that’s bad. Bad bad.

(Not actual video. And not really worth your time.)

~ Whitest Kids You Know “Freak of the Week”

It never “spoke” to me or anything. In fact, I didn’t even really like it. But I thought about it and did the “Awww” thing anyway. So here we are.

~ The Verve Pipe “Freshmen”

Don’t act like you don’t remember. I actually saw them in concert the summer that that song was huge. They had a couple good ones but they all pretty much sounded the same. So it goes…

~ Shawn Mullins “Lullabye”
I’m not going to say I loved it and I always thought the singer was whoa pretentious, but my heart hurt for the girl in the song for some reason and I may just always remember that. Or equate it with that time of my life. Or something.

~ Fastball “The Way”
I’m not a fan but my hubs loved them, so this is for him.

~ Caroline’s Spine “Attention Please”
Anybody remember this? Anybody?
This is not the official vid ’cause I couldn’t find it. They might’ve been that small of a band

~ Sister Hazel “All For You”
This may belong in the “Mediocre 90’s music” category but, if Soul Coughing made this list, then so does this one:

And, finally,

~ The Verve “Bittersweet Symphony”
Because we all know we enjoyed it but it still comes up too much in pretention to be sincerely appreciated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx3m4e45bTo&feature=related
(Embedding disabled)

I was once in love with a man who exclaimed that I was quirky. Like most of his statements, his tone was nearly impossible to decipher and, after he left me, I opted to think that he saw these quirks as flaws. So, I hid these away for a few years, terrified that these same quirks would drive away other loves that crossed my paths [instead of maybe admitting that he was just a cowardly, self-servicing, calculating man without the slightest clue how to connect with humans on an emotional level because he's too busy trying to fling everything into a logical, scientific forum... No, I'm not bitter.] When I met my husband, I was petrified that my dark past, in addition to my plethora of seemingly harmless quirks, would inevitably drive him away. They didn’t. (When I tried dumping all my flaws and quirks and neuroses into his lap to try to sabotage things, he finally looked right at me and calmly stated, “You’re not going to scare me off if that’s what you’re trying to do.” This is among the higher numbers in the Top 20 Reasons I Married Him list. He’s that good.)

Since we’ve been together, I’ve started recovering these quirks and exploring them, weeding through them and seeing which actually embody my tendencies and which are unhealthy habits I could do without. Here are three that I’ve recently rediscovered about myself that I’m hanging onto:

I love driving around and looking at Christmas lights… by myself…for hours.

This personal tradition started with my father, who would always take the time for a detour on the way home from anywhere during the holiday season to look at Christmas lights. My mother never allowed any outstanding Christmas decorations and limited our household holiday decor to a tree, a wreath, and candles in the windows. Every time we passed a gaudy, overlit house, my dad would chuckle to himself and stare in childish wonder of every Griswoldian spectacle, the envy of such freedom sparkling cheerfully in his eyes. As I got older, he and I were the only ones who enjoyed driving around for hours as it seemed everyone else had someplace more important to be. Soon, we were having to schedule annual dates a week before Christmas for the exclusive purpose of looking at lights and then there were years where we never saw them together at all.

When I moved home in 2003, I found myself very very alone in my drunken insanity. I had successfully pushed all my family away from me and staring at Christmas lights seemed too intimate and a little too embarrassing to share with anyone else. For many many December evenings, I’d fill a Nalgene bottle with Bailey’s and ice, wrap up in a warm coat, find my Charlie Brown Christmas CD and take myself for a drive, often staying out for more than 3 hours, driving, smoking, singing, and crying into my chilled wassail at the beauty that surrounded me and the joy that seemed to elude me. It was dangerous and reckless and unbelievably pathetic and kinda insane in retrospect, but those nights were the highlight of that dark year. In years following this, I would sometimes “treat” myself to a night off the wagon, slowly perusing quiet neighborhoods and parking my car in front of the tackiest of houses to bask in the lights and try to immerse myself in whatever Christmas was. AGAIN, it was dangerous and reckless and unbelievably pathetic and kinda insane in retrospect, but those nights were the highlights of my darkest Decembers.*

In the time I’ve actively embraced sobriety (you know, without just telling everyone that’s what I was doing), I’ve found that I can contain my excitement for Christmas lights about as easily as I could for a surprise gift of a million bucks. I’m always grateful that sobriety has brought my family back emotionally, as they now ride with me enough to allow me to take indirect routes home to ogle the various electric expressions of holiday celebrators.

Say what you will about the ridiculous overcommercialization of Christmas and how a giant, inflatable Mickey Mouse-dressed-as-Santa has nothing to do with the “real meaning” or how computer-programmed twinkle lights are impairing society’s ability to focus on Our Lord Little Baby Jesus Christ. Nothing makes me feel more childlike than staring at the sparkling spectacles created by overzealous Christmas fans, beseeching passing cars to take a moment to crack a smile and remember joy in it’s most basic, ridiculous, aesthetic form.

Last year I took myself on my solitary drive to sing Christmas songs to the baby inside me and explain to her what this swelling joy was in the atmosphere around her. This year I cannot wait to capture her reaction as she experiences it for herself.

*I don’t advocate drunk driving and I fully acknowledge that my doing so on so many occasions was extremely selfish and wrong. Even though I was never caught and never hurt anyone, it is still something I’m very ashamed to have done so willingly and frequently.

I have a problem with false nostalgia

The fact that I’m a Memory Lane junkie is no secret. I could sit around and reminisce everysingleday with those who inevitably haven’t thought about the past in years and years. In the advent of networking sites, this habit of mine has gone into overdrive in the last few years, seeing me delving into old relationships and old scenarios that simply don’t exist anymore. Gross. Anyway, I’ve curbed my need to indulge in memory so often on a public forum (even though “The inward eye is the bliss of solitude”, you know) but I think I’ve channelled that need for nostalgia to revisiting the past that I wasn’t a part of.

Heh?

I’ve always liked looking through old photos of my family during times that wasn’t around, which I don’t think is entirely unnatural. I love looking at my parents when they were younger and going through the drawers and boxes full of cluttered photographs at my Gran’s house to obtain clues about who my family were and eventually are. I kind of become manic about it, actually, taking time every other year or so to just peruse through forgotten photos and scrapbooks for an entire day and getting lost in memories and eras that I was never a part of.

This weird desire lives on a bigger level, too, in that I love watching old movies for their social commentary and the reality that Hollywood wanted us to embody and remember about this time. Additionally, I love reading about how people lived in their day-to-day lives in the past. It feels voyeuristic, but I love learning about people’s various quirks or the things that made them outstanding or boring. I love reading about what made Lucy and Desi Arnaz actual pioneers in both comedy and television even though their show seems so silly and trite to me today. I love trying to understand the mentalities of the average person during the most tumultuous times in history and how every one of society’s heroes had normal neuroses and quirks just like the rest of us. Like that Beethoven was apparently filthy and wouldn’t leave his room in the palace for weeks, covering the walls in scribbled music and covering his floors in rotting food and feces. (The royal administration would move him to a different studio each month to clean and air out the old one.) Or that Juliette Gordon Lowe dragged Rudyard Kipling out of a party she deemed as boring to go fishing in their formal wear.

A couple years ago, I came across an old 8mm projector and about 80 reels from a family that lived in Miami during the late 1950’s. I wanted to make a project of acquiring clues from the videos and eventually finding the family that would know those involved in the film, but this massive undertaking only lasted a few months before I became distracted by outside influences. However, while I still plan to eventually find the family eventually, I’ve found that I love watching these reels to peer into the past of a genuinely average mid-century American family. It’s amazing how they all look exactly like all the fake reels that cinema and television have recreated in the years since this era and I delight at watching women leave the house in pearls, dresses, hats and gloves and tinsel-covered Christmas mornings and burly men wearing short shorts and heavily-gelled hair while smoking a cigarette next to some infant. It’s fascinating and I hate that these videos contain no sound as I’d love to hear the dialogue and language of these people as well. This voyeuristic collection of mine is by far one of the most intriguing possessions I own.

I don’t know if I enjoy looking into the past for purely voyeuristic reasons or if I’m some sort of whacked-out history buff but, either way, this is a part of myself I hope doesn’t fade. I just wish there was some sort of career I had immediate access to that would allow me to explore this further. Like being a video librarian at a massive archive. Although I’m sure I’d sit in an editing room all day waiting to hear someone say something inappropriate or laughing when someone farted. This, I feel, is the humanity that unites us all.

I need to feel like I have enough.

This one doesn’t warrant an essay, but I’ve always felt like I can’t let things run low. I have to keep my possessions stocked at all times, I have to feel like there’s enough of something when I need it. I can’t let my gas gauge get less than a half-tank full without refilling it, I can’t let any makeup or bathroom products or food supply reach anywhere near scant proportions, I can’t let the laundry go without being done for over 4 days…

I think I have a problem with dealing with the tail-end of things. I always write in notebooks until there are a few pages left and then I abandon them, I never eat the last slice of bread or Lean Cuisine in the fridge, I can’t finish one tube of toothpaste unless there’s another already laid out.

Hunh… I’m weird.