A snowstorm on the weekend? No need to wake up early and listen to the radio for school closure information, hoping my school would be on the list. (Do people even do that anymore? Or do they just go on the school's website for that information?)
But with my so-called adult perspective, I'll just send out a wish for all my friends on the East Coast to stay safe and warm -- even with that extra foot or two of snow.
And also (because ultimately everything we know comes from pop songs), I've learned from Camera Obscura's cover of Jim Reeve's "The Blizzard" that if you're planning on traveling today by pony you might want to make other plans:
For decades, it was fairly common for songs to reference or answer previous hit songs.
So Irving Berlin had a hit with "God Bless America" and Woody Guthrie recorded the socialist answer record "This Land is Your Land." Neil Young knocked the South in "Southern Man" and Lynyrd Skynyrd responded with "Sweet Home Alabama." And when David Bowie released a record called Low (no e), Nick Lowe put out an answer record called Bowi (again, no e).
But, if you take rappers dissing each other back and forth out of the equation, the answer record seems to have all but died out.
Six months ago, we had a rare fall rainstorm in L.A. And the latest in a long line of L.A. radio stations that pop up, play great music, develop a fiercely loyal following (and then abruptly change format to ranchero music, chasing after higher ratings that never materialize) played this song by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions (which I'd first heard years earlier on a Boston station that briefly played the best music in the world before starting a long decline into pre-programmed mediocrity). Then the station played a second Lloyd Cole song (link for Gmail subscribers):
And I was transported from a car in rainy L.A. to a record store in Boston in 1984, where I stayed, watching the rain come down, listening to every second of both sides of the first Lloyd Cole album Rattlesnakes (which combined brilliant wordplay with insanely catchy jangle-pop music). "Dance music for English majors," someone wrote at the time, damning and praising the music in equal measure. When the needle came off the record at the end of side 2 (after the song "Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?"), the only thing left was to buy the record, walk out of the store in the rain, and marvel at the confidence you need to end your first album with such a great rhetorical question.
But maybe it wasn't rhetorical. Maybe Lloyd Cole was trolling for an answer record.
22 years later (but next on the radio that rainy L.A. afternoon), Glascow-based Camera Obscura responded with "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken," aping some of the sounds of Rattlesnakes, but updating it in a surreally poppy way. If it were raining and I were in Boston, I'd have stayed in the store and listened to their whole album... but I was late and it was raining in L.A., so I had to settle for the 21st century equivalent: coming home later and watching the video on YouTube 18 times in a row:
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