Frankly, it was a three-way tie between “IDK I Just Work Here,” “This Movie Sucks,” and “A Little More Dumb.” I think I like the song for “Movie” more, and the lyrics for “Dumb” more, but the combination of song + video edges out to “Work”.
It is another in their outstanding oeuvre of working class Millennial songs:
They don’t own me They just own the only thing that’s keeping me alive They swear that’s not a threat Cause I could always starve to death I guess I’ll pledge allegiance to the paycheck
The final song is already locked and loaded and next week we return to the backlog, but in between I have an idea for something special to do.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
This song is in between their two albums and shows some degrees of transition between those two moments. Surburban Legend grew out of a few years of singles and shifts. By contrast, This Movie Sucks was a year of a much more concentrated effort.
And, again, in the middle, is a song about feeling like you are supposed to still be a kid when you are also expected to be an adult:
I love dungeons and dragons In the basement with my friends Everybody’s got commitments It’s getting hard to plan
And everyday I’m playing dress up Go to work and play pretend That I grew out of it But I can’t
We’ll be Teenagers forever But not forever young Always on the cusp of growing up But it’s never quite enough
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
If you have heard of Durry, you have probably heard of “Who’s Laughing Now?“, their most viral hit, so I am not going to share that one. Instead, I am going to share…
“Who’s Laughing Now?” was a hit in our household, no doubt. I’m almost positive it was the first Durry video I saw and it was a case of instant love. The argument about whether or not to get a face tattoo lives, as the kids say, rent free in my head…at least some days:
However, it was “Loser’s Club” [yesterday’s pick] and “Coming of Age” that were my Durry-songs-of-choice. I played them both a whole lot. I still play them both a whole lot. I have designed entire music videos about “Coming of Age” in my head.
I also like the idea of having two different songs about coming of age stories on this blog.
A lot of what I enjoyed about this one was the subversion of the traditional “coming of age” from a teen to third-life crisis. A resonance, if you will, with the feelings a lot of us were going through post-COVID-19’s initial blast when we were returning to normal and realizing that the normal didn’t have to be precisely the normal and maybe “normal” was a code-word for “abusive relationship with society”…
Back to the rat race run in place. I just spin my wheel till my my next lunch break. And hope it gets better with a five cent raise.
But I can’t stop until I get paid.
I don’t know which is worse, the commute or the hearse. I don’t think that it’s worth it anymore. Sick of living for the paycheck. Blow it on the weekend. I’m giving up and loading up the briefcase.
I should have known better than to think that this could change.
I should have seen the pattern, how disconnected I became.
Climbing that corporate ladder.
If you need somebody to take the blame: you can call me a quitter.
But I’m calling it a coming of age.
Even as a person who was happy with his job — and I would be shocked and awed if most people wouldn’t essentially agree, disdain requires something of a minority condition to sustain1 — the fun of a certain type of punk attitude is fist-in-the-air, beer in hand, and shouting “FUCK IT” to everything for a full four-minute song.
That kind of joyful rebellion is rampant in Durry and I love them for it.
In the same way that if the shortcut was easy it would just be the way, true disdain requires it to be much more trouble to fix than to let it roll. ↩︎
Despite my initial plan, most likely going to skip the “performer of the week” thing for at least one week after this one just so I can get more backlog out.
The link I copy and pasted for the all posts up until now were slightly malformed in that they came from Youtube but somehow I copy and pasted them wrong. Depending on the browser, and Youtube’s mood, it might work or might not work. Those should all be fixed now with the corrected link that shows up with this one.
Look, I listen to a lot of Japanese Alternative Rock and Shoegaze but it’s less that it is the Japanese (though I appreciate that, as well) and more that I like a particular type of music. This morning, unrelated to this, I was trying to think up a way to describe it and this is what I came up with:
I like alternative rock music where the voice is another type of guitar and the lyrics are the right amount of ironic. Where I can listen to the lyrics closely and really enjoy them but I can also tune them out and treat the track like a instrumental with an almost subliminal sense of introspection. My favorite music is the bit where both truths are true at the same time.
Durry I think fits this. I love a lot of Durry lyrics. I love the Durry siblings’ singing. I also just like the song as a whole, as a vibe.
They have done some creative marketing and video design but for the start I thought it was good to go back five years ago to a brother-and-sister duo on a merry-go-round in what I assume is their local park. In what must of have been the waning days of COVID lockdowns and that broad hope folks were feeling in the 2021 summer. In that light, lyrics like this just resonate, you know?
I said this time last year that we’d be gone but we’re still here Just waiting for our turn to go but no one seems to notice We’re still swimming upstream with the best of us Another summer passes by like water through our fingers Crow’s feet creep a little deeper, creasing like a piece of paper But origami never seemed so beautiful
NOTE: the “swimming upstream” line which is a bit awkwardly given in the video (and the original version of the song) does not actually feature in the album version of the song. I think it was the only cut line but honestly I have not fully double checked.
It is a shockingly simple video to make but both of them are so damned gorgeous and seem to be having so much fun.
Fun which does not forget to inject a bit of irony…
What’s the point of living if you never strive for more? But I’m not keeping score
This will be a bit of spoilers for the tracks I will pick but some videos that I won’t be featuring this week that tap into the “just a couple of siblings having fun” vibe if you want more of that include:
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
