ILMiXor

Our journey is complete.

2005-09-12T06:27:00.000-04:00

Beaver Harris / Don Pullen 360 ° Experience - Gorée

2005-09-07T05:15:00.000-04:00

From Brazil we make the transatlantic journey and land on the island of Gorée, the westernmost point of Africa and former center of the slave trade. This excerpt combines two separate segments from the full 17 minute piece.

Hilary Duff - The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room

2005-09-05T09:48:00.000-04:00

There was a time in 20th century American history when the Polynesian Chinese restaurant was all the rage. In stark contrast to today's no-nonsense, decorless noodle shops, the Polynesian Chinese restaurant was high tack, all lipstick-red carpeting and brass statues of fire-breathing dragons. Some restaurants had aquariums with exotic fish; some had pebble-strewn fountains adorning the dining area. The food never strayed particularly far from your parents' American-Chinese favorites, but there might have been a pineapple ring on the plate, to satisfy the "Polynesian" requirement.

As I was growing up, these places were dying out. 1980s restaurantgoers found the caricaturishness offensive, and they wanted their experience to be guilt-free (if not completely unassimilated).

The same was happening with the Disney brand around this time. And although Disney took at least another decade to become synonymous with baptism-by-Noxema, its science project EPCOT Center was chipping away at the spirit that made the eponymous Anaheim park so iconic: its warped sense of adventure, its passion for surrealist children's-fiction, and its thirdhand knowledge of the far-flung.

Hilary Duff's Tiki room isn't one of rumbling, soundstagey Arthur Lyman- like war drums, or menacing monolith monsters with wide eyes frozen open in stone. Hers is a fake authenticity that builds on the premise of an older fake authenticity, while removing the scary edges. And since her very young demographic doesn't come equipped with reference-knowledge of Easter Island and mid-century cod-kitsch and so on, the multiple levels of removal are meaningless to them.

But in a way, their cognitive tabula rasa puts them at an advantage over me; they're free to come up with a whole new arsenal of ridiculous constructs.

Dry & Heavy - Dawn Is Breaking

2005-09-01T03:00:00.000-04:00

A new obsession of mine is dub. I stumbled headlong into the music through my best friend's band and found the love crystallized when I befriended some DJs heavily into dub, dancehall, and roots reggae. I have plenty of not-so-fond memories of the music. Growing up, my neighbors were notorious for their Saturday night parties where they would treat the block to their basement soundsystems, pissing off most of the houses around them.

My pick is in Japan, one of the major homes of reggae music. It's such a giant market that there are special dub plates made there that never make it to other sections of the world. I stumbled across Dry & Heavy trying to find some dub remixes. The drum and bass duo of Shigemoto Nanao aka Dry and Takeshi Akimoto aka Heavy make experimental roots reggae with help from friends. This song features the vocal stylings of Likkie Mai and the gentle waves that lull you to a comfortable zone. Music to think or smoke to. Music to comfort the soul.

Huun Huur-Tu - Aa Shuu De Kei-oo (live)

2005-08-30T13:55:00.000-04:00

Wiggling eastwards from Mumbai, and jiggling a little northwards, we now find ourselves nestling on the border between Mongolia and Siberia, deep in the heart of the Republic of Tuva (Тыва Республика). Maybe we're on the banks of one of the republic's 8000 rivers? Or maybe we're on horseback, thundering across the steppes? Since many Tuvan songs concern themselves directly with equestrian matters, then I guess it's probably the latter.

Think of Tuva, and naturally you'll think of Khoomei: the country's indigenous folk music, with its instantly recognisable brand of throat singing. Along with the altogether rockier Yat-Kha, Huun Huur-Tu - here recorded live, about three or four years ago - are the music's best known ambassadors. This track features Khoomei's most distinctive characteristic: that low, almost mechanical drone, with its multiple harmonics, as produced and sustained by a circular breathing technique which, notoriously, can shave several years off one's life expectancy.

Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar - "Disco '82"

2005-08-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

I'm stranded in Russia, left for dead by a cackling Dan Perry and two well-known teen lesbians. (It is unclear if he is mocking my fate, or giggling due to being in the company of well-known teen lesbians.) It's freezing cold and all I have to get out of here is a magic iPod that will transport me to the country of origin of the song that I play. But the Leningrad Cowboys are actually Finnish or something, I know nothing of the music of the Middle-East, and the battery is too weak to carry me back the home turf that is Australia, the one place that I could offer any real insight. I thumb through the artists and find a familiar Sri Lankan name, but I waver. "Imagine if this was not the fantastic adventure it clearly is, but some kind of ...collaborative musical archiving project - do you really want to be the 82,495th person to post an M.I.A. song on an MP3 blog?" But the backlight is fading - time is running out! I chance upon a mysterious playlist entitled "Bollywood soundtrack disco" and press play. The landscape warps around me, then settles. I find myself now standing outside a nightclub in Mumbai. A DFA-ish disco rhythm is echoing from the door. Have I been cast into some sort of Indian hipster enclave?? Thankfully, the distinctive strings and Hindi-English singing comes in over the top, and it turns out that I am in fact on the set of 1982 Bollywood flick Khud-Daar. I eventually negotiate an uncredited walk-on role in the movie, exchange the appearance fee for a second-hand battery charger and zap home.

* thanks to Gaz Mullygrubber for the track - apparently there is much, much more where this came from!

t.A.T.u - All About Us

2005-08-25T17:05:00.000-04:00

Ironic indie's favorite pop duo since Daphne & Celeste roar back with a vengeance with this juggernaut of a song. I didn't understand why t.A.T.u. was the pop group it was okay for everyone to like (okay, that's a lie; if they hadn't spent so much of their onstage career tonguing each other down and tweaking nipples, many people wouldn't have looked twice at them) until I heard "Show Me Love", a roaring, stomping banshee wail of malevolent desire awash in more production tricks than Britney Spears' voice. When these girls are on, they are a menacing beast; throughout the pop sheen and fragile girly-girl vocals lurks a palpable sense of rage. You can taste the fury zooming out of their best efforts, the feral snarl of a couple of girls sworn to rock the world that hates yet covets them.

Given that foundation, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that "All About Us" starts out like a serial killer stalking a half-naked coed drenched in sweat through a fun house and then proceeds to smack the listener in the face with a sock filled with awesomeness. Shame on me, I guess; I'd written them off as a flash-in-the-pan encapsulation-of-one-moment act who wouldn't be heard from again. I certainly didn't expect them to swan back onto the scene with the most stirring, emotionally-charged song of their career. Every time I play this song, I want to stomp and smash things; it amps me up in a way I haven't felt since the first time I heard Big Black. Somehow they do this by remaining completely faithful to their initial sound palette and overlaying it with the creepiest ascending vocal line ever recorded. I can't adequately explain it; it's almost like watching Alaskan fishermen club Seal.

"If. They. Hurt. You. THEY. HURT. ME. TOO."

Me hear you, ladies. Me hear you.

Jacob Hoffman with Kandel's Orchestra - Doina and Hora (Hebrew Dance)

2005-08-23T20:55:00.000-04:00

We've slipped a tiny bit to the West with this one, but Ned forced my hand by posting Marc Almond brooding over melancholy Russian folk music.

More Klezmer music should feature blazing xylophone solos played over blurry violin drones. In fact, the mixture of drones plus mad soloing recalls Coltrane's "India", at least in my mind. Naturally, I've always felt that jazz should feature more solos played over drones as well.

In truth, the age (1923) and fidelity of the recording smears the line between droning and lo-fi fuzz, but no matter. After a tension-filled intro, the piano finally leads the tune into the proper "dance" portion, which sounds like mild elation after what preceded it even though it's not much more than a series of drunken lurches. But soloist Hoffman is the clear superstar here with his dextrous, delicate xylophone work. It kind of makes me wonder how he would have fared as a swordfighter ...

Dr Alban ft Leila K - "Hello Africa"

2005-08-22T18:10:00.000-04:00

"Hello Africa, tell me how you're doing / Hello Motherland, tell me how you're doing." Born in Nigeria, living in Stockholm, qualified as a dentist, working as a pop star - this was Dr Alban's first hit and his style comes intact. The loping digital reggae rhythms, the gentle and polite flow, the slight, let's admit it, gaucheness. Alban is a long way from home, so is the music he plays: technically these beats and rhymes are a planet, not just a continent, distant from JA or NY, but that cut-off adds to the appeal. "Hello Africa" isn't unique among 90s Scandopop in its focus on the mother continent - the marvellous Stockholm Eritreans Midi, Maxi and Efti recorded a beautiful album later in the 1990s in which their heavy-handed Western teenpop styles are always in suspension with echoes of Africa, a translated, digitised, mediated Africa. I could have picked one of their songs but "Hello Africa" strikes as deep. Unlike many of the serious rock musicians who drew inspiration from Africa, Alban wants an answer to the conversation he's starting: he knows that transient pop hits are likelier to do well on the streets of Abuja and Lagos, his greetings are genuine.

T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Contonou Dahomet - "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome"

2005-08-18T21:48:00.000-04:00

Go very slightly east, then south, then back in time. West Africa in the '70s: a musical polyglot, where the cultures of one country sashayed with another, resulting in some propitious musical strains. Fela's the prime example. The embodiment of flexible continental borders, French and English colonialism, intercontinental pollination from North America, Cuba, Jamaica, Europe; rock, funk, jazz, bossa nova, PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC, etc; places to play, people to make dance, the proliferation of cheapish recording studios and record pressing. Revolution!

The Republic of Benin's most outstanding '70s band (actually, the only band from Benin I've ever heard, but no mind), T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey, kicks off this year's fantastic Luaka Bop comp, World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, with the track "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome". The tune is all fading sun, mosquitoes and after school fights, buoyed by the inherently supple rhythms of coastal living (does Benin even have a coast?). Fela Kuti and James brown are criterions of this kind of merciless A-to-B funk, yet neither possesses the well-ventilated touch or polyrhthymic variations of Poly-Rythmo. Alert but never manic (authentic JB screams aside), the song builds its psych cache atop a raw "Psychotic Reactions" intro. Aside from fundamentals, a singular sound, though for reference, it seems to have developed in parallel and half a world away from Os Mutantes, and is one of my personal favorite musical unearthings of the year. More where this came from on Soundway's immaculate T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo compilation The Kings of Benin Urban Groove, 1972-1980.

Ornette Coleman and Prime Time - "Unlabeled Track 3"

2005-08-18T09:10:00.000-04:00

This is from a concert recording I um...found...on a um...network in a folder labelled "London 1987." The sound quality is not so great, theres a lot of tape hiss, but the band is pretty clear and very audible. I don't recognize the song, although it may be off "Virgin Beauty" given the date, but Prime Time is playing like crazy. Ornette doesn't hit the mic until about halfway through, when he blows through first on trumpet, then alto sax.

To you, MCD

edit - DAR! Listening to this again I don't know where I came up with that stuff about Ornette not showing up til halfway through. He's all over this track, from around 40 seconds in, switching back and forth from sax to trumpet and back.

Around the World in Eighty Minutes!

2005-08-18T08:57:00.000-04:00

Alright, here we go! The theme of the mix is "Around the World In Eighty Minutes" and so to imitate the classic tale, we're going to start and finish in London, heading east the whole way.

We'll try to keep this moving pretty fast, with everyone given a full workday to post, and going in the order they signed up, and if they can't finish in time, whoever's behind them gets 'cuts' and the one who dropped the ball goes afterwards. Since I proposed the resurrection of the mix, that means I'll be starting things off.

Coming up after me, MCD, then Tom from Freaky Trigger, then Tantrum the Cat.

2005-08-16T09:32:00.000-04:00

So, what do you say to another round, then?

Here are the individual blurb booklets for each CD.

2005-04-12T17:16:00.000-04:00

Volume One.
Volume Two.
Volume Three.
Volume Four.

Each booklet should be printed using double-sided (Duplex) printing, with the print setting set to "flip on short side".

2005-04-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all you spudboys and spudgirls who participated in or otherwise contributed to the ILMiXor shenanigans. Now that we've finished Disc 4: Maximalism, we're going to take a break, and possibly pick up again over the summer, if the ILMiXmasters are recharged and ready for more.

To recap, if you haven't been following along: We've been doing a series of collaborative mix CDs in the form of an mp3 blog called ILMiXor. Ostensibly, a group of ILM-ers would assemble in a queue, and each of us would take a turn posting an mp3 relating to the chosen theme (using our own hosting space or borrowing someone else's), and writing a blurb about the track. It didn't always work out so neatly -- our final disc was pretty much a first-come-first-serve free-for-all from the get-go. Somehow we filled four 80-minute CDs, almost all of them to capacity.

Many of these mp3s are still available here; if you missed a few the first time around, I'll be posting the whole works as a zip file or a torrent or something. Stay tuned while I sort it out. Artwork and liner notes for Discs 3 and 4 will be up soon as well.

Special thanks to Austin Swinburn for the idea, Elvis Telecom for the cover design, and Mike T-Diva for assembling the blurbs into CD booklet form (.doc file).

Datach'i, "Memorandum (Mogwai Remix)"

2005-04-09T03:02:00.000-04:00

Datach'i was something of an Autechre clone. His second album, "We Are Always Well, Thank You" contained multitudes of scatterbrained melodies and crunchy beats that would have been perfectly at home on Autechre's "LP5". The album was also relentlessly chaotic, featuring a crazed mishmash of soft synth sounds and rapidfire buckshot beats that would have been perfectly at home on Autechre's "Confield". Oh, except Datach'i released his album the year before "Confield". So maybe he wasn't such a clone after all.

Still, somebody thought that all of this needed to sound even more insane, so they drafted in the likes of Kid 606 and Mogwai for remix duty. All Mogwai did was deliver one of the best tracks ever associated with their name. They took a few basic elements of the original track and plastered a sensitive piano line with a migraine-inducing distorted bass line onto it. Then all hell breaks loose. A couple of tonality changes are thrown in, to heighten the drama I suppose.

Play it loud. It's good for you.

Brides of Funkenstein, "When You're Gone"

2005-04-05T16:00:00.000-04:00

To say that this song reminds me of CBS’ classic sitcom, WKRP In Cincinnati, would be a vast understatement. Something about the strings (alternately wan and viscous), and the staggering desperation in Dawn Silva’s and Lynn Mabry’s voices when they sing, “In this world/all of my dreams/one by one/they all fell through”, really captures the sort of febrile weariness I felt while watching re-runs of the show as a kid. I would be lying if I said that, in listening to this song so intently over the past few days, I haven’t imagined intricate scenarios where Loni Anderson’s character, Jennifer Marlowe (covered in the perfume of loneliness), sings this song to a penitent and less sleazy Herb (WKRP’s advertising sales manager) amid a shower of Harvest Gold paint chip confetti (“When You’re Gone”: inspiration for delirious musings).

This is taken from the Brides’ (who were, pre-Funkenstein, backup singers for Sly Stone) 1978 debut LP, Funk Or Walk, produced by George Clinton. “When You’re Gone” is a piñata of a ballad, filled with thick, glossy fragments of guitar, bass (which throbs intermittently in such a big, yearning way), and wistful harmonies.

Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"

2005-04-01T20:55:00.000-05:00

Don't let the two near-silences (at the mid-point, near the crawling bridge, and the fake fade) fool you: All those strings, horns, chorines, and most of all the Big E himself at his most dripping-with-emotion are freaking massive. How else would he have made his comeback? By not doing what he'd always done only to greater excess and with more finesse than usual? Also chosen because one of the greatest moments in ILX history occurred when several board regulars sang along with this at a Lower East Side bar after collectively ditching some drunken jerk.

USA-European Connection, "Come Into My Heart (extended album version)"

2005-03-29T20:25:00.000-05:00

Pioneering dance music producer/arranger Boris Midney was among the principal architects of the Eurodisco sound. One of the first to exploit the full potential of 48-track recording, his trademark blend of strings, horn and percussion created a sound as deep and lush as any heard during the disco era. Born in Russia, Midney was a classically-trained composer who started out writing film scores; turning to disco, however, he discovered his true calling. Working under a number of guises he produced an enormously prolific body of work from his New York City studio ERAS. He first came to American prominence with USA-European Connection. The concept was simple, take lush female vocals and arrangements (done USA style) and place them over swirling strings, and incessant synthesized beats (Euro style) and you have a hit.
--from DiscoMuseum.com's USA-European Connection page

This sort of maximalism seems like it was tailor-made for me and me alone: the string and voice arrangements that could only come from the crinkled, sweaty brow of an overzealous conservatory crank; the ambitious, proggy build, striving madly upward into a ceilingless sky; the shameful devaluation by its branding as "disco," dissociating it from less frivolous musics while it makes no secret about its gleeful acceptance of an ever-renewing subscription to pop purgatory, where repetition is a social experiment rather than an end in itself, an invitation to action rather than a series of measured tones or Danish chairs or whathaveyou. Steely Dan would disapprove (oh, they were reluctantly pro-disco and even stole a few ideas when they remembered to have their ears cocked), but towards the end of "Come Into My Heart," when the dancing has been done and we start prepping the long fadeout with jammy rock solos, there are a coupla turns by whichever out-of-work pianist and guitarist were on hand, and it's like I've stumbled into the dark and muggy Aja comedown room cuz I'd swear it was Victor Feldman and Larry Carlton bringing a little class to the class. I'd like to think of it as Midney's gift to trainspotter maximalists like me, who've stayed the course and continued to dance alone to an empty room (whether a bedroom or a club long after all comers have gone).

Fred Frith, "The Entire Works Of Henry Cow"

2005-03-27T18:28:00.000-05:00

Eurgh, maximalism. Let's just say that this isn't an aesthetic with which I have ever formed much of a personal connection. As my partner always says, with a withering curl of the lip: too many notes. So if I must be maximalist, then please at least allow me to be minimalist with my maximalism.

In 1980, former Mott The Hoople keyboardist Morgan Fisher invited a wide range of performers to contribute pieces to an album project called Miniatures: A Sequence Of 51 Tiny Masterpieces. His only firm stipulation: that each piece should last no longer than one minute. The general idea was that contributors should aim to encapsulate a larger idea in a miniature format. In several cases, this entailed producing a miniaturised version of a larger work.

Thus it was that Roger McGough delivered a breakneck recitation of Longfellow's 22-stanza poem The Wreck Of The Hesperus, The Residents offered up a medley of the Ramones' We're A Happy Family and Bali Ha'i (from South Pacific), David Bedford compressed Wagner's Ring into one minute...

...and the experimental art/prog guitarist Fred Frith produced a one-minute sound collage comprised entirely of fragments taken from every track ever released by his former band Henry Cow, using a strict mathematical progression of his own devising.

In the album's sleeve notes, Morgan Fisher accurately identifies this as the "densest" track on the album - and you'd better believe that there was some stiff competition. It's perhaps also worth remembering that, in the absence of any available digital/sampling technology, assembling the track would have necessitated a painstakingly intricate process of manual editing and splicing. Minimal in duration; maximal in content, effort and effect; and hey, how many classic Cow tracks can you spot?

Fletcher Henderson, "Oh Baby"

2005-03-24T15:37:00.000-05:00

What is more maximalist than the active inventing of big band jazz? This is what Don Redman was doing when he hooked up with Fletcher Henderson in 1923 and got to work arranging piles of songbooks. Borrowing from New Orleans collective improv and Jelly Roll Morton's brand of stride, Redman worked at seperating out an ever-growing coterie of instruments into something whole and multi-faceted. His mechanisms are still a part of popular music; he invented, or at least popularized, the "false start," and, due to the relative closeness in pitch and timbre of jazz-associated instruments, harmonically layered the horns and wrote in full-band pauses to make way for a single instrumental passage. These tricks equaled more sonicly interesting music, added tension and complicated the fairly basic source material. Redman blazed a trail for Duke Ellington to set up the ultimate big band blind date, where popularity rendez-vous'd with musical sophistication at an intensity unmatched before or since.

Charlie Robison, "Magnolia"

2005-03-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

Several secrets here, most obvious one in the song itself, haha it's a guy singing a girl's song, listen all the way through and see who's laughing

Bigger secret perhaps is that I had so many country songs to choose from, turns out country songs are all full of secrets, "El Paso" and "Stays in Mexico" and "Ballad of Billie Joe" and "Delta Dawn" and "Comin' From Where I'm From" which IS a country song no kidding, wonder what it is about this music that invites such trust and then occasionally dashes it to the ground, ooh I could have also gone with Joni Harms' "The Wind" where the secret is HE'S DEAD, YOU'RE SCREWED

Anyway decided to go with "Magnolia," not the only song on Good Times like this either, and no I'm not talking about the song where he compares his Dixie Chick wife and her assets to a big huge Texican meal, biggest secret of all is that Charlie Robison and his brother Bruce -- two rough and tumblers from Bandera and San Antonio Tejas -- are two of the five best songwriters in America, now what do you think about that

Woob, "Gate"

2005-03-07T20:04:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, the Em:t label made a phoenix-like resurrection, unexpectedly resurfacing after more than six years of dormancy. Mid-90's ambient freaks -- in between frantic searches on eBay for the label's out-of-print back catalogue -- breathed a sigh of relief and cracked a smile. "I suppose this means there's an outside chance that Paul Frankland will release something new under the Woob moniker", I thought. "But even if he did, I doubt it would sound too different from the Journeyman album he recorded a few years ago. That was a decent record, but I'm a little burned out on the whole tribal drums + field recordings thing".

I frowned. "That was the problem with Em:t" I thought, resting my chin in my hands and bowing my head. "When they were on, they were ON, meshing dark ambient and drones and field recordings and dub into epic, glacially-shifting soundscapes that made you shake your ass one minute and scared the shit out of you the next. When they weren't on, it was still good, but how many sequels to 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' does one person need?".

Gathering my thoughts, I sat up in my chair and folded my arms. "And even moreso, that's Woob in a nutshell", I sighed to myself. "But at least I'll always have that debut Woob album".

Well, let's revise that and include the first track on the second Woob album in his canon of perfection. After that track, he jumped the shark and it was tribal drum overload from then on in (with a few gorgeous ambient flashes). The first album moved through half-hour long dub pieces, fluffy bunny ambient, screaming, about a million other things, and finally left off in some sort of dungeon with nothing but a speaker-rattling grumble for company. The second album picked up from there, with "Gate", with a low rumble that brews and thickens and builds and the tension is finally broken by the sudden appearance of drums (darkness gives way to light, etc.) ... and cuts off.

That's where the track ends. Up until that point, Frankland had done a masterful job at giving absolutely no hints as to where the song was headed. That's the secret. Of course, I already gave away this secret earlier in this post. Oh, what could have been. So now it's up to those who post after me to devise a better conclusion.

The Insect Trust, "The Eyes of a New York Woman"

2005-02-28T09:51:00.000-05:00

People say I'm cool
Yeah, I'm a cool chick baby.
Every day I thank God
That I'm such a cool chick baby.
-Yoko Ono, "Death of Samantha"

Mr T Experience, "Deep Deep Down"

2005-02-27T12:43:00.000-05:00

When St Peter finally calls them all in out of his book, I’m sure he’s got to have a special section of heaven roped off for pop-punk acts doing love songs. There’s something inherently great about the moments when a bunch of snot-nosed three chorders stop with the dumb pop culture references and dick gags for long enough to crack out the acoustic guitar and drop it on you on some kinda Petrarch tip. That’s why I’m mourning Blink 182’s departure at the moment: the effort our man puts into “I Miss You”, despite the fact that he can’t sing at all, is stunning. You can hear every single vein in his body straining itself just so he can do his dumb little song in anything approaching an acceptable register… it’s simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-warming. Like when you see a really ugly couple together who are obviously in love.

Anyway, yes, secrets, and having secrets. And discovering them. And revealing them, for that matter. A guy once threatened to punch me for giving him the answer to one of the clues in his Times cryptic crossword. And not in a jovial “D’oh, you crazy kids!” kind of way. In an actual “I am about to cause you severe cranial trauama” way. People hate having secrets revealed for them. They like to think that they’re intelligent just because the saw the punchline from a few seconds earlier, or that they named the murderer before Miss Marple did, or whatever. They fail to understand that the whole pretence of it was that the writer wanted you to work it before the main character did, that’s how he builds up your confidence, deux ex machina is for failures, you’re a winner. “Deep Deep Down” has a hidden meaning that I, as the 15 year old I was when I first heard the song, didn’t get. I just assumed it was a song of failed love, the sort of songs that soundtrack your being when you’re at that age. Of course, now I’m 22 years old, and can successfully hold a conversation with a member of the opposite sex without drooling, I understand that it’s just a novelty song about killing your girlfriend, but by then it doesn’t really matter. It’s your song. Enjoy.