Monday, February 20, 2006

Stupid colonialist Britney Spears

I spent all day today reading Yokomitsu Riichi's book Shanghai, which is a really excellent novel about a couple of Japanese men in various stages of down-and-out-ness in Shanghai in 1925, when most of Europe and Japan were squabbling over who had the right to colonize China. The last fifty pages or so are rather intense and engrossing, which naturally meant that I tuned out everything but the book during that part; as I was nearing the end, though, I suddenly realized that the silence that had previously reigned supreme in my mind had been replaced by the unlovely strains of "Hit Me, Baby, One More Time," a song I haven't heard for at least a year. Despite my best efforts to supress it, my mind insisted on adding this one-song soundtrack to the last ten pages or so, even going so far as to swoop and crescendo in line with the plot.
Is my subconscious trying to alert me to the fact that Britney Spears is, in fact, a time-traveling siren sworn by demonic blood vow to colonize China in the 1920s, thereby providing her with a large population base she can exploit to produce vast quantities of low-quality evil that she can sell at immense profit to wealthier economies, possibly in the future?
If so, all I have to say to my subconscious is: Dude. I totally know. Who doesn't? I mean, it's obvious.

4 Comments:

At 12:00 AM, Blogger Don Gately said...

It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who gets songs looped in his head. Whatever song it is, and it's usually dreadful, or maybe I just remember the dreadful ones more, will play in the background of my consciousness for days. It will play as I'm going to sleep, and if I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I'll notice it playing then as well. And then one day it will stop. To one day begin again when the next House Of Pain/Dolly Parton/Mindless Self Indulgence (cover of a Method Man song)/Bonnie Raitt/James McMurtry/Limp Bizkit aural lamprey latches itself to my brain. And the ratio seems to be about 8:2 bad songs to good. But that could be due to the aforementioned tendency to remember the execrable songs more.

Well, I seem to have shared way too much. Enjoy, and whatever you do, do not think about the Escape Club song "Wild Wild West".

 
At 3:46 AM, Blogger Flannery said...

Oooooooooooooooo-klahoma, where the blah blah does something on the blah...

Hum. I hadn't heard (or hadn't ever realized I was hearing) either of the songs mentioned, so I wanted to share a little something from my own wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night repetoire.

Has anyone noticed--do the songs pick up where they left off last, or do they start where they would have been had they been on continual replay since the last conscious moment?

 
At 4:09 PM, Blogger Mrs. Bear said...

+
Tag!

 
At 9:46 PM, Blogger Don Gately said...

flannery-It seems to me as if the songs are on continual replay, so it's like waking up to a clock radio or a CD player set to auto-replay the disk. That's what makes it so strange. If it started up once I woke up, that would make more sense to me.

 

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