woah-oh!

We have a student who has declared that her favorite part of all songs - any song- is the "woa-oh!" How can you not respect something that pure? Sod the rest of the song. I like those two syllables.

So, of course, I keep trolling through my libraries and trying to think of good wo-ohs. It's a neat puzzle for this age. You can't google the lyrics - how would you spell it? How can you tell the inflection of something stupiclyricssite.com lists as "wow wow"? Not to mention that it's really not a word, and might not make the lyrics sheet.

So, you have to sing the songs in your head, trying to find the spot in the chorus or bridge where something lurches and demands a wo-oh. I've found far more oh-ohs and wo-ooo's than wo-ohs, actually, but we've managed to scrape together a few decent ones.

Here's the list, with links to youtube vids if I could find them.

1) Be My Baby, The Ronettes
It was a toss-up whether we would use this or the Eddie Money shout-out. I went for purity, despite the massive soft-stop I have for Take Me Home Tonight

2) Phantasies, Stephen Malkmus

Hey, it's clearly a wu-oah! in the album version. And there's no call for quality across the board here. Just the wuh-oah.

3) Magic, The Cars

4) Good, Better Than Ezra

Ah, 1995. I am still in my high school girlfriend's car when I hear this song. I wonder when that will vanish completely.

5) Things Can Only Get Better, Howard Jones
This is a bit extended, and not as punchy as some of the others.

6) Hey Beautiful, The Solids
What a nice surprise this was. J and I love How I Met Your Mother in general, and the credits sequence in particular. It's maybe 20 seconds long and gives you everything you need about the feel of the show in concentrated shot. This is the full version of the song that those 20 seconds are taken from (the very end), and it happens to have a few great wu-oahs! How nice.

I keep thinking that I'll be able to condense one of the running conversation chains in my heads into something manageable and written, all within a 20 minute break at work. It hasn't seemed to materialize.

The best I have a weird video that J and I saw on mun2 last night.



To which, I mean, what can you say but "wow." From the moment first moments with the gloriously heavy stereo switches and volume knob, to the point where you recognize that yes they are going to make an homage shot to 15 different classic videos, all in a song that samples C&C Music Factory for the dominant chorus . . . my mind was just traumatized.

After finishing up the dishes and mulling it over, the best "This video says..." statement I could come up with was that music exists as a discrete cultural object, adrift in the world, always ready to be rediscovered by 12 year olds. And no matter how you feel about any particular band, song, video, label, genre or moment, what the 12/15/19 year old discovering it for the first time feels trumps you. Youth is always right. And so, just enjoy watching the cute kids dance and be happy that you had any time with it at all.

So..

In my head "Illusion of Doing" is how I've been referring to my WoW habit for several weeks now. This is the public but tiny/anonymous face of that. 10 minute chunks of thought that are rguably better for me than 30 minutes of mindless mid 40s grind and questing.