Today’s Wall Street Journal takes a look at a clutch of musicians who have decided to get notoriety—if not cash—by writing songs about the recession, although I’m guessing that the Journal didn’t want to do the songwriters in question any favors. Why? Because the paper took the time to print the awful lyrics these people have come up with in order to suck up the YouTube hits from people looking for “bailout” or “Fannie Mae.” Seriously, the lyrical stylings exhibited after the jump made me appreciate “Weird Al” Yankovic’s recession-ready remake of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” a lot more.

“I Want My Bailout Money,” a hip-hop song by the natural-foods writer Michael Adams:

The internal rhyme of “nation” and “hyperinflation” here is a deft touch, but the guy sounds like he’s about to bust into Porky Pig’s “Th-th-th-that’s all folks!” at any moment.

“Fannie Mae eat Freddie Mac and Cheese,” by Talya and Palvie:

Prop comedy is bad. Prop comedy songs that use the word “perfidy”: Much, much, much worse.

“Bearish,” by Marcy Shaffer:

A parody of the Association‘s “Cherish” that rhymes “bearish” with “laissez faire-ish.” Please, someone, take the rhyming dictionary away from this person. And the copy of GarageBand.

I guess the upside is that none of these people will make money off their horrible lyrics? Well, actually, one of the songs isn’t all that bad. But it has the benefit of having history, and someone who actually knows what words don’t sound good when crammed into lyrical meter, on its side—it’s old-school folkie Tom Paxton‘s “I’m Changing My Name To Fannie Mae” is an updated version of his response to the government’s late-’70s bailout of Chrysler:

And Arlo Guthrie—who’s covered Paxton’s Chrysler song in the past—has his own version, with slightly different lyrics (and a bigger band):

No Dough In The Do-Re-Mi [WSJ]

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:

I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls

Sure, in hard economic times, it’s rockcrit 101 to champion dudes who sing about the joys of simplicity and domestic life. What twentysomething who just got laid off from his graphic design job doesn’t want to occasionally be reminded that there are more important things in life than bottle service? (Conversely, politics blog The American Scene is paints Sr. Panda as a crunchy conservative in his “longing for property and for home.” What?)

But, really, fuck the economy. Is this dude saying “adobe slats” or “adobe slabs”? And what does that even mean?

Says SongMeanings.com commenter tonyjames:

adobe slabs refers to building a home from the ground up like way back in the day. basically stating that as father he’s going to work hard in providing for his children. but yes i agree that while most animal collective songs are a little difficult to interpret on the first try, this one is way easy to understand. its in general a song about a man providing for his family and making his father proud in the process.

So yeah, I love the sentiment and, hell, I even love this bloopy-bloppy mess of a song. But even so, I just can’t look past the fact that this is a crappy lyric. And I overlooked “Are we human or are we dancer.” Dig it:

1. By its very definition, social status is not a material thing. At all. Remember when David Cross tried to buy a house on “indie hipster cred”? Doesn’t work!

2. It’s a line about growing up and taking care of your wife and kids but still sung with that Peter Pan syndrome fake-naïveté that these guys haven’t abandoned since they were murmuring “I am the pantha!” through a Line 6 pedal.

3. To force the rhyme of “slat” and “stat[us]” they sort of leave off the “-us” reducing it to “a social stat” which is really like cutie-poo Hollertronix board slang given new life as song lyric. Nix social stat? Totes awes fam bros!

4. “Adobe” is like the least musical word humanly possible, next to maybe “coprophagia” or “phlegmatic” or “weltanschaung.”

5. With four walls and some slabs (or slats), the Panda Clan still doesn’t exactly have a roof.

I dunno. After looking at that cover for seven hours, maybe he means Adobe Photoshop?

In this week’s AV Club, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird drops the controversial soundbite “When you think indie rock, you think more about haircuts and fashion than about music.” Somehow, this has yet to be picked up by outraged bloggers (maybe because they think he’s right? oooh snap), but it made me I wonder just what other tags and adjectives and bits of shorthand have been rendered free of any sort of music-related meaning by misuse, overuse, or just your normal wear and tear. Bird’s full quote after the jump, so you can think it over!

AVC: Do you ever get tired of always being tagged as “the guy who whistles,” “the guy who plays the violin,” “the guy who does loops,” and so forth?

AB: It’s pretty harmless. There’s lots of worse things that could be attached to your name. Since I started doing the New York Times thing, sometimes they say on the ad at the theater, “Multi-instrumentalist, cultural commentator.” I’m like, “No, that’s a bad expectation to start to develop.” I guess it’s better than “blogger,” which is such an ugly word. It’s always been such a pain to describe to anyone what I’m doing, so it might as well be a matter-of-fact thing like “violinist,” “whistler,” “multi-instrumentalist.” It’s all pretty harmless. If they said, like, “swing impresario” or something like that, then I would have an issue. Or “indie rock” is another one that gets me. I just never felt like I had anything to do with indie rock. When you think indie rock, you think more about haircuts and fashion than about music. The other one that made me cringe recently was, some journalist was trying to coin a term and he said “whistle-rock” or something like that. “You know, like Peter Bjorn And John!” “Oh God, no, don’t, you’re going to ruin everything!”

That quote sounds a lot less dismissive in context, haha! Anyway, I do agree with him about “indie,” although I am prone to use it in conjunction with the words “rock” and “pop.” But what about you? What is on your Forbidden Words Of Music list? (Also, I still think that “blogger” is an awful-sounding word, all hard consonants and nasal vowels. Blech. “Writer” sounds so much better, and as a bonus, it’s a hell of a lot less constraining.)

Andrew Bird [AV Club]

Most critics have a love-hate relationship with album reviews. On the one hand, they’re an absurdly limiting format, forcing you to find things to say about albums you don’t care about, limiting your thoughts on albums you do care about, and requiring a bottom-line consumer reccomendation that might not really encapsulate your honest feelings. On the other hand, in these hard times for music scribes, record reviews are the one unique service we can provide that the public always seems to want. Which is why it seems crazy that Alernative Press was considering removing album reviews from its print edition.

After noting that “The reviews section is consistently one of the top three most-read sections of AP,” music editor Scott Heisel mentions that Vibe has cut its album reviews and now runs them only on the mag’s Web site, on the logic that “…in 2008, the most passionate conversations about music revolve around singles and remixes and playlists and who’s downloading what from where and how.” This, he says, raises the question of if “Rolling Stone, Spin and Blender [will] follow suit,” and discussions have been taking place at AP as to whether they should do the same. He then opens the question up to readers, who overwhelmingly come out against the idea:

An essential to any MUSIC MAG is a record review section. I carry my AP around with me for a few days and comb through every page, and I read every review for every CD. If the reviews were moved to the website, I honestly would not even read them. I don’t have the time to scroll through your website for something that I thought I paid to have sent to me so that I could cart it around with me. To even consider getting rid of a section that is one of the top three features in AP is ludicrous.

the internet would definitely be more convenient, however, I’d be less likely to read because I’m hardly on the website. it takes a lot for me to check updates on a website frequently.. unless I’m sent an e-mail or something. I prefer the reviews in the magazine, I’m much more prone to actually read them. I like the exclusivity of getting my info from the physical magazine before everyone else rather than a website that every single person with internet connection has access to in three clicks of the mouse

Taking it out of the magazine is absolutely crazy. What is a music magazine without a section to let readers know about the cd before making the purchase? I for one would like an opinion on a cd I like or may not like. If it HAS to changed, then take albums that are popular among readers and review some in depth, quality not quantity, right?

This is heartening to anyone dismayed by the diminishing prominence of reviews in non-music mags, and there are some pretty serious flaws in Heisel’s logic, mainly in the idea of comparing Vibe and AP. Vibe has sections that focus on non-music topics like style, and the musical logic about the current emphasis on singles, mix tapes, and online interactions applies almost exclusively to rap at this point. AP, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of music content, and there aren’t a lot of Thursday fans talking about mix tapes online.

Ultimately, it’s hard to understand the logic behind AP cutting its reviews section, since they’re such an integral part of the current readers’ perception of what the magazine should be–which is another reason why it’s hard to see how that move would result in a net gain of readers. The only benefit would be the money saved by an overall decrease in the magazine’s page count, and while that’s understandable, it’s also a little depressing.

43% blogged. [Scott Heisel of Alternative Press]

Lily Allen’s second album, Stuck On The Naughty Step, has a release date of Feb. 9, 2009 penciled into EMI’s calendar. Also right now she’s working on a video, although she says it’s “for viral release,” which like isn’t the whole point of a “viral” video for it to be sort of under-the-radar and able to trick users into thinking that they accidentally popularized it? Oh, language. How I weep for your lost meanings. Anyway, here’s my guess as to its concept: It’s a “Will It Blend?” segment featuring photos of Katy Perry. [Lily Allen's MySpace Blog]

In an interview with The Advocate, Beth Ditto says her rad-lib queer credentials make her a lesser-of-two-evils voter, with the attendant “George Bush is an illegal-immigrant-raping super-Nazi with a fire-spurting devil’s head on his cock” quote that will be making the blog rounds today. But I’m more interested in her specious “correction” of the flap that bubbled up after her nekkid NME cover and its attendant interview:

Although, since this interview is for The Advocate, I have to ask about your recent comments to the British magazine NME where you blamed gay men for perpetuating the “size zero.” What kind of reaction did you get to that?

I got a little bit of a reaction. Although I think what’s so funny to me — not “funny ha ha,” but “funny strange” is that comment was paraphrased to the max. I know that in America not that many people are familiar with the NME, but everyone in Britain knows that the NME is the enemy. There’s a reason why it’s called “the N-M-E.”

Its coverage is known to be sensationalistic.

Absolutely sensationalistic. Absolutely known for paraphrasing. What I said – and you can still disagree – it was in a list of things that I thought could be blamed [for the size zero] before women were blamed. Like I said, I’m a radical feminist, and first and foremost, I’m a woman. That’s something I’m perceived as by the whole world, and I get the options handed down to me that are handed down because I’m a woman. I didn’t create those standards that I’m supposed to adhere to — those were created for me, and it started before I was born.

That being said, it was a list of things, and half of the list was left out. I mean, one of the things I said which was a very specific thing was gay men in the fashion industry are responsible, not gay men as a whole. But I think it was good, at least, because it got people talking about shit. I don’t blame any one thing, and I would never say “Gay men are to blame for the size zero.” That’s absolute bullshit, there’s lots of things to blame.

Well it’s nice to know she’s now only blaming a miniscule cross-section of gay men, rather than simply blasting the fashion industry as a whole, for fostering fucked-up body issues. Progress! While I have no doubt that Beth likely was misrepresented by the hacks at the NME, and while I’m sure not all gay men in the fashion industry have womens’ best interests at heart, it still feels like an oddly absolutist stance. At least she’s not trying to pretend she never said anything of the sort, no sir. Right?

But if the NME is so known for paraphrasing, misquoting, taking things out of context, and otherwise mangling words for their own “sensationalistic” ends, didn’t Ditto feel any qualms about helping them pander so darn sensationalistically with a nudie cover and an interview that she had to know, based on the above comments, would be manipulated and misrepresented? Or did she only decide/realize the NME was a buncha big meanies after the Internet blowback? Or is she just an attention whore? (I know my pick.) I’m also pretty sure my honorary vagina shriveled up and fell off when I read someone who rolls around with Perez Hilton repeatedly referring to herself as a “radical queer” with (presumably) a straight face. (No pun intended.) Oh the immigrant-raping/devil-cock quote was a paraphrase, but I was totally only saying what she really meant.

Beth Ditto [The Advocate via Gigwise]