There’s no way to justify the leap I’m about to make here, so I’ll just get right to it: two of my favorite songs in the world are “Going to Georgia” by The Mountain Goats, from 1994, and “Graceland Too” by Phoebe Bridgers, from 2020—and I think they’re about the same people. Or more accurately, “Graceland Too” takes the things about “Going to Georgia” that are broken, and loves them, and fixes them.
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Decameron III
Pack it in, the coronavirus is done, this is the peak:
…Hang on, I’m just now hearing that apparently the “coronavirus” is actually a disease and not a justification for generating a bunch of high-grade YouTube/Twitter content. Um… we didn’t know that until the last 24 seconds.
Well, here’s a bunch of other good stuff:
This whole concert thing happened:
Ok this next one starts in a cringy place, but it never gets that bad, and also it’s Susan Egan (the original Megara!) singing the 24th-best song Disney ever recorded:
And then a tangent… the channel that hosts that last video is amazing in general, and in particular is home to Nerdy Spice’s all-time favorite YouTube video:
But the reason this is still Decameron content is that the isolation prompted the editor to cut and release another take of Jeremy Jordan performing the same song earlier that day, which isn’t really better? But it’s at least the same, which is to say great, so it’s ok to watch it right after that last one:
No one’s judging.
Let’s cut back to that Twitter thread:
And yes, I buried the lede:
Decameron II
So many things are happening while the world ends!
Billie Joe Armstrong covered “I Think We’re Alone Now” (do you get it?):
Ben Gibbard wrote a whole Death Cab-ish song about the quarantine:
Sir Patrick Stewart really needs to stay inside for all our sakes, and has set himself up for at least 154 days of isolation by starting a Sonnet A Day series on Twitter… and yes hearing him read Shakespeare absolutely counts as art:
Speaking of that new Ben Gibbard song: he premiered it on this stream:
That stream was the fourth (!) of nine (!!) sets, so far (!!!), in which he’s been playing DCFC material old and new, Postal Service, and covers, most especially on the all-covers stream on March 23rd:
You can look in the comments of each video for set-lists that link directly to each song, in some cases supplied by the band itself (for example).
Some guy made this amazing chilled-out cover of “Going to Georgia”, accompanied by at least 3 copies of himself:
Decameron I
It seems that one thing that will come out of the Covid quarantines is a new flourishing of cloistered art. No word yet on a new theory of gravitation. Here’s a wonderful instance – John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats recording new music into his storied Panasonic… but also broadcasting the recording session live on Facebook:
Eight Genres of Garbage Polemic About Taylor Swift
Cultural criticism is great, isn’t it? There are so many really smart pieces of longform writing floating around that present nuanced, enlightening discussions of our response to successful female businesswomen, the nature of celebrity, white feminine victimhood, the commercialization of feminism, the line between country and pop music, the role of authorial intent in interpreting art, the reasons why the colonialist fantasy of Africa as a giant theme park empty of humans still persists so strongly in the American imagination, and many other interesting issues as they relate to Taylor Swift.
WAIT JUST KIDDING. Some days it seems like the entire Internet is actually a Dumpster full of faux-intellectual schlock that stakes out a narrow yet vehement, take-no-prisoners position on Taylor Swift because somebody had a deadline that day and, well, Taylor was there. Here’s a tour of the trash heap.
Adversion 