Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The Beeb (jail)baited me into it!

I don't listen to the radio much anymore, maybe a little news, sports or comedy in the car when I don't take the bus/train, but I do use the wonders of the Internet to listen to BBC Radio 1 at work now and then.

Thanks to the BBC, I've discovered a lot of artists I would never hear in California (i.e., Alphabeat, Gabriella Cilmi, MGMT) or discovered them months before they made news in the States (The Ting Tings, Duffy, Estelle). So when they recently began playing a new, fun pop song with an infectious beat and fun lyrics that you can't get out of your head, I thought I'd made a new discovery.

But when it turned out to be from an artist whom -- as a 36-year-old man who grew up on the sad stylings of Depeche Mode, Erasure and the Cure -- I'm not all supposed to like, one who by the stylings of society I'm even encouraged to ridicule, I paused. But then I threw caution to the wind and bought the song -- which is now in circulation on the iPod. More specifically, since I couldn't quite get myself to spend money on this tune, I went to Amazon and traded Pepsi Points for it.

Darn the torpedoes, it's just a good, fun, innocent pop song and I'm not ashamed to own it.

And that's how I became a fan of Miley Cyrus' "See You Again."

(Just be sure to get the updated 2008 version (aka the "Rock Mafia Mix"), which is a lot better than the original.)