I’m not talking about a minor-key tearjerker written to elicit that reaction (see also: soaring power ballads) or even something you have a deep personal connection to. I’m talking about a song that makes you cry that makes no one else you known cry. I’m talking about the ones where you have to explain the tears, if you’re even able to. I’ve got a couple of them, but among the weirdest is “Rainbow Road.” Yeah, from Mario Kart. No, I don’t know why.

I want to get this out of the way: I will not be talking about any of the Mario Kart tracks named Rainbow Road. I have historically been and continue to be, at best, a casual gamer. So casual, in fact, that I have barely played the console-casual greatest hits, Mario Kart included. The first edition of Mario Kart I ever owned was the edition that came bundled with my first Nintendo Switch. I’m not even that great at Mario Kart. But boy do I love the songs, and I love “Rainbow Road” most of all.

I want to get this out of the way too: I’m not even going to be talking most versions of “Rainbow Road.” I’m going to be talking about what I consider to be the canonical version of “Rainbow Road,” which is the version from Mario Kart 64, released in 1996, composed by the great Kenta Nagata. This is the version of the song that, for reasons I have yet to identify, makes me cry. If a friend were to ever cast me in a movie, and my character had to cry, I would think think of one of three things to achieve the effect. One is “Europe Endless” by Kraftwerk (don’t ask, I do not know why, all I know is that it does). One is Colorado Avalanche captain Joe Sakic passing the Stanley Cup to teammate Ray Bourque in 2001 (this one I know why: I think achieving the ultimate goal in your vocation during your last try is very moving). And one is “Rainbow Road.” Fuck the Method, I have Mario Kart. 

I do want to give the other versions of “Rainbow Road” a bit of shine. So with that, we move on to the…

BONUS RANKING: ARANGEMENTS OF “RAINBOW ROAD,” RANKED

9. Mario Kart: Super Circuit (Game Boy Advance, 2001)

The arrangements bringing up the rear are victims of hardware limitations. There’s a killer Jaco-y bass line on this one, but arranging for the GBA means you are sacrificing tons of melodic and harmonic depth. Credit where credit is due: this version starts with a nice interpolation of…

8. Super Mario Kart (SNES, 1992)

I can’t disrespect the OG by putting it last, but again, hardware limitations. This version is a jittery electropop tune with an awesome, cheesy synth brass pad leading the melody. It deserves the electo-funk or Italo-disco treatment in a future Mario Kart game.

7. Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS, 2003)

This arrangement begins a run of dancier theme for our favourite spectral racetrack. It’s busy but not all that hooky, but I love how filthy that synth bass sounds. 

6. Mario Kart Wii (Wii, 2008)

The Wii version splits the difference between the MIDI sounds of yesteryear and the minimal-techno “Rainbow Road” arrangements of the 2000s. It has a Y2K utopian feel, tubular bells, and a cool key change. If the nine themes were a boy band, this would the cute one.

5. Mario Kart World (Switch 2, 2025)

This one being this high might betray by preference for fuller, studio-quality arrangements. Honestly, I just like that they wrote a 17-minute suite for this version: jazz fusion into progressive folk-rock into 90s-style arena techno and back. This is a very maximalist arrangement, and I am to understand that this reflects the winding, Easter egg-filled version of the track in this game.

4. Mario Kart: Double Dash (GameCube, 2003)

I really like the warm organ in the rhythm section. I fucking love the interpolation of the N64 version.

3. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U, 2014)

Orchestral techno, filthy bass, sick electric guitar leads, Price Is Right synthesizers. Great stuff, Nintendo house band.

2. Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo 3DS, 2011)

This version has the best feel of the bunch. Those synth leads are perfect. It's almost a shame that it interpolates the N64 version because up until then, this is the version of the song that best emulated the '96 version without directly referencing it (save perhaps those bass triplets).

1. Mario Kart 64 (Nintendo 64, 1996)

Of all the versions of “Rainbow Road,” the Mario Kart 64 version has my favourite arrangement. The melody, the galloping-triplet bass line, the to-the-heavens guitar on the second go-round. I can pinpoint where I start crying to the bar. It's bar 24 into bar 25. There's just something happening on a harmonic or melodic level that reduces me to mush. Maybe someone who knows a thing or three about music theory can enlighten me. But until that time, I will be moved to tears and baffled by those same tears every time I hear those telltale MIDI pan flutes.

So.

There are three versions of this version of “Rainbow Road,” which is surprising because if I wrote the “Stairway to Heaven” of video game themes, I would stick it in every nook and cranny of every game I’m involved in. Here’s how they stack up against each other.

THE MAIN EVENT: N64 RAINBOW ROADS, RANKED

3. Mario Kart World

This is the arena-sized fusion version of the theme, with the lead melody being jazzed up and carried by what sounds like a Lyricon (if you’ve heard “Home at Last” by Steely Dan, you’ve heard a Lyricon). This version sounds gigantic.

2. Mario Kart 64

The original recipe always tastes good. If I were to nitpick, I’d say that that I can’t hear MIDI electric guitar leads without thinking of “Brodyquest,” but that’s my problem.

1. Mario Kart 8

Heresy? Perhaps. If the MK64 version is tasty 16mm, this version is IMAX. The main melody is established by that most tearjerking of instruments, a solo trumpet, before being joined in my more brass and an electric guitar. The only way that melody could be any more stirring is if it were played on a pedal steel guitar. This version of the theme is what happens when you get a bunch of jazz fusion studio aces to gussy up something that was composed on a MIDI sequencer in the 90s. Dig that slapping on the bass triplets, too.

Well shit. I’ve written all theses words and I’m no closer to elucidating why “Rainbow Road” N64 Edition makes me cry. Maybe it’s a form of aspiration: crossing Europe by train, as immortalized by Kraftwerk, is as unattainable to me as crossing the galaxy by go-kart. Maybe my brain has flattened tautology into fact: it makes me cry because it makes me cry. Maybe trying to explain it isn’t the way to go about this. I should just keep feeling it.

#music

Credit where credit is due: this whole mess has been inspired by the twin remembering-guy behemoths of the MLB Hall of Pretty Good and the NHL Hall of Good. I like what these guys are doing because the superstars don't need further enshrining. What we want to commemorate are people that made us happy through their talent while committing the supposed sin of not being a world-dominant legend. You love Marian Gaborik and Hideki Matsui, I love the Beat (the American band, not the British one) and Matthew Good.

I do want to make a delineation between RRHoPG artists and albums. I think the former is the main draw, underappreciated artists that fall between the cracks of history. But I do want to make room for unheralded albums by bands that, while not S-tier legends, do have some cache in muso circles. So here are my criteria for induction into these hallowed halls:

MAIN HALL (aka the ARTIST WING)

• Artist must have at least three main releases (y'know, album albums)
• Artist must have no bolded main releases¹ on Rate Your Music.
• Artist's highest-rated album cannot exceed 3.60²
• Artist cannot be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as themselves (but can be in as part of a group; Paul McCartney is ineligible for the RRHoPG, but Phil Collins is)

ALBUM WING

• Album must be an officially-released album
• Album must be unbolded on Rate Your Music
• Album must have a rating under 3.60 on RateYourMusic
• Primary artist cannot be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as themselves

So all of these albums are eligible for the Album Wing, but the artists themselves vary in their eligibility to the Hall. These albums have been selected because they are the albums I have listened to the most (according to my last.fm page) that qualify for the hall. None of these are shocking picks if you know me at all.

And now, onto our first crop of inductees into the Album Wing of my own personal Rock and Roll Hall of Pretty Good.

The Clientele, God Save the Clientele (2007) Well this is hardly surprising. I've written at length on this very blog about my love for the Clientele, but never about this album in particular. It's their first album as a quartet, with newly-hired utility player Mel Draisey providing violin, keys, and background vocals. This is also their Americana album, recorded in Nashville with producer Mark Nevers from Lambchop, and featuring an assist from Wilco's Pat Sansone. This album is classic Clientele, dreamy and autumnal and lightly psychedelic, augmented with winsome country trappings. The steel guitar is already the saddest and most beautiful sounding instrument on the planet; in a Clientele song, it makes the melancholy weapons-grade. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Ineligible (Suburban Light is a bolded album)

FM-84, Atlas (2016) Are you a lo-fi girl or a synthwave boy? I know which one Colin Bennett is. The Scottish producer is firmly the latter, making music as sharp and alluring as the neon sunset on the cover of his sole full-length as FM-84. The knock against synthwave is that it can often feel like hollow nostalgia, a collection of 80s signifiers that coldly snap to grid. But Bennett is also a designer by trade; he knows how to infuse what could be empty pastiche with real warmth and soul. Enter featured player (and since 2018, official band member) Ollie Wride, an English singer who injects the vocal numbers here with real juice. I cannot adequately express to you how much I love “Don't Want to Change Your Mind.” It's one of the great songs of our young century. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Ineligible (only one album released)

Kiwi Jr., Cooler Returns (2021) “Man, Derek is talking about Kiwi Jr. again?!” Yes, god dammit, and I'll keep talking about them until they replace the faces on the 5, the 10, the 20, and the 50 with those of the four dudes in this band. Head Kiwi Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active lyricists, and not just because we seem to like a bunch of the same movies. I love the way these guys put songs together; I love the detail in the stories they tell, I love the way their guitars sound, I love the brightness and the tunefulness. If I ever make my ill-fated mumblecore comedy about a scene of local Letterboxd obsessives, you bet your ass I'm putting “Waiting in Line” under the closing credits. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

The Rural Alberta Advantage, Departing (2011) There's a lot of Pitchfork-core that's going to end up in this hall of fame. Most indie-rock sickos who were around during the aughts might point to the RAA's first album, 2008's Hometowns, as HoPG-worthy, but for my money, it's the wearier, less-heralded follow-up that merits inclusion here. This is a sad, spare, wintry album, Americana (Canadiana?) trudging through knee-deep snow, hoping no part of it will succumb to hypothermia. Paul Banwatt is a beast of a drummer, a one-man jungle wrecking crew propelling these aching tunes into uncharted rhythmic territory. This is what makes the Rural Alberta Advantage unique. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

Tycho, Awake (2011) This is the second electronica-ish album on this list whose main creative force is a designer by trade. Tycho is the nom de downtempo of Scott Hansen, who is better known in the kerning-and-CMYK spaces as ISO50 (here's some fun Derek lore: I was super into this thing called Layer Tennis, where designers would trade images back and forth and iterate on design ideas; Hansen participated in 2016, and other key Derek people who were involved include Aaron Draplin, Austin Kleon, and Jason Kottke). Hansen has a style he returns to—hazy, melodic downtempo—but other Tycho album has the effect on me that Awake does. This albums sounds like waking up too early and walking bleary-eyed on a beach as the Sun slowly makes its presence felt. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

Who are your first-ballot Rock and Roll Hall of Pretty Good artists and albums? I'm always on the lookout for cool stuff off the beaten path.

¹ In RYM-speak, this just means that an album can't be part of the X highest-rated albums on the website. At time of writing, I believe the threshold for a bold album is being in the top 7500 all-time. If all your albums are outside of that, you're eligible! And why this website? Well, it's got a big, passionate userbase and it's as good a sample of crowdsourced opinions as I can find.

² Why 3.60? I dunno, feels about right.

#music

According to the keepers of the world's most arcane knowledge over at This Might Be a Wiki, the most hardcore of hardcore They Might Be Giants fans (and I know they're hardcore because only the most hardcore fans edit wikis about the objects of their obsession) have collectively voted “Doctor Worm” as the eight-best song in the venerable Brooklyn band's vast, vast catalog. It is one of the non-live tracks on the group's 1998 mostly-live album Severe Tire Damage and appears on the first disc of the 2002 compilation Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants, a two-disc set that is one of the first pieces of music I bought with my own money, and thus is of great importance in Derek Lore (to give you a sense of where my head was at, I think I bought Ween's 2003 record Quebec during the same transaction). That's how long I've been in love with the work of the two Johns. I've loved this band almost as long as I've loved any band.

I was pleasantly surprised to see TMBG pop up in my YouTube feed playing live at Seattle's iconic KEXP, the Platonic ideal of an independent radio station. The set list was “short” (45 minutes is still a hell of a lot of music for one of these) but, naturally, eclectic, mixing recent songs with a pair of stone-cold classics: “Ana Ng” (from 1988's Lincoln, their finest hour, and according to the sickos of This Might Be a Wiki, the second-best song TMBG ever cut), and the aforementioned “Doctor Worm.” I love “Doctor Worm,” it's a near perfect introduction to They Might Be Giants' whole deal: punchy but askew indie pop, casually surreal in a way us lifers can take for granted sometimes. I have heard this song hundreds of times. Even I was not ready for how hard this version of the song goes. The first time I listened to it, the horns hit me like a Mack truck on fire. Those horns dropkicked me out of a tenth-storey window onto a plush bed of winning indie pop melodies. It's nice to be surprised by something we think is familiar to us.

#music

Here's the recipe.

First, get a DAW, that's a digital audio workstation. If you're in the Mac ecosystem even a little bit, congratulations, GarageBand is right there; the iPhone you had three iPhones ago is as good a drum machine as you can get. If you're on a Windows machine, Reaper will probably get you where you need to be. What I'm saying is that you're going to need a way to manipulate sound. You're going to want to get cool sample libraries; you probably don't have the yearly income to have a jam room full of Moogs and Mellotrons and vintage Soviet synthesizers and Eastern European rhythm boxes, but you can buy their recordings and feed them into your DAW. There's a small archipelago of drum machines ready to be programmed in your browser window, some of them based on tech that's been the backbone of pop music for what I'm wagering has been your entire life. If you're really committed to this project, you can get a MIDI keyboard (your regular computer keyboard will do in a pinch), but all the gear in the world won't be able to replace the key element of your project. If you set out to create the next great eccojam, you need a golden flip. You need a worthy sample.

The backbone of vaporwave is the sample, the disfigurement and recontextualization of a pre-existing piece of music. This isn't a new idea. It didn't come out of nowhere; specifically, the germ of what would become vaporwave's core moveset likely comes out of Houston rap, thank you DJ Screw. There's a lot of literature about the headier side of vaporwave, about its use as a vector for anticapitalist critique (see the work of James Ferraro) and its progressive collapse into empty signifiers and aesthetic choices as the world burns to the ground around it. But in all its guises, vaporwave is, in a sense, about The Past, where the detritus that marked an amorphous Then gets twisted into oblong shapes in the Now, because memory and creativity are distortion fields. When something is powerful but loves shortcuts, like, say, one's memory, details get blurred, sounds start to smudge and smear. At its best, or at least its most effective, vaporwave captures the sound of trying and failing to remember something you've forgotten. You know that something used to occupy this space, and you can still see the shape of it, but the act of trying to remember sends your thinking into a labyrinth of locked grooves.

Fittingly, I can't remember where I first encountered “I Hope You Remember Me,” the sixth track from Heavy Systems, Inc.'s 2020 album Vape Sessions for Alexander. That's a hell of a sentence to read with no context, I apologize. Let me break that down. Just who is Heavy Systems Inc. (or HSI henceforth)? I couldn't tell you, really. Like the umpteen bedroom producers who post their experiments and otherwise for public consumption on YouTube and Soundcloud and such, I can't pinpoint exactly who HSI is. From what I can tell, they are American, but I don't know where they're from; some places say Tampa, some places say San Diego. That's just as well, because what is San Diego if not the Tampa of California, and what is Tampa if not the San Diego of Florida. They draw; their Blogspot is full of digital illustrations. Best I can tell, they've been making music for just over a decade, a lot of it I'd perhaps ignorantly file under drum & bass. There's a breakneck remix of the all-time Ginger Root banger “Loretta” on their Soundcloud nestled between a sprightly D&B number called “Pimp Tight” and a lurching space-disco number spliced with movie dialogue called “Guns Can't Help You Now.” They 100% know their way around a groove, around a flip, around a sample.

The sample “I Hope You Remember Me” is built around, the sliver of the thing we're trying to remember, is from a song called “Not Me,” the title track from the 1987 album by singer Glenn Medeiros. Wait, who? To be fair, only a very specific kind of music nerd remembers who Glenn Medeiros is, specifically the kind of chart-watching dorks who concern themselves with Billboard Number Ones. He did have his moment in the sun, so to speak, riding a new jack swing beat and a big assist from Bobby Brown to the top of the charts in 1990. He also knocked on the Top 10's door in 1987 with his first single, a cover of George Benson's “Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You.” But unless you were a turbo-permed European housewife in the late 80s, you probably don't know who Glenn Medeiros is. He is an adult contemporary that-guy, a dependable soft rock bench player. If Richard Marx and Michael Bolton were the Bash Brothers of adult contemporary, Medeiros was, uh... Stan Javier? Rick Honeycutt? Why yes, I did look those up on Baseball Reference; I was barely alive when the Oakland A's were rocking the house. Point is, Glenn Medeiros was a working musician, and the uncut, unabridged story of American popular music can't be written without him, the same way erasing Javier or Honeycutt from those Athletics teams could butterfly-effect that 1989 World Series win away.

“Not Me” is 1987 as hell, built around synthesized chimes and oozing a very 1987 brand of mystique, the kind that wears a silk shirt in chiaroscuro lighting for the bordering-on-avant-garde music video. The parent album's credits are stacked floor to ceiling with session aces on shore leave from the Good Ship Yacht Rock, and the credited songwriters here specifically are Paul Anka (Canada's first pop star and an Ottawa legend, lest we forget) and Deke Rivers, aka Richard fucking Marx. There I go namedropping Richard Marx again. I need to impress upon you just how huge Richard Marx was in 1987: his self-titled debut album went triple-platinum and had four singles crack the top 3, including a Number One single, his first of three. He was the Jose Canseco of the most uncool genre of music on Earth, but the thing with professional songwriters, which Marx was prior to his breakthrough and still is to this day, is they have this shit down to a science. Pair that professionalism and craft with the looping, hypnotic structure of vaporwave, and you have a song (or two songs, I suppose) that I've thought about every day since I first heard it.

“I Hope You Remember Me” isn't a drastic reworking of “Not Me” in terms of sonic manipulation; HSI doesn't warp the track that much or make Medeiros sounds like he's a wailing, melting demon (cf the Chuck Person and death's dynamic shroud records embedded above). The effect is more akin to listening to a CD that has chosen to skip in a few very opportune places. Maybe it's the alchemy of the smooth groove, the deep-cut nature of the sample, the moody song title, and the sense that this was created with one specific person in mind that makes “I Hope You Remember Me” so memorable to me. I can't prove it, but I think the album title gives it away: I want to believe that HSI has a friend named Alexander who likes to chill out and hit the vape, and since it's 2020 and we're in the dog days of COVID, and since one latches onto the small pleasure we can still give ourselves, healthiness be damned, maybe HSI made this album for their friend. Maybe this was a gift, in the figurative sense if not the literal, since it isn't available on HSI's Bandcamp or Soundcloud (though it is on Spotify and YouTube). It feeds into this sense that creative types, like me, like you, like HSI, are all just trying to make something at least one other person likes, whether we're toiling in obscurity or playing arenas. And I guess, in a way, this whole essay is my way of letting one other person know that I like and cherish a thing they've created from the ashes of something else.

#music

Someday I'll be enough of a physical media die-hard that I'll start making tapes the old-fashioned way again. But for now, these will have to do. RIYL: loud trebly guitars, unexpected drum machines, unexpected saxophone, music to sit on your porch to.

A1 Ween, “Did You See Me?” (Shinola, Vol. 1, 2005) A2 Peter Cat Recording Co., “Memory Box” (Bismillah, 2019) A3 Cootie Catcher, “Friend of a Friend” (single, 2024) A4 Liquid Mike, “K2” (Paul Bunyan's Slingshot, 2024) A5 Double Dagger, “No Allies” (MORE, 2009) A6 Metallica, “Master of Puppets” (Master of Puppets, 1986) B1 The Decemberists, “January Hymn” (The King Is Dead, 2011) B2 Cake, “Italian Leather Sofa” (Fashion Nugget, 1996) B3 Pearl & the Oysters, “Side Quest” (Planet Pearl, 2024) B4 Dan Seals, “Bop” (Won't Be Blue Anymore, 1985) B5 Kiwi Jr., “Norma Jean's Jacket” (Cooler Returns, 2021) B6 MJ Lenderman, “You Don't Know the Shape I'm In” (Manning Fireworks, 2024) B7 Neil Young, “Down by the River” (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

#music

The Clientele. Hot off their sprawling comeback album I Am Not There Anymore and a opening slot for another pantheon band of mine (The War on Drugs—at Royal Albert Hall, no less! Of all the shows for me to miss!), these lads had another strong showing this year in my stats, bolstered by the fact that I made a sprawling playlist and accompanying zine for my dear friend Sarah. I leaned heavy on B-sides and assorted ephemera this time around.

Where should I start with them? If you aren't hooked within the first ten seconds of “Since K Got Over Me,” the leadoff track from the band's masterful third album Strange Geometry (2005), I fear this band might not be for you. But if you, like me, love swirling, reverbed-out fingerpicked Stratocaster in your swoony, literary English indie-pop, keep listening to Strange Geometry, then listen to their first two albums, Suburban Light (2000) and The Violet Hour (2002), then pick back up with their fourth album, God Save the Clientele (2006).

The Isley Brothers. Funk-rock godfathers, the ultimate R&B chameleons, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. These dudes wrote “Shout” in 1959 (which would cement anyone's legendary status, so unkillable is that song) and got Beyoncé to feature on one of their songs in 2022. They have been sampled by Biggie Smalls, the Beastie Boys, and Kendrick Lamar. Ernie Isley's guitar tone is one of the greatest sounds I've ever heard, guitar or otherwise. These guys are legends in the field.

Where should I start with them? I'm partial to the sextet era of the group that starts proper with the totally awesome 3 + 3 (1973), also known as “the one with 'That Lady' on it.” It’s my favourite Isleys albums, but the one I gravitated towards in 2024 was The Heat Is On (1975), which is more groove-oriented. Another Isleys track I had on repeat was “It's Alright With Me,” from The Real Deal (1982), which sees the brothers bringing in an electro influence.

Kiwi Jr. Last year, my friend Ross, who works at a record store in Jolly Ol', sent me a wonderful care package consisting of Kiwi Jr's second and third albums on 12” vinyl. Sometimes my friend spoil me rotten. He sent me the records in part because I've been singing the praises of this band ever since I listened to “Leslie” over and over again in 2019. Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active rock lyricists, and not just because he obviously likes some of the same movies I do.

Where do I start with them? Since the Kiwis only have three albums, I'd recommend just starting with Football Money (2019) and working your way forwards. If you miss college rock like they did it in the 1990s, you'll love Football Money, which is catchy, breezy (10 tracks, 28 minutes), and a total blast to list to. There's a lot of Pavement in their DNA, but they love Guided by Voices and the Kinks, too. Cooler Returns (2021), my favourite Kiwi Jr. album, introduces a broader sonic palette, while Chopper (2022) is stacked floor to ceiling with cool, moody synths.

Peter Cat Recording Co. The few, the proud, the contemporary sophisti-pop bands. I stumbled upon these guys while browsing the album art for 2024 releases on Rate Your Music, which I acknowledge is the most deranged way to find new music to listen to. But the experience isn't unlike browsing the stacks at a record store, where you have little to go on but a genre and a piece of album art. I can't claim this is the most effective way of finding cool music, but it worked this time, because I found a cool band that was able to answer the question “What if Prefab Sprout were from New Delhi?”

Where should I start with them? Beta (2024) is the record that hooked me. The cinematic atmosphere, the long, languid melodies, Suryakant Sawhney's weary croon: at the risk of sounding too abstract, this record has fantastic vibes. The opening avant-chamber waltz “Flowers R. Blooming” is kind of a fakeout, since the album twin centrepieces of “21c” and “Black and White” are brooding dancefloor bangers.

Ween. I've loved these bastards since I was in high school (I once did an oral presentation on “Push th' Little Daisies” in English class), which puts them in the hallowed company of bands like Rush and They Might Be Giants. And let's face facts, Ween is They Might Be Giants for edgelords (I know Ween bristles at being compared to TMBG, but how many prolific genre-hopping alt-rock duos from the Northeast founded in the 80s whose members met in high school can you name—I'm gonna dedicate a blog post to this one day) and now I'm at the point where I'm the kind of sicko who listens to bootlegs. Never mind that, I have preferred bootlegs (check out Central Park 2010/9/17, which closes with the best version of “Doctor Rock” I've ever heard).

Where should I start with them? I'd recommend non-heads start with the excellent White Pepper (2000), Ween's most approachable album in that it has the fewest voice filters and the least off-putting imagery. There's a lot of cool psychedelia and Beatles-y pop, and ends with a three-song run that wouldn't sound out of place on a 70s country rock record. That run includes “Stay Forever,” a song so lovely it fries your brain knowing that these are the same guys who less than a decade earlier recorded a song called “Touch My Tooter.”

#music #tenthings

Some of these are things everyone's favourite video game plumber has said over the course of his storied career. Some of these things are shouted by Mark Morrison at the end of certain lines of his immortal 90s R&B hit “Return of the Mack.” Your job is to figure out which is which (and also imagine “Return of the Mack” with Mario ad libs instead). I'll say this: there's more overlap here than you think.

1. “It's a-me!”
2. “Hold on!”
3. “Come on!”
4. “Boy oh boy!”
5. “Round and round!”
6. “Here I go!”
7. “Once again!”
8. “Here we go!”
9. “Oh my God!”
10. “Oh yeah!”
11. “All right!”
12. “Be strong!”

This way to the answer key. How did you do?

#music

Memory's funny. I have forgotten key facts about the people I love and cherish the most, but somehow, I still remember the eight seconds of Canadian basic cable where the Beastie Boys dissed Al Di Meola. If memory serves, and it may well not, it was on MuchMusic (i.e. Canadian MTV). The context for this cross-genre drive-by has been lost to time, but I distinctly remember there being a cutaway from the Beasties to a dude who looked like a bad guy from RoboCop twiddling knobs while strip-mall martial artists and tech demo assets dance around him. It's a baffling cultural artifact from an era thick with them.

The video for “Sequencer,” and its parent album Scenario, were unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1983, the year jazz fusion broke on MTV. This wasn't because of Di Meola: the video for “Sequencer” is, charitably, the dorkiest thing I've ever seen. Di Meola is doing is best Rick Wakeman impression throughout, what with the capes and synthesizers and all. It is the visual equivalent of a katana hanging on an otherwise bare apartment wall (and not only because there are literal katanas in this video). No, jazz fusion broke on MTV because that same year, Herbie Hancock took over MTV with the funky avant-garde nightmare fuel of “Rockit.” This was not a fair fight. Hancock was filtering his sound through the nascent idiom of hip-hop; Di Meola filtered his through Miami Vice, which makes sense, since the credited songwriter is the smuggler himself, Jan Hammer. So while “Sequencer” isn't great jazz fusion, it is superlative arena-rock cheese.

I still don't know a ton about Di Meola or his work. I'm familiar with Friday Night in San Francisco, his landmark live album with fellow guitar wizards John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, because every used record store on Earth is legally required to have one copy of it in stock at all times (see also: August and Everything After, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and that one ELO compilation, you know the one). I'm not a big Chick Corea/Return to Forever guy; my taste in jazz fusion runs funkier, towards Casiopea or, say, Herbie Hancock. But the main lick of “Sequencer” is catchy, the synthesized percussion in the middle reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's work (consider this my plus for his wonderful 1982 album Awakening, and the music video is an all-time piece of kitsch, memorable enough to appear on my brain's front door last month after literal decades of not thinking about it.

#music

Okay, this one requires a little table-setting.

There's this cartoonist/animator from South Korea who goes by Ramdaram. If you've encountered any of her stuff in the wild, it's likely one of her animated music videos starring her OCs, one for Jack Stauber's “Two Time” (24 million views at time of writing), one for Tim Legend's “Soda City Funk”^[1] (52 million views). The OC lore is extensive and cryptic in the way these self-contained universes tend to be (no doubt exacerbated here by my inability to speak Korean), but the videos are fun explosions of Gen Z webcore energy. “Poison” is a newer, moodier entry in Ramdaram's “Underfity Friends” story cycle^[2], soundtracked by Evgeny Bardyuzha's “Tastes Like Poison.”

There isn't much online when you search Bardyuzha's name, which leads me to believe he's just a dude out in Chelyabinsk who likes making electronic music, sometimes for clients (those motivational business videos don't score themselves, shout out to the library music producers out there), sometimes for fun. “Tastes Like Poison” is indeed fun in a club-goth Drive-core kind of way. It sounds like the Weeknd and M83 trying to write a crossover EDM hit. Ramdaram seems to be doing well for herself as well: just south of a million YouTube subscribers, a handful of viral videos, a steady stream of new work on Instagram (movie dork bonus: her most recent piece at time of writing contains a nod to Chungking Express). There's something heartening about stumbling onto the work of people plugging away on the other side of the planet.

[1] It is absurd how hard “Soda City Funk” goes. I mean, it's just “Got to Be Real” plus “Do You Wanna Get Funky?” at 1.7x speed, but it works.

[2] Perhaps sensing there were a bunch of non-Korean goofballs like yours truly among her subscriber base, Ramdaram released an English-language lore explainer last year with the circuitous, oddly poetic title of “Story of a city where it's not strange for a person to go missing.”

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Continuing from last time: “The Surfer” sounds like Vampire Weekend's version of a lo-fi hip hop song, down to the drum machine, leisurely tempo, and woozy processed piano. But “The Surfer” also has Ezra Koenig singing and some sick George Harrison-esque guitar, which, honestly, more lo-fi hip hop should have.

As indie-heads of a certain vintage shuffle towards middle age, one question lingers in their hearts: does Vampire Weekend pass the Five-Album Test? I couldn't hum you a single bar of anything on Father of the Bride right now, so I'll have to revisit it before I set my take in stone. But to hear father of the Five-Album Test Steven Hyden say it, the band has sailed over the crossbar with room to spare. This discusson can be heard on a recent episode of Hyden's Indiecast podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow music writer Ian Cohen. It's a banger of an episode: they talk about that one time Pitchfork reviewed a Jet album with no text, just a video of a monkey pissing into its mouth, but they're dead wrong about Good News for People Who Love Bad News being overrated.

But there's at least one thing my fellow greying Xillennials and I can agree on: Only God Was Above Us is awesome! It rocks hard! The workrate has slowed down (Koenig was otherwise busy daisy-chaining hyphenates in the five years since Father of the Bride was released, just as he was in the six years between that album and Modern Vampires of the City) but the work, crucially, is still good.

#music