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Coworker one: You should have a cheesy songs blog.

Coworker two: Or a blog about songs about cheese.

Me: I smell blog entry!

Notable songs about cheese:

Primus, "Sailing on a Sea of Cheese"

Kingsauce, "Who Cut the Cheese?" This could possibly be about farts. Sadly it's not available online.

The Rutles, "Cheese and Onions"

Joan Collins, "Chalk and Cheese"

Commander Cody, "Two Triple Cheese Side Order of Fries"

OCDJ, "Smoke My Cheese" (via) This is another one that I suspect uses the word cheese to mean something else.

Work of Saws, "Tangerines and Blue Cheese" (Via)

Modest Mouse, "Mice Eat Cheese" (Via)

Dexter Gordon, "Cheesecake"

Bubboon and Bubbles, "The Cheese Song" (Via)

Ween, "Where'd the Cheese Go?"

Nirvana, "Big Cheese"

And this obscure little gem is a delightful exploration of comfort food.

More songs about cheese than I expected. OK, so some of these only mention the word cheese, but I'll allow it.

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• This is awesome. It's exactly what Bowie meant.

• NPR's Robin Hilton, a while ago, pointed out this cover of Outkast's Hey Ya, done as a plaintive indie rock ballad. It really highlights the fact that despite the song's upbeat gloss, the words are really kind of hopeless and sad. "So why oh why oh are we so in denial when we know we're not happy here?" Here's the original.

• And speaking of "Hey Ya," Cats and Beer put together a list of "The Top 10 Rap Songs White People Love" ("Hey Ya" only gets an honorable mention, which I'd quibble with). And in the spirit of equal time, they also have "The Top 10 Rock Songs Black People Love, A Post Written By A Black Person", in which they invoke their own version of the Steely Dan principle: "All black people like Steely Dan. Any black folk who claims he doesn’t hasn’t heard them yet."

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Asian Baby Sings Hey Jude - Watch more free videos

• How cute is that? The guitar is largely a prop, but it totally makes the video.

• The Modern Age does a Commercial Watch of their own, on that annoying Old Navy "My arms get cold" ad.

• Rolling Stone has a brand new B52s single for download. So hurry up and bring your jukebox money, because this track has plenty of Fred Schneider's trademark monotone yelling. Incidentally, The B52s have to be the best group to ever mention the narwhal in song. (Also, this is the best letter to the editor of the Times about narwhals.)

• Gawker ceases with the hate to bring us some pretty neat follow ups to the "Daft Hands" video. This one is awesome.

• Nah Right has a new Roots track from their forthcoming "Rising Down." It drops the N-bomb pretty liberally and is generally pretty raunchy, which might be NSF your W. But it's a cool tune.

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The Greyboy Allstars get the puppet treatment in their new video for "Still Waiting." When you've been rendered in felt, that's how you know you've made it. And, that girl puppet is am/fm favorite Inara George! Good stuff.

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Maybe I'm late to the game on this, because I have willfully never heard a Carrie Underwood song before in my life, but I reluctantly sat through an episode of "Saturday Night Live" last night, and I noticed that this song:

sounds a lot like this one:

Also, I hate the boots that Underwood is wearing. That's all.

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Let's get to it ...

Noe Venable "The Summer Storm Journals"
Noe's voice is ethereal and gorgeous as she weaves delicate melodies over spare instrumentation. It kind of feels like the music you might hear while lost in an enchanted forest, or something.

Black Horse "The Black Arts of the Black Horse"
Fuzzed-out old-school rock and roll with a sneer and a swagger. The lead singer recalls an early Courtney Love. The effort is competent, but nothing special.

Born Ruffians "Red, Yellow & Blue"
Jaunty little ditties that experiment with changing time signatures enough to keep you off balance, but not so much that they throw you off entirely. Energetic and fun with enough complexity to keep you actively listening.

They kind of remind me of Vampire Weekend a little.

Danava "Unonou"
If someone played this for me and said it was some cock-rock band from the mid-'70s, I would have no reason to doubt them. Complete with indulgent guitar solos and tracks that extend past the 10-minute mark, this album sounds like the '80s and on never happened. Why doesn't anyone make new music that sounds new anymore?

more after the jump...

(via)

This is amazing. Jake Shimabukoro plays a downright incredible version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on the ukulele. The virtuosity and technical mastery in itself is pretty impressive, but his rendition is absolutely beautiful as well. More at his Web site.

And, sorry I haven't had much to say these past couple of days. I just, well, haven't had that much to say. Let's blame it on post-cold malaise.

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(via)

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She's good. Check her out here.

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That no one but a Weezer completist would even think of popping this in the CD player is a given. Archival material is always the provenance of the obsessive. Listening to this kind of stuff is less about a musical experience than a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the process of your favorite artist.

In case the title doesn't give it away, "Alone" is a collection of home recorded tracks, spanning from 1992-2007 (with a little bonus gem from Cuomo's garage rocking days in 1984), by Weezer's frontman. It's interesting stuff, worth hearing once (I probably won't listen to any of it again, though; it's definitely not going into the general shuffle pool). There are some excerpts from a rock opera (set in space) Cuomo was working on after the blue album hit it big.

What really struck me about the collection is what a literal songwriter Cuomo is. These tunes are all raw and unedited, and he really lets everything hang out. If he's sorry, girl, that those other guys are so mean to you, that's exactly what he says. If impending fame makes him feel ambivalent, well:

"Blast off! Up to the stars we go
And leave behind everything I used to know.
Someone's giving me a whole lot of money
to do what I think I want to
So why am I still feeling blue?"

That's from the opera.

The lengthy notes Cuomo includes with the album shed further light on the man's personality, and confirm my own suspicion that he's kind of a self-important jerk who really benefits from collaboration, but is good at driving away those willing to work with him. (I'm a Matt Sharp fan.) Maybe that's unfair — I've never met the guy, after all — but that's the picture this, ultimately self-indulgent, package presents.

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... with a box of Theraflu. We're deliriously happy together. Well, we're delirious, anyway.

But so my planned V-Day post is a little delayed.

Here's something. I'm kind of sick of the Valentine's Day backlash. I am by no means a fan of the holiday; I don't really think we need to devote a whole day to celebrating people in couples by buying each other stuff. But it seems that retailers have caught on to the fact that chocolate and roses and expensive jewelry are not the stuff everyone's VD dreams are made of ... and have missed the message entirely by commodifying "anti-love." I received more pitches for "Love Stinks" t-shirts, "badmouth your ex" all-night raves, "STD status" greeting cards, etc., than I ever wanted this year. Le sigh. It looks like corporate-codified love (or lack of love) isn't going anywhere.

With that in mind, I went about creating a playlist for the day that, instead of bashing traditional romance, celebrates all kinds of loves, even (maybe especially) unrequited. Here goes:

"Call an Ambulance" Albert Hammond Jr.
I cannot explain it, but I love this song so much. The sentiment is so wrong — boys behaving badly, stealing girlfriends — but he sounds so passionate about it.

"The Mayor of Simpleton" XTC
It's so sweet — he's stupid but he loves her. Also, I just read an essay (from the fabulous collection "Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me") about a guy whose girlfriend who told him that this song was about them. How fabulously insulting!

"A Postcard to Nina" Jens Lekman
"Nina, I can be your boyfriend so that you can be with your girlfriend" -- now that's love.

"I Need Some Fine Wine and You Need to be Nicer" The Cardigans
It's so true. Also, this is the best song title ever.

more after the jump...

Michael Showalter Plug Awards Mixtape Doc, pt.1 from Super!Alright! on Vimeo.

• Stereogum has this duo of videos, the first, Michael Showalter plugging the Plug Awards, in his way. And I'm a sucker for contemporary videos made from 8-bit nintendo game footage. (Not music related, but BWE points us to "Fear and Loathing in Hyrule.")

• Remember when Scarlett Johansson said she was going to do a Tom Waits covers album? Whatever happened to that? Well, I'll tell you. Or, Gawker will: It's still on. S'gum (hello again!) has a less alarmist take on it, pointing out that TVotR 's Dave Sitek is producing.

• Just for Ryan, Brooklyn Vegan rounds up the week in metal.

• NY Mag reports on this weird spat between Aretha and Beyonce. When one-named divas get feisty, get out of the way.

• Idolator has an odd story on Lennon Murphy, a young woman (yes, named after John Lennon) who is being sued by Yoko Ono. It's odd.

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Last night's ceremony did go on forever, but there were some cool moments.

• Amy Winehouse (or as I'm calling her until it catches on, Amy Win-house) delivered a performance to be proud of.

• Kanye invoked his mom to get TPTB to stop the "wrap it up" music.

• Rihanna had Jay-Z to help her give a cute acceptance speech.

• Also she performed with The Time, while wearing an ostrich.

• Vince Gill poke some good natured fun at Kanye.

• Daft Punk showed up!

• And Feist was there. She got a bit lost in the shuffle, but she still gave a sweet performance.

Yeah, three of my seven highlights invoke 'Ye. I'm kind of obsessed. He's just fascinating.

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Back in September, we liveblogged the MTV VMAs, so we figured we'd do the same for the mother of all televised music industry self-congratulation. I've heard of all the nominated bands before, and I even like some of them.

11:32pm And it's over! Goodnight! You did great Amy Winehouse! I'm proud of you.

And I'm proud of me, for making it through another live blog. This was exponentially less stressful than the VMAs. They actually let their performers finish one whole song (in some cases, more than one song), and it wasn't as fragmented and "edgy." The awards part is kinda boring anyway, so it does make sense to focus on the performances, but maybe we could do it in, like, an hour and a half next year? See what you can do, Academy.

Am I easily won over by heavily hyped advances in stylistic achievement related to gadgets? Yes. Do I want one of these quite badly? Yes.

Anyway, the song is charming. It's "New Soul" by Israeli/Parisian singer Yael Naim.

I think part of the song's charm comes from the fact that English is clearly not her first language. It lends weight to the claim that she's trying to navigate a new world, otherwise, the lyrics are a bit insipid. The sentiment reminds me of nothing so much as the thoughts of the whale in this video.

ETA:

On her MySpace page (linked above), she also has a deliciously creepy cover of Britney Spears' "Toxic." And a few songs in Hebrew which sound really cool. According to this article, they're about her break up with a boyfriend.

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This is a two-fer. First we have Sara Bareilles singing "Love Song." It's kind of cheesey, but I really like this song. I guess I'm a sucker for a singer/pianist.

Then it's am/fm faves Cool Kids performing "Black Mags."

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I just heard this song on the PA at the bank. Hmm ... Corporate music selectors are getting hip. I refuse to believe the alternative.

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Feist wins what, you ask? Why the Shortlist Music Prize, of course. And for those of you who have lives outside of music, the Shortlist is an award given to an album that's good, but not too good. The prize is selected by a committee of industry insiders, and goes to an album that hasn't been certified gold by the RIAA. With the result that the long list (of nominees) reads like every bloggers end of the year best ofs with a few mainstreamier selections thrown in. This year, Robert Pollard, Stars and Spoon share space with Wilco, Kings of Leon and Eddie Vedder. And Feist topped them all!

It's not really surprising. That album had universal appeal, and I don't know anyone who heard it who didn't like it. (Except for, of course, BT) So, yay!

Here's a song that's not "1 2 3 4."

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Actually, that's a lie. I absolutely hate football and I despise the Super Bowl. No, I don't even want to watch it for the commercials -- an argument that always sounded specious to me; people are trying to sell me things enough in my life, I don't need to seek out extra advertising.

But other people seem to be really into it. Everyone's been talking about it for the past two weeks. And before the event completely passes me by, I guess I should try to join the conversation.

So, didja see that halftime show last night? Tom Petty. Wow.

In case you missed it ...

Actually, not terrible. Tom Petty is not my favorite, but he's a solid rocker. Sticking to the crowd favorite, arena rockers he did a bang-up job. He wasn't Prince, but he wasn't Janet and JTim either.

But, like, what's the deal with the halftime show? Back when I actually used to watch the game, I didn't remember it being such a big deal. A rock star performance surely would have held my 12-year-old attention. So I did some research.

Or, rather, I looked on Wikipedia. Which had some interesting stats. Since the beginning, the halftime show was generally performed by a university marching band, and only started booking marquee acts each year since the '90s (when I was 12, Gloria Estefan performed, although that also was the year that FOX aired that special episode of "In Living Color," and we may have watched that instead). Michael Jackson in 1993 was recruited for his star power, in response to flagging interest in the halftime show in the years prior. Before that, there were occasional big names, interspersed with marching bands and other smaller acts; Carol Channing was the first in 1970. She would appear again two years later with Ella Fitzgerald in a "Salute to Louis Armstrong." That actually sounds kind of cool — and an odd choice to go with a football game.

Anyway, more discussion of halftimes past here and here.

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