Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

road games

Rob and I drove down to South Carolina for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, a trip that generally entails between seven and eight hours on the road (depending on traffic and pit stops). To help pass the time, we sometimes play games with the iPod, picking a theme and running with it for as long as we can. This time around, for the trip south, our meme of choice was musical “gimmicks,” which I marked for posterity via the occasional Twitter update. (I was quite the overactive Twitter-er on this trip, texting random updates to the microblogging service as a way of amusing myself.)

Thinking up songs to fit each given meme proved surprisingly difficult at times. We’d start a thread, only to run out of ideas a few songs in. The standbys in each of these memes seemed to be Ben Folds / Five and various Canadian pop bands.

• road trip ipod meme of the moment: songs with ‘ba ba ba’ backup vocals. suggestions? 10:20 AM November 22, 2007 from txt
  I think this was inspired by a Ben Folds or Ben Folds Five song (“Army (live)”), then jumped to songs by Sloan, The Salteens and the Beach Boys (“God Only Knows”).
• new road trip ipod meme: sleigh bells 10:34 AM November 22, 2007 from txt
  Among the contenders from this list: The Weepies (“All That I Want”) and Letters to Cleo (“Laudanum”). I can’t remember what others we came up with. We started strong, but found ourselves feeling stumped fairly quickly.
• made-up band names of the moment: three banjo attack and the handclap agenda 10:50 AM November 22, 2007 from txt
  This tweet was inspired by 1) a new “quirks” meme: songs with handclaps and 2) a discussion about the Feist song “1-2-3-4” and her SNL performance from a few weeks back. Other entries in this category: Ben Folds (“Kate”), Paco de Lucia (“La Nina de Puerta Oscura,” from the Life Aquatic soundtrack), Camera Obscura (“I Need All the Friends I Can Get”) and Gwen Stefani (“Hollaback Girl”), among others.

Other “quirks” themes to pursue at another time:

• Children’s choir (preferably, one that comes in towards the very end of the song)
• Crowd noise layered in an otherwise non-live song
• Banjo picking
• Squeaky acoustic guitars
• Songs that reference other songs