Your Beautiful Body Filling Up With Water

Electric Six “Jimmy Carter” – At first, this song seemed like a silly joke, but the longer I live with it, the more it seems deadly serious. After the initial novelty of a grunge ballad filled with strange references to the Backstreet Boys, gory celebrity deaths, electric underwear, and former American presidents wears off, the emotional resonance kicks in. The refrain “this is who you are” carries the most dramatic weight; implying the tragic, undeniable notion that we are all shaped by our absurd culture of celebrities, politicians, inescapable surveillance, consumer novelties, and the constant vague threat of random violence and atomic annihilation. It’s essentially a song about powerlessness, and the realization that you owe so much of who you think you are to a collection of cultural factors that seem so stupid, random, and meaningless when considered in abstract terms. But this is who we are, and we can be made to feel weepy when the singer turns the catchphrase “Backstreet’s back, alright” into a mournful lament by placing it in the context of sentimental nostalgia because even if you never cared about the Backstreet Boys, it’s at least a reference point we can all understand. Sometimes that’s all you need to feel less alone. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Tom Scharpling & Jon Wurster “Timmy von Trimble” – This is a selection from the forthcoming Hippy Justice: The Best of the Best Show On WFMU Vol. 3, a collection of fairly recent radio call-in skits by Scharpling & Wurster chronicling what I consider to be an experimental period for the duo. The basic elements of their comedy remains the same – ie, good guy Tom struggles to remain civil while dealing with one of Jon’s selfish, deluded, opportunistic, and hateful characters – but some of the bits on this compilation find them trying out new ways of framing their comedy routines. On “Kid eBay,” moments of extreme absurdity punctuate an otherwise mundane conversation about rare collectables; “Old Skull” and “Rock n’ Roll Car Dealership” integrate real-life characters into the show’s elaborate mythology; and “Hippy Johnny” and “Timmy von Trimble” both start out with seemingly sympathetic characters who reveal themselves to be utterly despicable over the course of a phone call. The latter is quite possibly the most surreal bit to ever air on the program, starting out with an entirely unbelievable premise that is eventually trumped by the disturbing turn the conversation takes once we get to know little Timmy. (Please note that the sound quality on this mp3 is fairly low because I wanted to keep the file size small and manageable. The sound on the actual cd is much better than this.) (Click here for the official Scharpling & Wurster site and here for the Best Show On WFMU archives.)