I know, I know, there are plenty of women who visit this site with absolutely excellent taste in music.  And some of the best music blogs out there are written by women.  But the title of this post is not to criticise all women, it is aimed at a very particular sort whose relationship with music makes me want to set fire to cute little bunny rabbits, and in particular a song that, no matter how incognito they try and remain, always roots the old boots out in any situation.

Specifically, it’s women whose response to ‘that song is fucking dreadful and makes me want to burst my eardrums with knitting needles’ is invariably ‘oh don’t be so boooring’.  Or ‘just relax and have fun’.  Or something equally deserving of punishment by breast cancer.  ‘Having a good cry, sweetheart?  Chemo getting you down?  Fuck’s sake cheer up – don’t be so boooring.’  Just relaxing and having fun is not an option when this shitty Radio 1 Party Mix is playing.  No amount of relaxation, even to the point of a coma, is going to be sufficient to not fucking detest Dancing in the Moonlight by that curly-headed cunt and his baldy-dwarf-shagging cohorts.

Why so bitter about this in particular?  Well there is a very specific reason.  Firstly, the ‘don’t be so boooring’ defense has irked me since school.  People always used to respond with this stinker when you didn’t want to dance, and they had things completely fucking backwards.  Having a pleasant conversation with one’s friends is not boring.  What is boring is spastically hopping about to some fucking woeful Glenn Medeiros number in a desperate attempt to assert your social conformity.  How the fuck is choosing not to do something I don’t particularly enjoy boring, you silly tart?  And why is it always, always the most unimaginative, lifeless, one-dimensional, ultra-conventional dullards who use this particular gambit?  Sometimes I like to dance, sometimes I don’t.  Go.  The Fuck.  Away.

But more specifically this is about that one song: Dancing in the cunting Moonlight.  Unspeakably awful it is in the first place, but the sort of vapid, bovine old slappers who embraced the bloody thing back in about 2001 or whenever it was made it even worse.  You’d be in a bar and that teeth-grindingly awful intro would play: doodn-do-DO-DO-DOO! and whilst you tried to find a door in which to slam your penis in hope that the pain might distract you from the song, invariably the most depressing, largely unattractive, not as young as they pretend they still are, slightly overweight old heifers in the place would give an incoherent little shriek of delight and start, in the unusually large herds in which they tended to move, doing that little epileptic black woman’s Jerry Springer head movement, whilst stepping back and forth in the exaggerated style that is meant to say to everyone ‘Yeah, I can move.. yeah, I’m out with my friends… yeah, I’ve actually got friends, despite what you may think… yeah, in my herd I can gain some tiny measure of fucking self-esteem back from my completely unstimulating existence and comfort myself with the fact that however much I disappoint myself my friends are all equally mediocre and in this dismal company I don’t feel quite as inadequate as I do when I compare myself with the rest of the world.  Yeah!’

‘Oh can’t you just relaaax and enjoy yourself.  Don’t be so boooring.’
‘Do not tell me to FUCKING RELAX!  No amount of fucking relaxation can make this festering, white-boy  cod-soul by one of the most punchable cockmonkeys on the fucking planet anything less than three minutes of brain-melting, utterly inhumane mental fucking anguish.  Boring?  BORING?  If your capacity to appreciate art is so FUCKING STILLBORN that you are capable of anything other than pathological loathing for this steaming, god-punishing excrement then it is very much not myself who needs to fucking well consider whether or not they might be a little boring.’

The depth of the bile represents the hatred of the song, I hope, rather than any particular misanthropy on my part.  *Cough cough*

Anyway, can you imagine my horror when, at my housewarming party in Cambridge, I heard that unspeakable doodn-do-DO-DO-DOO! emanating from my fucking stereo and all the spastics started to twitch so immediately that I couldn’t even turn it off, although I did consider jamming one of their kids’ fingers in an electrical socket – power failure or poignant punishment: a win-win situation really.  Not only that but one of these tired old mares even had the temerity to say, on hearing this aural abomination in a pub six months later: “I’ll always associate this song with your lovely housewarming party”.  Is there a statement in the world more likely to drive me to suicide?  Or spontaneous combustion?  I doubt it.  That fucking song.  My House.  Please god, no!

I hate that fucking song.  Can you tell?

The music I do associate with that house would be far more along these sorts of lines:

Howe Gelb – Pontiac Slipsteam
The Pernice Brothers – Our Time Has Passed So Quickly
Badly Drawn Boy – Stone on the Water I don’t care how shit the rest of it’s been, this is still a good album.
Doves – Here it Comes
Grandaddy – Miner at the Dial-A-View
Lambchop – Nashville Parent

This is less straightforward than the Wedding Present post the other day.  Getting into Yo La Tengo was a longer and more uncertain process than getting into the Weddoes.  I suppose that any group with fifteen minute-long songs called (and sounding like) Mushroom Cloud of Hiss is always going to be a trickier proposition.

After graduating from uni I went to the States for a while and ended up working as a restaurant manager, of all things, for almost a year on Cape Cod.  During that year one of the only pleasurable shopping experiences to be had was a regular trip to Newbury Comics in Hyannis.  Hyannis itself is a dreadful town – no charm, no soul, nothing going for it at all – but Newbury Comics was great.  The staff were inevitably a little snotty, but they knew their stuff and the selection was fantastic, even for a pretty small shop.

Amongst a great many things, I tried to get into Yo La Tengo while I was there.  Like the Wedding Present, my friend Strath was mad on them, so I felt there must be something there I was missing, because the two of us agreed on most things musical.  So I bought Ride the Tiger and Little Honda during my stay on Cape Cod, but neither really grabbed me properly at the time for some reason, although I find that a little odd in hindsight.

Yo La Tengo – Be Thankful For What You Got[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/YoLaTengo-BeThankfulForWhatYouGot.mp3]

What actually did the trick for me at long last was the early 2000 release of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.  I bought in a little record shop in Manchester, but I was living with my Granddad at the time so the only times i could play were when he was out of the house, at which point the stereo went on, loud.  Why loud with such a breathlessly quiet album?  Because some quiet music needs to fill the room and swamp you, and this is just such a record.

For some reason I found the belligerently still atmosphere of this album more accessible than more obvious pop records.  Electr-O-Pura, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, and even Painful are more obviously catchy, so maybe it was related to mood.  I was pretty depressed at the time, having come back from Canada for a job offer in Milan that was dangled and then withdrawn, and thus found myself working in a gangster-riddled nightclub in Manchester.  It was so shitty I found myself right beside someone who pulled a gun on another customer on the eve of the millennium, no-one ever bothered to clean the blood from a previous stabbing off the DJ box, and the place was smashed to bits by an Irish travelling family a couple of weeks later, on another night I was working.  So maybe in that environment the quiet of this particular album was just about what I needed.

Duly enlightened I bought Fakebook, and then went on to the others.

Yo La Tengo – Cherry Chapstick
Yo La Tengo – Last Days of Disco

So, when I confessed to Strath that I had finally seen the Yo La light he looked at me somewhat askance and said with heavy sarcasm “Oh really.  Even songs like Big Day Coming that you said were just the same thing repeated endlessly for ten minutes?”  And the answer was an enthusiastic yes.  Brilliant song.  How the fuck it took seven years and three false starts for this particular penny to drop I have no idea.  A better band, and a better live band, I would struggle to name.

Yo La Tengo – Big Day Coming[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/YoLaTengo-BigDayComing.mp3]

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