My friends have figured out my weakness. And I don't mean the chocolate one. Or the alcohol one. I meant the Song Pop one. I was totally killing everyone, even blustering my way through Modern Rap, before they all figured out my weakness: Love Songs.
I don't do Love Songs.
Here are some of my playlist names on iTunes:
Songs to Slash Your Wrists To.
Sexually Ambiguous Songs.
Angry Bitches.
Bad Romances and Break Ups.
Say My Name Bitch.
I Kill You.
On that note, here is I Was Alive, by The Whitlams. Cool song, weird clip.
Wow, you guys. How come I'd never seen this clip until this week? It's fun, it's jaunty...and it's surprisingly sweet. It's everything the title promises. It's Gay Pirates, by Cosmo Jarvis, and I dare you not to love it.
And now I wanna write a big gay love story about pirates. Because ... just because ... aww Sebastian.
I completely blame thank my parents for not supervising me better as a child, and for letting me listen to music that my friends' parents had banned.
The Divinyls were an Australian band big in the eighties and nineties whose lyrics taught me, before I'd even kissed a boy, that there was a fine line between pleasure and pain. At least I wasn’t surprised by anything that’s come up since. Pun totally intended.
This is Pleasure and Pain:
My favourite line: "No please don't ask me how I've been getting off."
I still love I’m Jealous. Here is lead singer Chrissie Amphlett being the woman you wouldn’t want to cross back when Alannis Morrissette was still wearing pigtails.
(For some reason this video cuts out half the first line. It starts: You've got a new girlfriend...)
Favourite line: “I’m liable to do anything, I might kick her face in.”
And this is the song that I listened to with wide eyes, and turned off if I thought anyone might catch me listening. I Touch Myself:
Favourite line: "I don't want anybody else, and when I think about you I touch myself."
What songs shaped the teenage you? And do you still love them?
I was lucky enough to see Lady Gaga last week in Brisbane,
and wow, what an awesome show! Not a
concert so much as a spectacle...but you know what impressed me most? The
genuine humility she shows when she talks about her own success, and the
genuine love she has for her fans.
When Lady Gaga talks about bullying, she talks about
forgiveness, and I think that makes her a better person than I am. I’m like the
guy in the crowd who, when Gaga told the story about being dumped in the trash
can, yelled out loud enough for the whole place to hear: “Fuck ‘em!”
Because it makes me angry that we’re still talking about
stuff like this. It makes me angry that in every corner of the world there is
always some kid – the gay kid, the weird kid, the fat kid, the uncool kid, the
different kid – who goes through hell every day just for the crime of living in
their own skin.
Bullying starts and ends with us.
You see it, you call it.
You set an example.
You tell your kids it’s okay to be different.
You tell them it’s okay to be anything.
Which is why Born This
Way resonates with so many people.