In light of the Obama phenomenon, take it as you wish:

The Way It Is
Bruce Hornsby & The Range

Standing in line marking time–
Waiting for the welfare dime
cause they cant buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies eyes
Just for fun he says get a job

Thats just the way it is
Some things will never change
Thats just the way it is
But dont you believe them

They say hey little boy you cant go
Where the others go
cause you dont look like they do
Said hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules
He said, son

Thats just the way it is
Some things will never change
Thats just the way it is
But dont you believe them

Well they passed a law in 64
To give those who aint got a little more
But it only goes so far
Because the law don’t change another’s mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar

The new Geico caveman ad ad made me go hunt up the techno sounding song. It’s by Royksopp and called Remind Me, and here’s the music video from YouTube:

The video is bloody awesome, but then I am a sucker for this stuff ;-).

[ Link to Video ]

Update: I read elsewhere that the above video and song version is a remix by someone else. Not sure about the details.

Have you listened to the Avalanches? Below is a YouTube video of Since I Left You, which for some reason I have watched over 7 times now and I think I can watch another 10 times or so without getting bored:

Not sure why I find it captivating!

At the risk of stating the obvious, while simultaneously revealing my pop preferences, I have to ask: is there another album as good as Getz/Gilberto?

Works for all occasions ranging from sitting back with your booze of choice, to working on churning out a few hundred lines of code.

Malian “bluesman” Ali Farka Touré died last night. The story goes that he fell in love with [African-]American blues music and adapted his own native music to that style. The picture to the left is the cover of his collaborative album with Ry Cooder. If you have not heard Touré before, find a site (perhaps last.fm or Amazon) which will let you listen to snippets of “Ai Du”. Its a great song.

Currently playing on my iTunes: Staralfur by Sigur Rós. Its a nice, haunting song (Epitonic will even let you legally download it), though the more uppity types might find it (as always) pandering or trite. One way to identify the uppity types ;-) is by their unfaltering admiration of Springsteen — I think the thing for this crowd is the Woody Allen trick of mixing the trivial (baseball) with the allegedly profound. Anyway this is not one my pet rants, though it sort of turned out this way. Just wanted to point you to the song.

And also a very interesting movie (which falls into the same classification as the song) called The Girl in the Cafe which I picked up quite by change because of the dratted free coupons that Blockbuster wastes my time with (because of my erstwhile DVD subscription). The movie in short: idealistic, simple, young girl meets nice, old, shy bureacrat resulting in trip to G8 summit and question of poverty, hunger, etc. Includes statutory Bono (One!) blurb at end, and all in all leaves one feeling empty and disgusted about oneself and the world (factoid from the movie: a child dies every 3 seconds due to entirely avoidable causes), except of course one is one of those sophisticated, uppity types described above! The movie ends with Staralfur in the background.

The other day while driving home I was amused to hear the Gotan Project on NPRs slick economics and capitalism news program “Marketplace”. I have been listening to Gotan Project for a few months and found the music very interesting, at least to write code to, but what amused me in this instance was that the song they were playing (just a short bit of) is titled El Capitalismo Foraneo.

Check out the album. Its worth a listen.