After reading about Lille and Araceli’s favorite love songs, I realized I was in trouble. Despite a healthy amount of loves, most of them fizzle before I have been properly introduced — failing to reach the apex of significant songwriting territory by a longshot. Not to be outdone, there are songs which I most-certainly attribute to romance, or, at least what I would interpret love to be in that particular era.
1992: Love is A Capella
I distinctly remember junior high gym dances being awkward in every way. Kids both obsessed and terrified of the opposite sex… and also sweaty from playing pick-up basketball in between dances. All I know is that slow-dances, complete with bad cologne and flat-bottom woven ties, were always made better by Boys II Men. Aside from that Motown/Philly gold, I was particularly fond of Shai’s “If I Ever Fall In Love “. I remember being outraged when I saw their video on MTV and it was the instrumental reprise! WTF. Acapella 4 Life, yo.
1997: Love is Swing-Techno-Ska
People do stuff for people they like. But, when you’re an impressionable teen, you don’t pretend to like stuff that a girl is interested in, you actually will yourself to like it. For real. This is the only reason I can come up with for me to dive headfirst into bands that included (but are not limited to) The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Underworld, and Less Than Jake… in the same year. Not that they were all terrible bands (I actually still like Underworld), but the only reason I can explain jumping from my favorite musicians in Junior High (Peter Gabriel’s US, and whatever was played on party radio B96) into Prodigy’s Fat of the Land would have to be girls.
2002: Love is a concept
Everything is difficult. The older people get, the more complicated they like to think life is. It’s like history class. When you’re 6, love is candygrams and the Civil War freed the slaves. When you’re 15, love is pure infatuation — ever-forgiving and evergreen — while the Civil War was the result of tension between the Industrial North and Agricultural South. When you’re older than 22 you have decided that the more you know, the more you’re aware of what you don’t know.
Love is all Conor Oberst talking about a mirror, or a girl (or a dream or something) and we are aware that the Civil War is called “The War of Northern Aggression” in the South, Northerners had no real interest in abolishing slavery, and Abe Lincoln temporarily disbanded congress and may or maynot have been bisexual. Here’s a song about Jeff Tweedy doing the dishes, or touring Japan, or drug addiction, or an aquarium.
Comprised of DJ STV SLV and ABX, The Hood Internet represent the future of the mash-up. Gone are the days where you mix one song with another song just because you can, or because they share a strange time signature, or because they make a hilarious song title. Technology is such (and GirlTalk has shown) that there is a way to mix any song with any another song and make it sound good. The next step, the step Hood Internet is going in, is voluntary restraint for the sake of clarity and craft — in this case, restricting the mix to only bands that share the city they all hail from. Also, it’s my City, so I’m biased.
But lo and behold, hipster culture dictator Pitchfork Media broke a VERY interesting development a few weeks ago: The story of a fictional classic rock band Geronimo Jackson / real San Diego throwback rockers The Donkeys. The Phork reports:
On a recent episode, the character Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) is heard listening to a Geronimo Jackson song called “Dharma Lady”, and last week, the song appeared as a free download on iTunes. Over on the “Lost” message board Dark UFO, someone noticed that “Dharma Lady” is almost the exact same song as “Excelsior Lady” by the Donkeys …
The non-fictional Donkeys
Well played Dark UFO dude! Pitchfork, thorough journalists as they are, took it straight to The Donkeys’ label, Dead Oceans, to pose the question, “Are the Donkeys Geronimo Jackson?”. The reply was revealing, also, hilarious:
“It seems as though it’s possible that the Donkeys also existed as Geronimo Jackson in 1977. It might be possible that they were part of a Dharma Initiative experiment on time travel … Geronimo Jackson is likely to appear on extras of the season five ‘Lost’ DVD, where they will feature the band recording ‘Dharma Lady’.”
Hahahah. It seems they did indeed. Alrighty then. A simple “yes” would have sufficed.
Anyway, Geronimo Jackson seems to be a recurring reference in the show — on T-shirts, on posters, but most prominently in the scene below. Hurley and Charlie (who could easily pass for clerks at Championship Vinyl) sift through the Dharma record collection and come across the GerJack LP Magna Carta…
Innnnnnnteresting Charlie. Hmmm. You say you’re an “expert of all things musical,” but you’ve never heard of them, eh? Hmmmm. Maybe that’s because YOU’RE IN THE BAND in the past (future episodes)!?!?! Wha? Sounds ridiculous, but why not?
I personally like to think that Charlie is bound to show up again. First of all, one of the lesbians hiding in the Looking Glass told Charlie that the stations’ passcode was the song “Good Vibrations” and that it was originally programmed “by a musician”. That’s a weird tidbit of information to throw out there as your dying words, isn’t it Bonnie?
Also Charlie gets the code on the first crack before he drowns. Is it too crazy to assume that Charlie himself wrote that passcode? I don’t think so. Meaning, Charlie didn’t die at that point, and is sure to have lived and done other things, like, ummmmm, jumping through time and forming a band in the 70s. It’s possible. After all, we’ve seen people we thought were dead come back to life in the show before. Isn’t it possible that Charlie is in the band Geronimo Jackson? Could be.
Also, is it at all possible that Geronimo is actually the name of Jack’s son? Doubtful.
