8. The Mockingbirds, The Loops (We’re Those Kids)
In order to explain what this song is (because I’m sure you don’t know it), I need to set the scene a little:
Picture it–Providence, 2000. There’s live music out the wazoo; The Call, The Living Room, The Century Lounge, The Safari, AS220, not to mention the whole Fort Thunder thing that was still happening.* They’ve all got shows every night. I don’t go to any of them, mind you, because I’m still afraid of everything, but still. But in the early part of the new millennium I went to Lupo’s and the Met Cafe a whole lot; that’s where I saw my first show (The Cardigans) and my second show (also The Cardigans!) and many, many shows after that, from Gang Starr to the Queers to Cibo Matto to Richard Thompson to Eve to Ash to Elvis Costello to Cat Power to… well, and so on.
The cool thing was that there were lots of local bands there, too. Many of them even opened up for the bigger bands, like when Daughters played with Mission of Burma or Spheres played with Xiu Xiu. I tried really hard to see local bands and to put their songs on mixtapes I passed to people I met on the internet. I was all Erin McKeown this and Plymouth Rock that and Purple Ivy Shadows the next thing and Amazing Royal Crowns what have you. I think I’m responsible for the world’s biggest fan of the Rebecca Hart Project, since I included their (still-good) song May I on a tape I sent a guy in England and he promptly fell in love.
Anyway, The Mockingbirds were from Providence. They were kind of rednecky in a very suburban way, and I saw them live a whole bunch of times. They were punky, I guess, in that they sang about the working class, although a better description might be Letters To Cleo or Fuzzy re-imagined as the bar band from down the street. With regard to including this song on my ten-best list for the year, the best I can do is say that I was young, and meant well. I actually barely remember this song, though there are others (called Middle-Class Pansy and Dumbest MoFo) that I could still sing along with; I’m not sure why I didn’t pick one of those.
[photo via Boston Rock Photos, charmingly hosted by Tripod]
[*All of these places are gone now, except for Lupo's, which moved into a much bigger space, meaning that very few of the bands I saw have a place to play in Providence now. AS220's still there, too; it's also bigger now, but they don't book many national acts, and regular rock music is very passe now. Here, at least.]
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