By 1997 I was a tenth grader with waaaaay too much time on my hands, thanks to a lack of social skills and a school fuck-up that left me with eight study halls a week.  I spent my time practicing French, reading Alice Hoffman novels about girls who locked themselves up for the summer and emerged beautiful and handy at gardening, and watching an insane amount of VH1.

I still like most of the songs on this list, but it’s pretty amazing how uncool they are.  Not in the sense that their popularity is collectively embarrassing now (um, hi, Paula Cole) but in the sense that most of these songs weren’t popular in the first place.  There’s an abundance of flops by artists whose labels stopped supporting them after their one mega-hit, and songs by folks you may never have heard of at all…

[Click to embiggen.]

My 1997 charts were a little simpler… Fewer numbers and symbols, and I only wrote the artist names down the first week of their release.  And while “Breathe” stands the test of time, I suppose, “The Difference” kinda blows in retrospect and I have no idea what that En Vogue song even is.

Also on this countdown, a number of obscurities: “Whisper A Prayer To The Moon,” a completely forgotten single by Eleanor McEvoy, the Irish singer whose “Precious Little” was a minor hit earlier in the year; “On The Way Out,” the lead single from Freedy Johnston’s Never Home album; Jill Sobule’s “Bitter,” who years after the success of “I Kissed A Girl”; “Been It” by the Cardigans, which went nowhere because “Lovefool” was a hit for about two years straight; and “Until,” off jazz singer Cassandra Wilson’s New Moon Daughter, my very favorite album of the previous year.  (I was a snob, I realize now.)  Also there’s the single from the failed Echo and the Bunnymen reunion–the one that was so ill-conceived the record label accidentally spelled Bunnymen wrong on the CD sleeve–and a song off the follow-up album by “I Know” singer Dionne Farris.

There were also some big hits, though: “Semi Charmed Life” and “Bitch,” the latter of which was killed for me just months later, when I got a job as a day camp counselor and all the kids would sing it all day to torment us.  “How Bizarre” and “Block Rockin’ Beats” have both aged better than they should have, probably, and Sheryl Crow’s “A Change” is still her best hit single, I think.  (Note to the world:  As annoying a presence as Ms. Crow is now, her self-titled second album is reeeeeeally good.)

Amd, at number one, Emily and Amy:

Seriously, fuck this song.

A friend of mine once described Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up The Sun” as “the kind of song that was made for medical receptionists whose main dream in life is to be able to wear flip-flops to work every day.”  And, nothing against medical receptionists (or flip-flops!) but she is right.  “Soak Up The Sun” is a terrrrrrrrrible song.

Another song that was custom made for the gyno’s waiting room is “The Song Otherwise Known As Forget You” by Cee-Lo Green, the Record Of The Year-nominated piece of shticky retro-garbage that took the internet by storm last summer and which is currently #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, right behind Lady Gaga’s insipid “Born This Way.”  The fucking Cee-Lo song also in the top ten (and gaining!) on the Pop Songs, Radio Songs, and Digital Songs charts, as well as the Yahoo Video Chart.  I don’t know what that last one even is, but it just furthers the point that this song is everywhere.  And like so many songs that are everywhere, it is a fucking terrible atrocity.
I guess I should mention that I’ve never really gotten Cee-Lo’s appeal.  The whole Gnarls Barkley thing was waaaaaaaaaay overrated.  I thought “Crazy” was grating, though I was very alone in that, and I really did not see the big whoop about the Violent Femmes cover, either.

The joke of this song, the one the Grammy announcers genuinely referred to as “The Song Otherwise Known As Forget You,” is that in the radio edit of the song Cee-Lo says “forget you” a bunch of times, but really everyone knows he’s actually saying “fuck you.”  (I guess this is a thing now, because it also happens in Enrique Iglesias’ mildly date-rapey “Tonight (I’m Fuckin’ You),” a song which I don’t actually dislike, for some reason.)  Apparently people who are not fifth-graders still think the word fuck is automatically amusing!

Gwyneth Paltrow sang “Forget You” on Glee, the horrid television program, and then she put on some overly high heels to stand on Cee-Lo’s piano and sing it at the Grammys.  Cee-Lo wore a giant George Clinton-y bird outfit, and there were Muppet things, too, because why not pull out all the bells and whistles to disguise the fact that even Amy Winehouse at her crackiest wouldn’t go near something this blatantly artificial.

Okay, maybe I should step back a little.  I am not totally opposed to fake soul:  those two Winehouse records are both really good, and the same whoo-ooh-oohs from “FU” were actually pretty good when Solange Knowles used them in her similar-sounding but much, much better “Sandcastle Disco.”  (The key differences between the songs are that Solange can actually sing, and that the lyrics of “Sandcastle Disco” weren’t written for suburban white divorcees getting ready for a root beer vodka-infused night on the town.)

And maybe the lyrics, about not how gold diggers are bad and how it’s okay to be poor, resonate with 98% of America.  But come on, no one should have to settle for this.  And it won a Grammy!  I am genuinely upset that this won a Grammy!  I mean, okay, a live version of “Hey Soul Sister” also won a Grammy, but this stupid-ass song won the award for Best Urban/Alternative Performance, when Janelle Monae’s infinitely superior “Tightrope” was also nominated.  That is just not fair.

The good thing about the song’s slow ascent on the Billboard chart is that there probably won’t be much of a follow-up.  UK single “It’s OK” only got up to #20 over there, and hopefully third single “Bright Lights Bigger City” will fizzle without making it onto US airwaves.

I am leaving the internet now.

(via Marion Nestle)

I’m off to a gay pool party–have I told you this yet?–so I’m keeping this short.

Erykah Badu’s released a new video (sort of) for “Get Munney,” one of my favorite songs off New Amerykah Part 2, which is probably my album of the year so far.  It starts off with two full minutes of “Window Seat” and mainly reminds me that a) I automatically love every single thing this woman does, but also b) Rick Ross’s beard is seriously dreamy.

Last week was shark week and fittingly beaches were closed, but also it was, as a friend of mine put it, noir week.  Drowning teenagers, murdered dogs, dead bodies in houses full of trash and the Tokyo’s oldest woman missing.  (And that was just one day!)

Also it was missing bike prevention week.  This happened in New York, but also something really odd happened during a Headmaster meeting the other day.  One of the other Headmasters locked his bike to one of those metal poles that road signs come on, but an old one that didn’t have a road sign anymore.  He figured it’d be okay because those things are like eight feet high, but when he walked out of the building to get some lunch he found a man standing on top of a trash can, trying to lift the bike (and bike lock) over the pole.  When he questioned the guy, the guy was like “Oh, I thought that was my bike.”  BUT MEANWHILE, the sister of my former city councilman happened to be passing by and she called the cops and ID’ed the guy, and eventually the man was arrested.

Finally, dreamy porn star Conner Habib has a blog now.

Sigh.

I’m so tired by this that I don’t even want to point out the part about how her husband is standing behind her holding a big flag and shooshing the younguns while the woman says the same thing over and over again.  Seriously.  Longest 2:20 ever.

(via Popnography)

Last night I dreamed that someone in the porn industry called me and told me that they were going to be in the area and needed an extra hairy guy for a four-way scene involving the guy calling me and also a pair of twins (not the Peters twins, but an imaginary pair of porn twins that existed in my dream world.)  The caller also informed me that they wouldn’t be shooting the scene until mid-November.

And in my dream state, do you know what my response was?  “Oh, good!  That will be the perfect motivation and length of time to reach my weight loss goal.”

And then the dream ended.

Here’s the cover of Coming & Crying.  I’m still in the awestruck phase of seeing my name on a small-ish jpeg of what’s going to be an actual book cover near the names of people I have actually heard of before this book.  (Jonathan Ames! Stephen Elliott! Tao Lin! Douglas Wolk!)

It’s out this fall and will surely make a great holiday gift for anyone on your shopping list (assuming that you are not on gift-giving terms with my parents or the man I wrote my story about.)

Still no internet at home, which is annoying but also kind of good.  I spent the weekend doing real things with real people.  Caught a couple of runway shows, hung out with Lady Catterley*, and went to my hometown to watch people in colonial garb set a pretend boat on fire.

The other good thing about not having internet is that I’ve been obsessing (slightly) less about Headmaster.  We’ve only got 47 hours left in the pledge drive, and I still reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally want to make $5000 or get 100 backers.  Right now we’re at $4,287 and 87 backers.  We can do it?

If you know of anybody that might want to order a copy of a really awesome magazine, or want a t-shirt, or a disposable camera that we pre-fill with photos for you, then pass this along.  It would mean bunches.

(*who thinks she is a sweater; see above.)

Maria Mosterd, the Dutch teen who wrote the book about being forced into prostitution at the age of twelve, may have made the whole thing up, after someone questioned why the girl and her mother would sue the girl’s school but not anybody else.

The MacGruber movie opened this week, preceded by the “leak” of some “modeling photos” that show the character with a poorly Photoshopped micropenis.  Because male bodies are automatically hilarious, especially if they’re hairy!

A brief history of Batman-themed porn movies.

MTV’s new comedy series about big-dicked teen RJ Berger got written up in the Times this week.

Every single shirtless scene on Lost, which is not that many?

The fifty greatest samples in hip-hop history.  I’ve had this open in my browser for weeks now.

[Image: Jean Boullet (1921-1970), via Les Ombres Part Deux]

IT’S THE MONEY SHOT on 9 and the Numbers, a group I’m liking quite a bit.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS HOUSE?!?!”  The Palmer house is for sale.

The downside of being a sex news writer is that while I’m researching I spend most of my time dealing with really, really lame crap.  Like this “story” about how John McCain uploaded a photo to Twitter and then someone posted it to GuysWithiPhones.  NOT NEWS, PEOPLE.

Dirty Tumblrs you may wish to follow: Blue Guitar.