My MP3s A-Z

Condor Avenue by Elliott Smith

It’s boring in Connecticut, so in ninth grade I started playing Nintendo again. I got very good at Contra and didn’t even need the code to beat the game. I played Double Dribble for a while, Tecmo Super Bowl. I went out and bought a used gun to play Duck Hunt with, but bored of that, too. Then I dug up Transylvania III. Though I’ve never been interested in role playing, this ate least had ghosts and fireball things and you could switch into a guy that walked up walls and mostly it had a lot of levels and took a lot of time. I was listening to a lot of the Elliott Smith then and would play the game over and over, content and quest-like with the sound on mute and Elliott Smith. So now can’t hear this song without thinking about ghostships and the way my back would hurt from lack of support when I would sit hunched on the floor and stare at the TV in the room at my parents’ house.

ps dude sold more CDs than Justin Timberlake last week

Do They Owe Us a Living? (live) by Crass

For a little while I had a high school intern. He was a punk in both ways a teenager can be a punk. He showed up to his interview, ten million feet tall pimply kid with a spiked jacket and a Discharge patch. We hired him because he cost seven dollars a day and I am sick of looking at spreadsheets. It turned out that though he had never looked at spreadsheets he was already sick of it (though he did show me that if you hold the shift button down you can scroll to the right with the mouse wheel). Before he quit, though, I sat him down to have one good mentor/intern experience with him and explain how our contracts work and why there are territory rights. I talked about GISM, a Japanese hardcore band and bootlegging and selling on iTunes Europe and what an ISO code is and all kinds of things. He was even semi-interested, crossed his legs and looked thoughtful, though that was maybe for my benefit. Then we just started talking about Japanese hardcore. “I might look like a total herb but I know a thing or two about music,” I told him. I said “When I was in eighth grade my dad drove me to see the Business and they covered Do They Owe Us a Living. Isn’t that cool.” But he didn’t care, asked me if we could upload his band’s CD to iTunes. I told him he’d need a barcode and that we could go over how to do it but instead he ignored me and looked at Myspace.