& ONE DAY I AM GONNA GROW WINGS

kellyoxford:

Kristen Bell and I have the same excited/sad crying scale.
Holy shit, I love you Kristen.

oneweekoneband:

Spoon - “I Turn My Camera On”

While I’m on the topic of music videos, I should mention that Spoon isn’t really crazy about making them: Britt has said “We don’t have any good videos.” Now they mostly make them live, because lip-syncing isn’t “cool” (I’ll explore Spoon’s relationship with that term more tomorrow), and one gets the feeling that it was this video that led to that rule.

“I don’t understand what it’s about,” Mr. Daniel said of the video, with a shrug. “We got lots of treatments for this video. This one I didn’t understand. And if I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand what was wrong with it.”

But still, it’s a pretty good video! Or, at any rate, it’s a really good song. One of the most worn-out critical truisms about Spoon is how “consistent” they are, which sure, but the flip side of that is that they are extremely eclectic as well. Since Girls Can Tell, Spoon seems to be on a mission to show how many genres and influences they can absorb, and still put out their “consistent,” signature product. “I Turn My Camera On” gets compared to Prince, or “Emotional Rescue” era Stones, both of which are pretty apt comparisons; but it still just sounds like Spoon, too.

Much is made of Spoon’s pan-generic qualities, how they make indie rock “funky”: the term “blue-eyed soul” gets thrown around a lot. What makes it so effective, I think, is how unaffectedly they adapt these sounds: there is no sense of pretension, of “now we are going to get funky” or “now I am going to do a falsetto.” Spoon just does what they do, and they make it look easy. (Which is why, I think, they don’t always get the credit that they deserve. More on that, also, later.)

“I Turn My Camera On” is also one of Spoon’s most licensed songs: in addition to appearing in a Jaguar commercial, it has also appeared in episodes of Veronica Mars (Britt also acted in an episode, which I can’t find online: if anybody wants to help me find a clip to post, please let me know), Bones, The Simpsons and Friday Night Lights (not a bad list of shows, right there). I’ll talk more about Spoon and TV tomorrow (I know, seems like I want to talk about an awful lot tomorrow, right? Well, we’ll see: we’ve got all week), but it seems pretty obvious why this song gets used so much: sex sells, and “I Turn My Camera On” is sexy as hell.

For the same reason, it also gets remixed a lot.

UPDATE: Here is a short clip of Britt on Veronica Mars; thanks @meghandrrns!

I found out about Spoon thanks to Veronica Mars. So good. I downloaded the song the second I heard it on the show.