Six Months Behind Fashion But Moving Fast

Hot on the heels of my good lady wife's post on 'does anyone remember memes and shit?' Carrie of Little Distraction has hoofed a Friday meme up the pitch to me, and I fully intend to play.

So...yeah.

Total volume of music files on my computer:
Oooh, tough one...mostly because I'm not working at my computer. I think it's about 3.5Gb. This might not seem like much, but Krissa and I have separate profiles on her 40Gb iBook, so despite Tiger doing funky profile-switching swooshiness, we're still sharing hard drive space, hence the restrained volume of tunage.

The last CD I bought:
On a flighty trip into the Virgin Megastore in Union Square I bought Gorillaz: Demon Days and Gomez: Split The Difference, temporarily satisfying my neverending hunger for bands with names which start with GO and end with Z.

Song playing right now:
Funnily enough, it's Gorillaz - a tune called 'Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head' about a mountain called Monkey who is unwisely mined for diamonds and takes volcanic revenge. Never mine a mountain called Monkey for diamonds, kids. Just say no.

Five songs that I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Well, if I was at home on the iBook I know iTunes would throw up the recent iPod commercial tune 'Jerk it out' by The Caesars, and Yellowcard, 'Way Away' - both tracks from the video game SSX3...and my Audioscrobbler Profile has been eternally skewed by accidentally leaving a small downbeat/depressing playlist on overnight with the volume off, so there's not much to be gleaned from that...I'll just freestyle, then.

Third Eye Blind - Semi Charmed Life

I will never forget the feeling of hearing this song being used on the trailer for The Tigger Movie. Mostly because of what I know about the song now, but we'll get to that.
In the summer of '98 (...I think) I loved this song. It spoke to me of ambition and desire and the physicality of the presence of another person in your life and arms and the joy of being. Well, the lyrics I could make out spoke to me of that, anyway. A few years later, I had played it so much on university radio that if I didn't play it on my weekly show people asked after my health. That's how much I loved this song.
Then I heard from someone that it was all about smack, crack, heroin, ecstasy, MDMA, PHP, poisoning your sweet old innocent grandmother with radioactive tea and biscuits and probably slaughtering babies and pedophilia and genocide as well.
Or something like that, anyway.
But now you know why I was surprised to hear it on the trailer for The Tigger Movie.

New Radicals - Mother, I Just Can't Get Enough

People who have been on the receiving end of a CD compilation of almost any ilk from me in the last couple of years are more than likely to be familiar with this song. It rocks the face so far off my face that my face is probably under forensic examination by the Hong Kong police, who are no doubt manfully struggling to find out why a man's face fell from the sky for no apparent reason. Make my nipples hard, let's go!
Indeed. A motto for our times.

Lemon Jelly - Ramblin' Man

The only thing I don't like about this track is that it segues from the previous track on the album, meaning you can't slip it onto a compilation or playlist easily - it jumps in. That's it. Everything else is fantastic. It's a grandiose, majestic introduction, over which two middle aged chaps seem to be conducting an interview about lifelong travel. After a blissful musical bridge, the interviewee's voice begins to rhythmically and evocatively say the names of places from all across the globe, the enunciation of which totally complements and enhances the music behind. The place names, the procession of which throws up an enormous amount of imagery and association...Dubai ... Sydney ... New York ... Tokyo...Murmansk...Cairo... Sri Lanka...begin to speed up, until they are overlaid and blurring into each other and anything and everything you can make out from the sussuration of names makes you feel as though you are spinning the whole world faster and faster as though it were a globe in a study and you are spying these places whizzing by...
I fucking adore this song.

Blur - Tender

1998. Working in supermarkets to fund European travel. Listening to blur on library-borrowed CDs to save money. Feeling more than a little down-at-heel and not a little lonely. Singing the lyrics to 'Tender' while wheeling around the Safeways' warehouse on a stock trolley because the acoustics were, somehow, awesome; certainly good enough to make my attempt at the lyrics sound less than painful to my own ears, anyway. In the Blur v. Oasis battle I was always a Blurrite, if less passionate and vitriolic than some, and this is my favourite Blur tune.

Radiohead - No Surprises

This one might come as a little bit of a...well...an unexpected choice. I haven't listened to this in I don't know how long, it's not a particularly favourite track. But it is tied in with an experience so viscerally that bringing to mind the electronic harp-like tones alone paints memories from 6th form life that are sharper than most. An unpleasant morning after, for what it's worth, one of my first real hangovers, and gut-wrenching guilt, fear and panic...unsurprisingly resulting from the spur-of-the-moment acts of the night before. Stepping outside the Common Room to chat, this song was on the stereo and all I could hear was this song and all I could think was 'bloody pertinent radiohead' and 'No Surprises Please'. Please no surprises. I can remember the colour of the paint on the swing doors, the view out of the corridor windows across the courtyard between different blocks of the school and the trees lining the green playing fields and the blackened chewing gum flattened and eroding in the purple carpet and the grey of the cloud on the December morning.
Like I said - visceral.

And on that IMMENSELY cheery note I end the memey-wossname. I won't pass it on to anyone, but if you want to do it...do it, I say.

Incidentally, has anybody seen my camel?