In February, I wrote my first installment of “Sound Association,” in which I hit Shuffle on my iPod and wrote what came to my mind when listening to the first five songs that popped up. I wrote the second installment of that column two months later, in April, and then decided to do a new one every two months thereafter. Naturally, I promptly forgot about this decree and missed June entirely. So this is a month late and a song short, but rather than apologize for my failings, let’s just get to the music.
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Fall Out Boy “Saturday” (from the album Take This to Your Grave)
Though I’m hesitant to admit it, I’ve always kind of been aware that I shouldn’t like Fall Out Boy quite as much as I do. Now I’m not exactly sure why I feel this way: I don’t consider them a “guilty pleasure,” because I don’t really believe that enjoying music should make one feel guilt, and I don’t consider myself too cool for the band, or the band too uncool for me, partly because on any scale of objective coolness, they seem to score a lot higher than I do. Just the same, I do feel this way, and this feeling was galvanized in the winter of 2006, when I took Jenn ice skating at the Dix Hills indoor ice rink and saw a kid — you know, a kid, maybe 9 years old — wearing a Fall Out Boy sweatshirt stuffed into oversized hockey gloves. This sight didn’t make me feel sheepish or silly, didn’t make me take stock as a then-32-year-old man with every Fall Out Boy album on his iPod, it just made it clear to me that whatever enjoyment I get from the band — and I get a lot of enjoyment from them — was never really intended for me.
The Smiths “Oscillate Wildly” (from the album Louder Than Bombs)
In the summer of 1994, when I was 19 years old, I spent a few weeks with two of my best friends in a beautiful old house in the Jersey Shore town of Beach Haven. During this time, we were driving everywhere in a single car — a beat-up and rusted-out 1985 Nissan Sentra with a temperamental cassette deck seemingly capable of playing only one tape: a copy of The Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs. We listened to that tape dozens of times that summer, but it felt like thousands. Today, of course, whenever I hear any of the album’s perfect 24 songs, I am immediately transported to the cramped backseat of that car, in a rush of cigarette smoke and sharp ocean air. Most people probably don’t think of The Smiths as a summer-vacation beach-house band, but for me that’s all they could ever be, and in this case at least, there could be no greater designation or higher ceiling.
Wu-Tang Clan “C.R.E.A.M.” (from the album Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers)
There’s this terrific Yankees-themed baseball blog called Bronx Banter, and if you’ve never checked it out, I recommend doing so. It’s got some of the best writing on the Internet; I read it every day, and once in a while, I add my two cents to the bustling comments section. Anyway, last year, the blog’s founder, Alex Belth, was considering printing up Bronx Banter T-shirts and he was looking for a catchy, inside-jokey slogan for the back of the shirts, so he asked his readers for their thoughts. There were a lot of really funny, smart suggestions (none of which I can remember now) but I came up with this one: Cash Rules Everything Around Me. This, I felt, was appropriate on two levels: (1) Cash, of course, is the nickname of Brian Cashman, the general manager of the Yankees, and if you’re a fan of the team, he kind of does rule everything around you; and (2) Belth and many of the Banter faithful are old-school hip-hop heads, and “C.R.E.A.M.” is one of the best songs ever produced by the genre. Anyway, I thought it was a great idea, but I never got around to submitting it, so I’ll mention it here now, and leave it at that.
Vince Guaraldi Trio “Christmas Time Is Here” (from the album A Charlie Brown Christmas)
I have exactly one Christmas album on my iPod, precisely for this reason: because if I were to have even two such albums, I would invariably be crushed under a barrage of Christmas songs every time I pressed Shuffle in July. A Charlie Brown Christmas is something of a cliché even as far as Christmas albums go. It plays on the nostalgia of 30-somethings like me: someone who grew up on Peanuts, who watched A Charlie Brown Christmas every year on CBS, who would repeatedly ask his father to play that soundtrack, not necessarily because of the music, but because of the colorful album sleeve with all those familiar characters. Today, it’s so much more to me than Christmas music — it’s the vestigial stamp of the most magical moments of a mostly forgotten suburban childhood, and even in July, these songs open up a world of old winters.
