since this seems to be the best way to inform everybody about my plans, i’ll be coming up to rochester thursday, october 18-sunday, october 21. shall plans be made? the parade route will not be revealed.

Spurred by Zach’s insightful decleration about YouTube that the website “preserves, archives, and highlights cultural ephemera that were never meant to have the lasting power they’ve been given via digital technology,” I set out today to reacquaint myself with songs, via their music videos, that I briefly but memorably encountered ten years ago. The results:

“Get Higher” by Black Grape

I remember hearing this song once, and only once, when I was making use of the listening booths in the Tower Records on Central Avenue, the drag that runs through Westchester and served as the main boulevard of my teenage time-wasting during high school. Black Grape was only familiar to me as that band consisting of ex-Happy Mondays (whose music I never knew anyway) that in an interview I had at that time recently read bragged about their drug use and wild run-ins with pushers, prostitutes, etc., none of which intrigued me very much. But I guess their hip cred and juvenile escapades were still enough to convince me to listen to the first song off their second album, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid (too easy) I thought it was lame then, and encountering it again a decade later hasn’t changed my initial impression one bit. The sole element of interest in this boring, pseudo-psychadelic anti-jam is the doctored sample of Ronald Reagan extolling the virtures of illegal substances. Who created that? Anyway, the terrible video is proof that most people’s idea of “trippy” is exceedingly pedestrian.

“The Unforgiven II” by Metallica

If The Black Album and a representative song from it like “The Unforgiven” signalled the beginning of the end for Metallica, ReLoad and “The Unforgiven II” were the end of the end. When I came across the video for “TUII” sometime around the same period as my rejection of Black Grape I snapped the television set off with intuitive disgust, even if that forced me to never hear the song in full. Having finally made it through the entire track and video I can now say with the experience of a complete encounter that my intuition was correct — this is uninspired blues-hard rock drivel providing a needless sequel to a “story” nobody with a discriminating opinion of music gave a shit about in the first place. You can imagine real metal fans listening to “TUII,” even before the Napster controversy, and walking away in profound disappointment, having put up for a decade with Metallica’s slow decline from their last masterpiece, . . . And Justice For All, to their late-Nineties incarnation as anonymous blandoids opportunistically cranking out minor key sludge-ballads. The worst part is the retread of the original “Unforgiven” video, which looked pretty neat for an eleven year-old in 1991 but in retrospect traffics in the sort of ersatz “grittiness” (chiaroscuro lighting! out of focus shots!) that revealed in no uncertain terms the poseurdom of the alternative and hard rock acts that employed it. How depressing to be reminded that the Metallica of Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning would have laid absolute waste to the band responsible for “The Unforgiven II.”

“Freak Like Me” by Adina Howard

“Freak Like Me” is a prime candidate for Greatest Song Ever Written and Performed in the History of the Universe (up there with “Mogwai Fear Satan” by Mogwai, “Connection” by the Rolling Stones, and “Two Feet in Front” by Lync) I’ll support that polemical statement in a moment, but first some background: “Freak Like Me” came out in 1995, though I swear by my highly unreliable memory that my friend Kevin and I were affectionately mocking its “Boom boom” section in late high school. Accidentally coming across “Freak Like Me” and its fine video (featuring an army of Howard and other scantily-clad ladies — before that became a seedy cliche in the post-Hype Williams era) while trying to find that “Don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?” hit, I was astonished by how perfectly accomplished it is. How is it that Ms. Howard’s infectious blend of sexy R & B singing and West Coast gangsta-style high-pitched synths and laid back beats didn’t catch on? And I love that Ms. Howard proudly boasts of her freakiness sans qualifying it with apologetic “girl power” shout-outs (a la Meredith Brook’s hateful, sexless “Bitch”) Her insistence on respecting her libidinous nature and primal lusts — just wanting to freak — is positively Bataillian: “It’s all about the dog in me.” This song brings pure joy to my heart. Or, as a YouTube user commented about the video, “[It's] [o]ne of the few songs that make you feel good inside.” Amen.