Yamamoto’s audio picks: On Patsy Cline, Lady Gaga, and Death

Each week I’m going to post a few songs, music videos and websites that  have caught my eye at some point. I should mention that many of the links to “songs” will probably be on youtube (aka they may include videos that I don’t consider to be particularly good) and that I’ve chosen the “music videos” based more on the music video than the audio track, although I will try to pick catchy and/or relatively “good” music. Enjoy!

Songs

1) Patsy Cline’s “Crazy“: I know that music like this tends to elude my generation, but Patsy Cline is, in my opinion, simply amazing.

2) Boys Like Girls’ “Love Drunk“: Just another pop/emo catchy track. I don’t know how mainstream these guys are now, but their self-titled album was pretty good.

3) 3Oh!3′s “Don’t Trust Me“: This song is admittedly pretty catchy, although I have to say that the thing that caught my attention was the phrase “Do the Helen Keller.” Intrigued (I normally am by new “hip” phrases), I decided to run a search on Urban Dictionary which managed to spit out a few definitions that I’d rather not retype. Feel free to check it out here.

Music Videos

1) OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass“: I honestly can’t think of a better way to describe this video than the word “awesome.”

2) MGMT’s “Kids“: Having listened to this song LONG before seeing the music video, I became quickly surprised by how disturbing the video was. Regardless, it’s a song that I enjoy.

3) Saturday Night Live’s “I’m On A Boat” featuring T-Pain: This is almost a year old, so it’s sort of fallen out of popularity, but I still find it amusing.

4) Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance“: If you haven’t seen this yet, you might as well do it now. I doubt that it will be going away anytime soon. I’ve actually read some very in-depth articles on this video, like this, which have actually somewhat improved my opinion of her.

Websites

1) xkcd: This is easily one of my favorite webcomics. I particularly enjoy the strip’s physics comics, such as this and this, but all of the comics tend to be consistently humorous.

2) One of my friend’s posted this on facebook a while back (I think that it might have been Nigel?), and I found the video to be quite interesting. The video is a recording of a lecture given at Yale University by Professor Shelly Kagan titled “How to Live Given the Certainty of Death.” It’s admittedly somewhat morbid (it IS a discussion of death), but I strongly suggest taking the time to watch it.