Sun, December 2, 2007
Sibilant Earth's Greatest Hits—3:51 PM
I'm not a music person, but I know and occasionally date people who are. (In the same way we are "occasionally" at war with Japan; give me a break, I'm 30 in barely a month and trying to stay chipper!) Whenever music people talk to me about music, I love to play a game in my head where I try to guess whether they're making up fully half of the band names they mention, or actually fabricating all of them.
It's one of the reasons I keep a transcript of that SNL fake ad for the Valentine soundtrack on my computer. I love the way a random collection of words, numbers, or even phonemes can create something that is unmistakably a band name even though it doesn't make any sense in any other context. I could write up an alternate universe Grammy ballot for you every day of the week, but if I started it would become a frenzied obsession and soon you'd find me scribbling on the walls and covered in poop.
So today I'm flipping through an ancient back-issue of EW and I come across a page that absolutely makes me laugh aloud. It's a page of blurb reviews of recent album releases ("Daddy, what's an 'album?'") and above each review it lists the album title and the artist. It doesn't say "Album: This" and "Artist: That" – it just displays both. One is a little bigger and colored red. I swear to God I could not tell which was which by looking at the five on the page. They were:
Say Anything
In Defense of the GenreCoheed and Cambria
No World for TomorrowCassius
15 AgainDeborah Harry
Necessary EvilThe Thrills
Teenager
Now, granted, I had a hunch. "The Thrills" sounds slightly more like a band name than "Teenager" does, but that's not a guarantee of anything. Not even "Deborah Harry" is a solid giveaway: there are plenty of albums named after famous people, and "Necessary Evil" really sounds like a band name. Finally, I glanced at one of the reviews, and "Say Anything" is mentioned as a band name so I had my answer. But I seriously would have believed someone who said they wanted to listen to "Say Anything" on their iPod on their way to buy the new CD by "15 Again" and attend a "No World for Tomorrow" concert.
