Sunday, July 01, 2012

Music on airplanes

So I was messing around with the little personal mini-screen thing on the airplane, where you can watch selected movies and listen to selected music and play really half-assed selected games.  Observations:

-I haven't listened to Led Zeppelin seriously in many a year, but I played Physical Graffiti just on a whim, and I really think I appreciated it more than I ever did back in the day.  It's no wonder this band was so priapically huge.  Their version of "In My Time of Dying" is one of the most epic monuments ever.

-If you saw an album entitled "Ethiopian Hip Hop," you would think, whoa, that sounds incredibly interesting, wouldn't you?  And you would play the hell out of it, right?  Well, then you would be crushed, because it's complete bullshit: it just features a miscellaneous variety of stuff from DECIDEDLY NON-ETHIOPIAN artists like Kanye West, Eminem, Outkast &c.  Apparently, the "Ethiopian" part is just to denote that this particular mix is specific to this airline.  I feel like I should be suing someone here.

-Finally: I came upon an album in the inexplicable "Kidz Bop" series, in which popular songs are sung by children.  I'm having a difficult time conceiving to whom this would be of interest, or indeed who could possibly be black-hearted enough to exploit this apparent interest, but there you are.  American capitalism, ladies and gentlemen.  This was volume eighteen in the series.

Anyway, my only point here is that this album included a version of "Telephone" that I listened to out of morbid curiosity, and I can report to you that apparently "sippin' that bub" was considered an inappropriate thing for a minor to be singing, so it was replaced--I am not kidding here--with "eatin' that grub."  All kinds of special, that is, not least because now you can't help imagining the song being sung by a cowboy at the town square dance.  The disc also included a version of "Alejandro," a "kid" version of which strikes me as genuinely inappropriate no matter what ridiculous nonsense you do to the lyrics, but I did not have the stomach to give it a listen.

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