. . . if I find you've been creepin' 'round my back stair.

This earworm brought to you by the Canada Post Corporation, which has announced a new line of stamps featuring Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Anne Murray, and Paul Anka. (Canada, having fewer celebrities than the U.S., doesn't have to wait for them to die.)

For the next round, I'm hoping they use the most hostile-wino-tastic picture of Neil Young they can find. One that makes the Nick Nolte mug shot look like a GQ cover.

In the future, tape scratching will be the centerpiece event in the Summer Olympics.

Via the TTL Estoy con Estupido blog

Of all the stuff I've downloaded in the past few months--including the 47 most recent Lil Wayne mix tapes and Cloverfield--probably the one thing that has most improved my life is Widget Foundry's Amazon Album Art Widget for Mac OS X. (If you're not using OS X you can grab a non-widget version here.)

Ever since Apple introduced album-art support in iTunes, I've struggled to balance my OCD-driven desire to acquire art for every single record on my hard drive with the pain-in-the-assness of having to track down everything that's not on iTunes and the bugginess of manually assigning art. The Amazon Album Art Widget has made it entirely unnecessary for me to restrain my compulsiveness--I just select an album's tracks in iTunes, enter the album title in the AAAW, and in usually less that three mouse clicks my jams are connected to the proper art and I'm free to go make sure all of the picture frames hanging on my apartment walls are exactly level.

On his personal blog today New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones discusses a not-too-rare phenomenon in mainstream hip-hop where vocal substitutions for radio-unfriendly lyrics--rather than dropouts or backward masks or bleeps--actually improve the song. Using Jay-Z's "Can I Get A . . . " as an example, Frere-Jones points out that often "the fig leaf ('what what') is better than the skin ('fuck you')."

One recent case in point is Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction" (or, as it's known in its unedited form, "Sexual Eruption"). Writes SFJ: "'Sensual Seduction' is funny because it is redundant and stupid. 'Sexual Eruption' is a euphemism for something I don't need to know about Mr. Dogg and his day." The other reason it's a bad move to release the track as "Sexual Eruption": since the bowdlerized version leaked first, clubgoers know the song as "Sensual Seduction," and when you're dancing to a jam you love you don't want to be distracted by changed-up lyrics.

I think the first time I noticed something similar was during that brief period, right after "Country Grammar" dropped, when it seemed like Nelly might be somebody worth paying attention to rather than an unrepentant cheesedick. In edited form the song's wickedly catchy chorus--"I'm goin' down down baby / Your street in a Range Rover / Boom boom baby / Cocked ready to let it go"--has an excellent little rhythmic nugget in the "boom boom" bit. When I finally heard the unedited version I was totally bummed that it substitutes "street sweeper"--a type of shotgun--for the infinitely more pleasing "boom boom." The insertion of just one extra syllable--plus the gratuitous addition of gangsta posturing to a nearly flawless good-time party song--ruined the track for me.

I'm all for swears and guns and everything, but why would you fuck up a perfectly good "boom boom" like that? Putting "boom boom" in your song is a foolproof way to make it better.

Mecca Normal aren't for everyone: David Lester's guitar accompaniment doesn't give you much of a buffer against the rough, quirky intimacy of Jean Smith's theatrical poetry, which gets so nakedly powerful it can violate your personal space with nothing but words. They've just posted two new songs on their MySpace blog, and one of them is about Chicago sound archivist, musician, and antiwar activist Malachi Ritscher, who recorded a Mecca Normal show in Chicago a few years ago. Stark and raw, the song has none of Smith's usual wryness. Lester also created a poster for it in the classic protest style.

For those of you traveling to the Pacific Northwest (or living there!), Mecca Normal will perform the new songs this weekend in Olympia and Portland; at the Portland show they'll also host an art auction to benefit Books to Prisoners.

No big surprise, but the new Bird Names record, Open Relationship, is a piece of weirdo pop brilliance that sounds pretty much unlike anything else happening right now, unless there's such a thing as a Chinese Os Mutantes I don't know about. It's so good that the powerful positive vibes surrounding its release cannot be contained in just one party, so the band is taking over Ronny's for two nights this weekend. They've packed both bills with quality openers. Tonight they're bringing out freak-funkers Killer Whales and tomorrow Emmett Kelly's Cairo Gang will be along for the ride. Both shows are highly damn recommended. 

According to the YouTube description this video for Zombie Zombie's "Driving This Road Until Death" is an unofficial production, but it looks super pro and super cool. I imagine it would be hard to come any closer to matching the song's eerie and slightly menacing tone as well as its overall vintage soundtrack-y feel. If you're not a fan of director--and frequent soundtrack composer--John Carpenter, it's an adaptation of his The Thing. If you're not a G.I. Joe or 80s football fan, that G.I. Joe with the tall socks is William "the Refrigerator" Perry.

And if you're curious, here's Carpenter himself in full rock-making mode.

Like most dance music genres, blog house was declared dead by its more cutting-edge proponents as soon as it got popular enough to earn its own unfortunate moniker. And for sure there is something burnout-inspiring about the form's kudzu-like infestation of dance clubs around the world, and the way that its genuine talents are often swamped by wave after wave of pale imitators. That being said, it's still a little too early to fully turn your back on the style, and its going to be a little while until the last bit of fun can be squeezed out of the combination of pulsing Giorgio Moroder beeps, obnoxious 90s-rave synth freakouts, and raps about sex, drugs, and personal electronics from the 90s.

If you want to stock up on "I was there" moments to pepper into future conversations, I recommend checking out tomorrow's event at Smart Bar.

Headliners LA Riots are one of the aforementioned genuine talents of the genre. Their DJ mixes (one is available here) show a genuine knowledge of and respect for the older forms they're jacking, and their already huge catalog of remixes is marked by a refreshing sense of restraint.

The Bloody Beetroots, on the other hand, can really shine when they completely abandon restraint and good taste by pushing blog house's standard distorted synths to a place not too far from pure noise. Of course that can also make them completely obnoxious at times, and I still haven't settled on whether to love them or hate them.

Felix Cartal has supplied some of my favorite dance-floor jams of the past year. A couple of quirky breaks aside, his track "Drugs" could have slain at any rave I ever went to in the 90s.

The event is free, but requires an RSVP through its sponsor, Toyota Scion, and probably putting up with a fair bit of Scion propaganda around the club.

Tomorrow devout music nerds will celebrate one of our newer high holidays, Record Store Day, where indie stores will offer live music and goodies to remind people that iTunes isn't the end-all and be-all of the music-buying experience. All participating stores will be offering treats like limited-edition records from the likes of Steve Malkmus and Vampire Weekend, but a few are pretty much daring you not to spend your entire Saturday afternoon in a record store.

Permanent Records is offering in-store performances by locals Purricane and buzz band Grand Ole Party at around 3 PM, with a visually enhanced multi-boombox listening party for the Flaming Lips' uber-psychy four-CD set, Zaireeka. (In case you're one of those people who didn't care about the Flaming Lips yet in 1997, that's the one where you're supposed to listen to the discs all at once.)

At Reckless's Wicker Park location there's an in-store by Rogue Wave at 5 PM, and freelance mind-wizard Steve Krakow--the guy behind the Plastic Crimewave Sound, Galactic Zoo Dossier, and the Reader's own Secret History of Chicago Music comic--will be drawing rock 'n' roll caricatures on demand from noon till 6 PM.

Both the Grand Ole Party/Rogue Wave shows at Schubas this weekend are sold out, so if you don't already have tickets these will be your only opportunities to catch them this time out.

Record Breakers at 2109 S. State is going balls-out with a ton of live performances--American Draft, Amplified Heat, Chicago Green Counterpunch, Daphne Willis, Doppler Shift, Green Sugar, Hot Garbage, How Far Too Often, KB Duo, Lorimer Sound, Moving Targets, Ronnie Rock & Blues, Seth McGaha, Sonny's Dog, Sybris, We Are the Willows, White Devil, Power Space, Too Sweet, the Fastest Kid Alive--as well as free hot dogs and 20 percent off everything they sell. That is some serious Record Store Day spirit.

For more information, check out the post on the Reader's Free Shit blog.