Friday, July 06, 2007

Girlfriend and Girlfriend

A tale of two ... um... songs. One has anime and the other has the F-bomb.

My girls like the Avril Lavigne song "Girlfriend." They heard it on the pop station Stef and the kids listen to in the car sometimes, and even if Stef tunes away when it comes on they are already aware of it and get all excited when a promo for it comes on or the DJ says it's coming up. Ordinarily, I think it's great when my kids hear a song they like (Sarah has become attached to the song "New York City" by "They Might Be Giants" lately) but I'm none too pleased about "Girlfriend," since the song drops the F-bomb about a third of the way through. I don't know doodely-squat about Ms. Lavigne except that she appears to have been 16 for about the past ten years, and drops the F-bomb in a song my 8- and 6-year old like. Yay.

Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=cQ25-glGRzI ... T-53 seconds to cussin'.

When Lily first told me that she likes the song I told her that I liked it too, because I thought she meant the song from Guitar Hero 2. One of my favorite tracks is "Girlfriend, as made famous by Matthew Sweet" ("as made famous by" is their code for "it's not really him") and the girls have seen me play it, and have played it themselves. After watching the above-linked Avril Lavigne video, I decided to search for the Matthew Sweet version.

And here it is: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4b98QpDh65I ... go watch. I'll wait here.
EDIT: this one works ... http://youtube.com/watch?v=UYOt9_5v1cA

Not only did I find it, but I quickly realized that I had heard of this video before. Back in 1991, when Matthew Sweet's version was released, anime was fairly rare in the U.S. The fact that a great deal of the video was footage from the anime file Space Adventure Cobra was a real oddity at the time. Pretty much everyone who saw the video told me about it, but I never once got to see it. Until now. And I didn't miss much, did I? First off, how uncomfortable do you have to look before the director of your music video just says, "You know what? Let's just use the animated parts and leave you out, okay?" It's not like these were the early days of music video or something... "Nevermind" came out that same year.... they should have known better.

Anyway, what's the point? I don't know. It's just a contrast for me to point out.

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