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Animal Collective’s Fleet Foxes-slobbered-on, Kanye-endorsed video for “My Girls” has been bumpin’ around for a few days and has been getting some pretty positive praise, despite generally looking like an expensive version of Green Man from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. And more than any lyric on Merriweather Post Pavilion, the chorus to “My Girls” has people Tweetinging or Tumblring or whatever the fuck they do now. The most common reading on (always-accurate!!!11) lyric sites is:
How successful are people expecting the new Animal Collective album to be? So successful that Spin‘s Charles Aaron is worried that Merriweather Post Pavilion will become as ubiquitous as Moby’s Play—an album where all but one track was licensed to commercials. This is to say that Aaron is predicting it will be as successful as one of the most successful albums in recent memory, and he is worried that this will make him dislike it. Aaron seems aware of how crazy this is, but all the self-flagellation about his coyly authentic taste lapse doesn’t excuse the fact that he nevertheless wrote a piece about it, nor that he felt enough ownership of a Moby album to be offended when its songs showed up on soap operas, nor that he, like the rest of the internet, is somehow convinced that MPP is going to be a major crossover smash. But why?
Admission: I’m an Animal Collective fan at Idolator.com. Yep. I’m a real bro’s bro. I know we are hated around these parts, and I tend to keep my mouth shut when Maura is on one of her rants about them. She seems to think that AC fans are uniformly crazy, and I’ve been defending them, saying not all of us are crazy, and some of us are quite nice, I swear, and just give us a chance. Well, after today’s foofaraw in the weird, wild world of Brooklyn Vegan’s comments section, I’m beginning to think maybe she has a point. Just look at the case of one Seth [last name redacted because we aren’t jerks], who felt the wrath of the mouth-breathing Animal Collective faithful.
The new video for Animal Collective’s “My Girls,” which recalls all those repurposed-from-European-TV clips of classic rock bands that used to fill countless hours of VH1 and all those dripping-paint videos that were so hot in 2008—not to mention maybe, just maybe, Bunnicula—is located after the jump. Quick, can you come up with the most hyperbolic bit of hyperbole to describe it? Maybe I will give a prize to the person who can out-freak-out the rest of you! Why not, it’s almost the end of the day, right?
During the Bush administration, everyone seemed to agree: there were no protest songs. Or, at least, no good ones. At any rate, it definitely wasn’t like the ’60s. In her latest blog post for NPR, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein provides a welcome correction to this idea, noting both how many protest songs there were and how widespread the perception was that releasing a protest song was a bad idea. But even if there were protest songs, surely they didn’t have the same effect as in the ’60s, right?