Psoy Korolenko - Pizza

I don’t really know what’s up with Psoy Korolenko. He’s a current Russian folk singer, I guess, and he really likes pizza. My friend James’s Russian teacher played this song in class, even though it’s in English. Even if it isn’t much of a language learning tool, it is completely amazing, which I guess is better in the long run. Some of the songs on this site are in Yiddish, too, so I guess he’s Jewish. There’s not much to the song; it’s just a list of the pizzas of the world: “The pizza from Rome, it tastes like the Pope; the pizza from Milan, like La Scala; the pizza from Verona is like Shakespeare, the pizza from Sicilia is like Mafia.” And on and on and on. It’s three minutes long, but they’re the longest three minutes ever, and needless to say, totally great.

Dukes of Stratosphear - Bike Ride to the Moon

The English band XTC are already rad when they’re playing with a straight face, not that a band that comes up with great lines like “She a laughing giggly whirlybird, / She got to be obscene to be obheard” is especially serious. But I just decided that what every great band really needs is to do an album under another name, with a half-hearted pretense that they’re not actually the same people, consisting of perfect pastiches of ’60s psychedelia. At least, that’s what XTC did, and it’s amazing, so I think everyone might as well do it, too. The Dukes of Stratosphear put out an EP called 25 O’Clock, after its perfect first track, and then an album called Psonic Psunspot, and then stuck them together in 1987 as Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, which is how you can get it now. Practically every song is a perfect imitation of its influences, but unlike the crappy parodies we all listened to in middle school, these songs are original themselves, instead of just renaming “My Sharona” “My Bologna.” ‘Cause face it, Pink Floyd is a good idea for a while, but after a while, they’re not worth the effort. What the world needs is psychedelic music made by people who are at least minimally in their own heads; enough to remember that most actual, authentic psychedelia is boring sober.

I can’t stand Jay-Z, so there aren’t any songs along with this, but I wanted to post the fruits of my afternoon with Photoshop.

King Louie and the Swinging Monkeys - Loneliness

My friend Hallie is from Houston, and these are some kids she went to high school with. Most of their songs are good-natured love letters to drugs and that sort of thing, and fine, as far as they go. But this one’s the best, with a fantastic, murky sound and sleepy vocals, plus a groove that does the dancing for you, although it obviously wants you to help. Their web page and the guy in the picture’s Marley shirt say that they’re a reggae band, but they’re really not at all. The page is pretty 1997-core, and it doesn’t look like it’s been updated too much recently, but there’s some MP3s you can download. I don’t really know that much about King Louie, but I think maybe some of the members go to USC now. I want them to make a real CD, but I’m not standing on one foot or anything waiting for it.