Music Notes

• There are two big features MySpace has that are absent from social-networking rival Facebook: music and the ability to make your profile the ugliest thing on the internet. And, oh, how their music sucks these days. Ever since they launched their new, supposed-to-be-revolutionary music site, everything I try to play is a herky-jerky, slow-buffering mess. It's like listening to the scratching of the least talented DJ in history. Add to that the screwing-over of independent labels and it's like Tom et. al. are trying to make themselves irrelevant.
• I paid just about zero attention to WXPN's annual countdown this year. I like 'xpn just fine, but 885 "Essential XPN Songs" seemed like a death march of earnest singer-songwriters. That being said, I can wholeheartedly endorse the song that came in at #1:
  
  
• I had kind of a slow day at work yesterday, but that's fine because it gave me a chance to get no fewer than six songs stuck in my head. And the remarkable thing was that they sort of organized themselves into thematic pairs. It's like my head was Noah's Ark, gathering the earworms two by two. Things kicked off with a duo of soft-rock hits from the '80s: Madonna's "Borderline" and Quarterflash's "Harden My Heart." It then segued into the more recent, less-embarrassing collaborations "Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart" by Against Me! with Tegan Quin and "Thank You Mario, but Our Princess Is In Another Castle" by the Mountain Goats and Kaki King. Finally, there was the double-shot of lengthy classic-rock story-songs: Springsteen's "New York City Serenade" and the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away." I actually really like five of those six songs, but "Borderline" is pretty fucking tenacious. It got to the point where I was thinking about Rick Astley just to get it out of there.