Throwback Thursday: Since U Been Gone

This week, Throwback Thursday sort of speaks for itself. This song is simply the best song ever to sing aloud, really loud, in an East Village bar surrounded by all your closest friends.

Unfortunately, because Google owns YouTube - now only mere steps away from owning literally everything in the world - I couldn't find an embeddable version of the official video for the song. But this version is amazing, because 1.) Who doesn't love Reba McEntire? 2.) Toward the beginning, Kelly sings: "It wasn't long 'til I called her mine." Wait, what? Is Kelly a big ole closeted lezzie? It would make sense. We can only hope.

Throwback Thursday: Lady Gaga Edition

Today is my birthday. I'm twenty four. TWENTY FUCKING FOUR. As many hours as there are in one day, I've lived that many years. You may recall that I announced a couple months ago that Lady Gaga is performing at Radio City Music Hall tonight. I am already prepared: brown hair bow, fishnets, new dress, Art Deco necklace, studded boots and eye liner await my gracious donning.

In honor of my first live Gaga experience, today's Throwback Thursday goes allllll the way back to April 2008, when Gaga released her first single as a solo artist: Just Dance. I didn't like Gaga at this point - in fact, I don't think I had even heard of her - and she didn't really start growing on me until last summer, more than a year after the song came out. But listening to it now, it seems like old school Gaga, or something, which is ridiculous since she's such a new artist. But compared to her tracks on The Fame Monster, it somehow seems like a really old song.

It's definitely not my favorite song on The Fame, but I decided on it because it was the first one released, and it was a huge, ginormous hit. Instead of posting the official music video - which, BTW, I feel doesn't do the song any justice because her inspiration for writing the song was her crazy nights going out in NYC, and the video takes place at, like, some lame house party in LA - I am posting her live performance of the song on So You Think You Can Dance? from fall 2008. I was living in Alabama at the time, and I watched this show religiously every week with Schmom B., so I saw this performance as it happened. I remember actually saying to my mom, "What the fuck?? Who is this bitch? She's not a good dancer and her singing is just sub-par."*

Oh, how things have changed.

This barely even seems like the same person performing. True, her budget was much smaller back then, but even her face looks different. Her body looks a bit stouter. I mean, this was almost two years ago so it's definitely possible that her look has changed. But that's no defense for those shoes. I mean what the hell? Neon highlighter wedge sandals? Hell. To the naw.

*Yes, I used those actual words, because Schmom and I are tight like that.

Throwback Thursday: Second blog post edition

So Thursday was halfway gone when I realized that I now allegedly have a blog "series" that I have to "maintain" in which I "write" posts dedicated to "music" from days gone by. Initially, I planned to just post Throwback Thursday on Friday, which would have been a total cop-out and an easy way for me to not actually have to write a Friday post. So, I decided to just bite the blog bullet and write two posts in one day.*

In honor of writing a second post in one 24-hour span, I have chosen Britney's Oops!... I Did It Again, the song that officially** holds the title for Best Song Whose Name Contains An Exclamation Point. As I was discussing with a friend very recently (because we often talk about our favorite pop icons from their glory days, you know, from before their I'm-bald-and-bashing-car-windows-with-umbrellas phases), there really is no good reason this song was so popular. The video was the cheesiest thing ever created, not in like a good way, and the song lyrics are quantifiably terrible, and Britney traipses around in a red latex jumpsuit that foreshadows only the worst of Lady Gaga's outfits. And yet, it was a huge hit. Totally mysterious, not unlike most aspects of Britney's impenetrable inner life.

Instead of putting you through the painful rounds of the Titanic references in the official video, I have chosen to post her live performance of the song from the 2000 MTV VMAs. This performance isn't nearly as infamous as her Slave performance from the next year, but I have always secretly liked it more. Here's the video, followed by my favorite parts, broken down by seconds.

:12 Britney starts singing live. If only we had known then how truly lucky we were to witness such a rare event.
:49 Britney grabs the rail violently and drops it.
:54 Some dude in the audience yells either "YEAH BRITNEY!" or "GET IT BRITNEY!" It's hard to tell which one. He's so committed to it. I imagine him being either the horniest straight or the queeniest gay in the audience, and also way ahead of his time.
1:01 Britney's tear-away suit starts to pre-emptively come off her body. Little bastard. I remember people talking about how this ruined the whole performance because it gave away her surprise striptease. I never understood this logic. It never detracted from the performance for me; I mean, you still got to see her rockin' bod, so stop fucking complaining.
1:07 Said rockin' bod makes its first appearance. Thus begins the best decade of pre-adolescent eating disorders ever.
1:27 Britney raises her arms above her head to signal that THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF MY NEW SONG PAY ATTENTION Y'ALL. She is also still singing live at this point. Take note.
1:36 Choreography officially begins. I could try to hide the fact that I learned this entire dance, but I won't.
1:36 This is also the point when her voice-over track starts playing, but you can still hear her singing underneath it. Amazing. Like we wouldn't notice that there are now two Britneys singing instead of one.
1:55 Britney starts writhing in a sea of gay men. This is absolutely a pre-cursor to the Slave video, which would come out the next year.
2:07 The camera zooms in on Britney's hips/ass while she does a shimmy, and somewhere in the universe a star dies from related causes.
2:17 Britney does a serious, hardass Harlem street move and drops her hands to her muthafuckin knees and pops her booty. Another star dies.
2:24 Britney gets inside the space egg and poses with her back arched, while singing, "You see my problem is this..." To which we respond, "What? Your problem is that your body looks too good? Were we supposed to notice you have a hot body? Honestly, it's not that noticeable. Wait... have you gained some weight?"
2:52 Britney does a subtle but effective double-forward hip thrust. Yeah, I noticed and learned this part of the dance too.
3:19 Britney's live mic comes back to the front as she screams "WHOOOO!" to signal that the frenetic dance break is about to begin.
3:31 The music gets more beat-heavy for about two to three seconds, and Britney faces the back and shakes her ass to match. Not sure why, but there is no camera zoom here.
3:47 Close-up on Britney's face, and we really see her straining here. She is singing, y'all. You can't hear it, but goddamnit, girl is singing.
3:52 The best go-from-standing-to-crouching (I think they call this a level change) ever in the history of dance occurs. I did this in my room over and over and over again.
3:52 - end THE BEST 30 SECONDS OF BRITNEY'S LIFE.
4:08 Britney coos, "Oooooh, I did it again," before punching her fist toward the heavens as if to say, "I did it! Again! I made mere mortals scream and cry and question their sexualities! I made legions of women hate their abdominals! I made real singers question their talents! And while I was at it I killed some stars! Oops! I did it again! But the 'oops' part is just for coyness because I totally meant to do it yeeeeehaw!"

With that, I will conclude by sky-punching and saying: Ooooh I did it again. I blogged twice in one day. What about it, bitches?


*This kind of sucks because now I have no fucking clue what to write for tomorrow
**Not officially at all

Throwback Thursday: Meghan Edition

I went to my grandmother's house for Christmas last week, and I was inspired by a photo of myself I found on one of the tables in her living room. I actually laughed out loud when I saw it, and then I found myself feeling very confused about why, of the hundreds-if-not-thousands of photos taken of me since I was born, she would have chosen this particular photo - framed and everything - to grace the top of her lovely table. It was taken ten years ago - making this post all the more topical as we close out the decade - at my 13th birthday party, which was the first time my parents let me invite boys over to our house - a piece of information that, by all accounts, makes this photo all the more embarrassing.

1. I have those amazing straight-across-the-fohead bangs that pretty much defined my childhood until the age of 15 or so.
2. I am also rocking the butt cut. You know, parted straight down the middle. No shame.
3. That appears to be a beaded choker.
4. Yes, that is cake with a screenprint of the Backstreet Boys on it. I. know. I remember that screenprinting on birthday cakes was, like, a big deal in middle school. You just took whatever photo you wanted on your cake to the bakery in the grocery store, and they somehow created an edible version of it.

Wait. I was getting ready to write a snarky comment about how ridiculous a screenprinted birthday cake is, but I have changed my mind. This is awesome. If I could have a screenprint of Lady Gaga on my next birthday cake, I wouldn't even think twice about it. Then I would have them sprinkle it with edible glitter before topping it with an edible hair bow, and I would take a photo of myself holding it the same way I held the BSB cake when I was 13, and I would do a side-by-side comparison of little baby Meghan and somewhat-more-grownup Meghan.

It's shocking how little things change, even when they change a lot. For good measure:



At least I wasn't alone in my choice of the butt cut. Nick rocked it for quite a long time. But I didn't care about him because I was in love with Brian, who never had the butt cut. Conclusion: My taste in men > my taste in haircuts.

This is not necessarily still true.

Throwback Thursday: Beyoncé edition

This week, I wanted to take it back to the summer of 2003, when Beyoncé made her debut as a solo artist with the single "Crazy in Love" and the whole world went OH MY FUCKING JESUS THIS GIRL IS THE SHIT. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and I listened to her first album, Dangerously in Love, on repeat for the duration of it. Come to think of it, it's one of my first real memories of driving around and dancing obnoxiously in my car, totally young and carefree. When it came to my immersion in pop music, I was completely delusional, and still pretty much am to this day.

So, here's the video that, in a sense, started it all. In it, we see the first hints of themes that would prove to be staples in Beyoncé's repertoire, including but not limited to: large fans and windblown hair, always wearing heels, twerking it in said heels, large fur coats, chewing or faux-chewing gum, collabos with Jay-Z, generally looking smoking hot, and (apparently) setting cars on fire. Even Chuck Klosterman has written about how much he fucking loved this song when it came out, and Chuck doesn't really love a lot of things.



Also, it's weird to think that when she made this video, she was a year (nigh two) younger than I am presently. F.M.L.

Throwback Thursday: A dedication to the South

I am going home to the dirty dirty tomorrow, and I could not be more excited. I felt much better when I woke up this morning, much more like myself, which naturally means I'm in the mood to listen to some hardass, gritty Southern hip-hop. This includes but is not at all limited to Three 6 Mafia, Trillville, Lil Scrappy, Bone Crusher, Outkast, Ludacris, Rich Boy, T.I., Gucci Mane, Weezy, Young Joc, Pastor Troy and Crime Mob.

I don't understand why I love this music so much, but I'm sort of beyond analyzing it. The first single I ever bought was B.I.G. ft. Puff Daddy and MA$E "Mo Money, Mo Problems." At the time, I was a 12-year-old white girl growing up in the suburbs, and now I'm a 23-year-old white girl living in Harlem. After listening to this shit for nearly 12 years, it now reminds me of home. It reminds me of driving around bumping the bass at full volume, or going to the club and dancing until I was drenched in sweat, eating greasy food at 4 a.m., then going home and washing the cigarette smoke out of my hair. It reminds me of this one night my friend M (who helped introduce me to a lot of this music) and I went to the grittiest club in Birmingham, a place we had no business being, and I tragically lost my Blackberry. Because sometimes you just throw too hard, nomesayin.

So now, the first in a new series I'll call Throwback Thursdays: a song I used to bump loud and often as I drove around the South. 'Cuz there ain't no place like home, y'all.



And nothing says home like booty dancing, high school drum lines, college football, heavy bass, slurred speech, accents, sippin' on whiskey sours, dropping it, thick air, thick women and the men who love them. Fuck. Yes.