Songs I needed to put on my phone this afternoon (and some others)

"The Curse" - All credit for my discovery of this goes to Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself), who twittered this link a while back, and I had to RT because of its sheer awesomeness. I had only heard a little of Josh Ritter and not really connected to his stuff, but this song is so crazy good and the video - PUPPETS! - pure genius through and through. One of the most poignant bittersweet songs/videos (ever?), and it actually made me buy the album. Warning: consider kleenex.

That was just to draw you in and because I couldn't post the following song without showcasing such an amazing video by the same artist.

The next is just a vid of a live performance by the artist, so nowhere near as amazing. But the song is really lovely as well and has kinda been stuck in my head all day.

In fact the main reason I got on my computer right this second was to move this from itunes to my phone so that I could have it for work this week. I have had a long weekend - I finally got a grown-up bed, and had to wait for more than 5 hours for mattress delivery yesterday which sucked up my entire afternoon/evening; I bought the mattress on overstock.com though, so the money saved was worth the minor inconvenience on the delivery side. And this week I have stuff to look forward to, like my birthday and related festivities (which means probably no posts for the next week or so, unless the spirit really strikes), but as much as that is great, it means that work is going to be very challenging to keep my mind on. Thus the need for any possible good song I can fit in. (Another recent helping hand has been my Echo & The Bunnymen station on Pandora, which soothed away a lot of last week.)





"Lark"







And then for something completely different - another great mid 90s classic that was also something I just realized should be on my phone, haha. The video is just terrible. I am 100% sure the keyboardist is chewing gum. But hey, black kitty! Lots of rather sad mugging for the camera with bad teeth! The song actually holds up quite well...

"Female of the Species" - Space






But to go out on a high note - here's an excellent video to another extremely catchy song where to quote my friend T:

         " dude that video's what makes the song. They defeat a giant squid with their rock.      

       There's a powerful message in there somewhere. :P  "

Muppets!

This seems to be making the rounds of the internet lately - and I must say that I love it.

Puppets!

Somewhere between creepy and adorable, there are music videos that feature puppets.

If you are not a puppet fan, this is not the post for you.

I'm going to mention a few of my favorites, ones that I had seen/thought of prior to digging deeper - unfortunately I discovered my list is not extremely original (a disappointing blow, indeed), as I found out this morning after a little googling, which led me to find there are several other lists previously compiled. And they do include a lot of the ones I will talk about, and some I had not seen before like "Flat Beat". But I hadn't read those before, so LOL. I will cite them for reference: in a 2007 post, Culture Bully listed their Top 5 music videos w/puppets, the comments on the post list several more, which make for a very entertaining click-through). A 2009 Yahoo Music blog had a considerably longer list, which I thought included some great newer ones.

There's probably some kind of deeper analysis to be done of puppet videos, here's a short list of possible topics for rants on the subject:
* Do they do things we can't do/show people doing?
* Do they represent our trapped meaningless lives?
* Is this just a ploy to make a video that people will talk about / is it just an easy way to make your video more 'whimisical' or 'quirky'?
* Are most of these videos made by white rock/pop bands? And therefore, are puppets racist?
* Why do I like puppet videos so much? Am I sucker for adorable things?
Provide your detailed answers in the comments, folks, I'm sure you have opinions.

Let's get to it by starting with creepier ones!

First up, a classic - is this the first puppet video ever? Do we know? "Land of Confusion" - Genesis: Not sure how or where I first saw this, but it is super weird and I think definitely falls on the Creepy side of the spectrum.



"Evil" - Interpol: A little creepy because of the extremely flat affect of the singer and the puppet and the disaster setting. I think it actually matches the song/singer's voice perfectly, and was one of the first videos I thought of blogging about.



"Keep Fishin'" - Weezer: This was on both of the aforementioned lists, and for good reason. It has the actual Muppets. And it's cute, especially because Rivers is cute and muppety himself. Weezer has lots of videos with gimmicks - animals, internet memes, herpes-riddled Southern Californians, etc. Some might say that they often have too much gimmick, not enough song, but I generally enjoy Weezer videos, because they really go for it. No self-important "this video is just us standing and playing our song"... they tend to have a lot going on. Is this selling out, or calculated-selling-in-an-ironic-fashion, or is there a difference? Either way, I think this is a cute video.(I know this also opens the ongoing, "does Weezer suck now" can of worms.)



Slightly less famous - another video that actually used to be on my profile - which features not just puppets, but cute animal ones: "In a Funny Way" - Mercury Rev:




"Sugarbaby" - Morningwood: Puppet boobs, vomit, coke and other things... I laughed so hard when I first saw this. I'm glad to see it was noted in the Yahoo music list. This was another of the ones I saw for the first time and hoped/knew someone would write about.

Morningwood - "Sugarbaby" from Matthew Achterberg on Vimeo.

A more recent one, "Elephant Elephant" - Evelyn Evelyn: just plain super cute, love the toys. Leave it to conjoined twins to make an endearing video!



Finally, "Dog Problems" - The Format: this one doesn't even actually have puppets, just the stripped down, slightly-accessorized hands. This is a nice swingy song, and I loved this video immediately because the hand in the hat is just so sweetly sad throughout - the hand posture/movement is actually strikingly evocative, I think (the backgrounds/lighting contribute a lot). The Format also have another video done in paper/origami.



I feel there are probably at least a few other great ones out there, that I just don't know about. Educate me! Comment with which ones you like, which you think sucked, or ones you think I overlooked. Suggestions for upcoming themes are also always welcome.