FIREWORKS

So in the spirit of retroactive blogging, here's my post about the Animal Collective song/video Fireworks.

In high school, I had two friends who I still love dearly to this day. back then however, they were more often than not complete dicks. One of their favorite things to be dicks about was music. They were staunch believers in Pitchfork's merit and held their tastes for lo-fi noise punk, and baroque-harmonic-folk-pop in fairly high esteem. Though sometimes I travelled in similar spheres, most of my favorite bands were strictly allocated to punk rock genres.

However, one song that they played over and over did resonate pretty strongly with me. It was by a decidedly weird electro-pop band of modest fame and tremendous Indie cred; Animal Collective. the song was Fireworks. To uphold my dignity, (or at least save myself the exposed shame of liking an electronica band) I kept my small   fling with the song a secret. I didn't buy it on itunes or, god forbid, go all out an get the band's cd. Instead I listened to the song every night on youtube over and over again, with the strange music video playing in the background as I mineswept. My fling turned into a passion and eventually grew to a throbbing love. I listened to the song so much I knew all the words. Then I listened to it so much that I could sing the strange looping doo-wops that Animal Collective presents as a breakdown (or verse or something I don't know music terms). Then I was found out.

My friend Andrew, one of the dicks, came over and saw the video open on my computer screen from the night before. I tried to exit out before he could bare witness to my horrible horrible habit, but he saw it and recognized the screen shot. I knew I was going to get the come-upance I deserved (to be fair I may have been a little dickish in my punk rock pretentions as well), but to my surprise Andrew held back. Instead he showed me a second song from the same album, For Reverand Green, and it was like seeing Fireworks' hot sister, who was a little bit less of my thing but still a total babe.

From then on I started letting down my walls of music little by little, and realized my friends may have been complete assholes, but they did have some fairly solid tatstes in music. I even learned to love lo-fi noise punk, which makes complete sense in retrospect. So thanks Fireworks, without you i might still be listening to that same Ramones six times every day for the rest of my life.