Meowdy everyone,
After like 26 attempts at a comeback I wanted to actually come back to talk about my music tastes, definitively. I know this blog was meant for my appreciation of The Monkees, and by extension 60s music as a whole, but my heart lies in late 2000s/early 2010s pop.
T.G.I.F. (Last Friday Night)
I can't remember first hearing this song, but I do remember when my little sister (the evil one*) got addicted to it. It was in heavy rotation during car rides, a concept that has largely died in the wake of "listening to music you like and not talking to anyone, ever". Normally, people were subjected to whatever was on the radio, but my mom was a radical extremist who used custom burned CDs with songs both of the siblings mutually agreed were good. When TGIF came on, there were no complaints.
Later on in life when I was 21 years old, for some unexplained reason I got hooked on the song. The chord progression was infinitely loopable, akin to that of Brian Wilson's obsession with Be My Baby. For one week in January I spent almost all of my available time making various remixes and iterations of TGIF. It was a hypnotic moment, and even now I still don't know why it happened but I loved every second of it.
Fast forward a few years, I finally found some leaked stems for the song. It was fascinating, to say the least. Katy Perry may be a currently shitty person, but her work doesn't need to be understated, TGIF is a multi-layered rich pop song that never should be forgotten.
It spawned my entire music career, so I may be biased. Even then, who cares. Friday nights are for fun and parties, not intellectual thinking. It's good to turn your brain off and just enjoy the moment.
Get Lucky
If you held a gun to my head and asked me what my favorite song, ever, was..... I'd say Get Lucky. I know it's heresy over here on the blog. You're telling me the woman who spent months doing nothing but Monkees research loves a Daft Punk Song???? The answer will always be yes.
I first encountered Daft Punk sometime in late 2012 via DSi Flipnote. At the time, Flipnote was basically its own social media platform. I have vivid memories of saving as many funnies as I could to my DSi, but unfortunately it did have a limit to storage. There was a flipnote of 4 frogs singing along to Harder Better Faster Stronger, and I loved the funny robot voices, so I did mild research and found out it was 2 guys named Daft Punk.
Fast forward half a year later, it turns out these Daft Punk guys were making a new album, and it's focused around Funk music. I had (and still have!) a CD of Funk, and I was hooked on it when I was 6 years old. It was probably just the complex baselines, being the child of a bass player.
When Get Lucky came out as a single on the radio I was hooked. I literally said nothing from the moment it came on to the moment it finished, and I begged my mother to burn it to her next CD, asap. I was in love. A bit later, the Random Access Memories album came out and to this day it's a wild trip. Disco, Funk, Electronic, and EDM blending together in one pristinely clean package.
Destination Calabria
It's currently 2025 and I think if I died right now, one of my finest achievements would be as a mashup artist. But even now I never explained how that started. In early 2012 (you might be noticing a pattern with the years here) I randomly found this song titled Destination Calabria.
After getting hooked on it for an entire week, I used my aforementioned DSi to look up the song. It turns out, it wasn't one song... it was TWO songs! That blew my mind completely wide open. I had enjoyed remixes of pop songs, but I didn't realize you could put them together to make a new song. Later I downloaded an app called Djay and spent months trying to match whatever 2 songs were in my iTunes library together. I still have some of the recorded audio, but I was 12 at the time so it sucks bad.
Side note, I didn't see the music video for Destination Calabria until a year later. I wouldn't advise seeing it unless you're ready for a sexual awakening....
Rainbow Tylenol
I'm a furry. What I didn't know in 2012 was that I wasn't a furry yet.
Rainbow Tylenol is one of the staples of YTPMV culture, and being sheltered in the early 2010s meant I was exposed to a lot of Rainbow Tylenol (and Avast Your Ass, same artist btw)
For anyone after Gen Z I do feel the need to explain. The Internet was not just "haha, funny videos" like it is now, it was considered to be the Wild West even during the age of the iPhone. Sure, anyone was able to make videos, but nobody knew how to game the system. If you were lucky on YouTube you saw skits and trending home movies. If you were unlucky, you saw people dying.
For me, I ended up being an outcast. I didn't want anything to do with the Trending tab aside from Annoying Orange. I found myself enjoying YTPs and YTPMVs. Rainbow Tylenol kept being used in both, and it was making me crazy trying to figure out what the song name was. I don't know who it was, but some kind commenter helped me find the track and since then, it's probably one of the finest contributions from a furry to music at large.
uhhhhh
Idk what to say, but I'm done here now. Okay, goodbye. I will return randomly sometime this year about some topic I enjoy. If you want more content, watch Cybershell onYouTube. He's pretty cool!
*: I have 2 younger sisters. One is good the other is evil. I hope this clears things up
