Tag Archives: elton john

Inappropriate Walk Up Music: 03.07.09

santo-shea.jpgFor the original Inappropriate Walk Up Music post, click here.

Every day until Opening Day, Scratchbomb presents three tunes that are completely, unequivocally inappropriate for use as major league walk-up music.

These are not necessarily bad songs–although that
certainly helps. They are merely songs that don’t evoke the fear and dread one traditionally associates with the walk-up song. In fact, they evoke the exact opposite.

Imagine yourself in the on-deck circle. Bottom of the 9th. Down by one. Man on second, two out. You hear the PA system blare, The centerfielder, number 20… The crowd roars at the sound of your name. And as you stroll to the batter’s box, you are greeted with the strains of one of these songs:

* “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart,” Elton John + Kiki Dee
Please don’t make me tell this story again.

* “At the Bottom of Everything,” Bright Eyes
Especially inappropriate if you walk up to the eerie opening monologue. And refuse to step in the batter’s box until it’s over. And demand that the entire stadium be perfectly silent as it plays.

* “Touch Me”, The Doors
Worst Doors hit (I was gonna say worst Doors song, but I’ve heard worse deep album tracks). It’s like Jim Morrison singing a Fat Elvis song. If Elvis circa 1973 did this song in Vegas, followed by “Suspicious Minds,” would you have been surprised? Ironically, The Doors didn’t do another listenable album until Jim Morrison actually got Elvis-Fat for LA Woman.

My Brain Hates Me, Part 8,143

I don’t get tunes stuck in my head. They burrow into my brain like ticks, and it takes some serious countermeasures to lodge them loose, like extreme zen-like concentration, or dynamite.

But even worse is when I get a tune stuck in my head that I associate with a particular visual memory. 99 percent of the time, that visual memory is an old TV show or commercial. It’s a bizarre sensory memory, almost Proustian–in that it makes me want to lock myself in a cork-lined room and never come out again.

Since I seem to be the only idiot who remembers the bygone TV fare of yesteryear, there’s usually no point in explaining the whole Madison Avenue spectacle going on in my head. All it does is make me appear more insane than usual, like I’m starring in my own private version of Gaslight. Except I’m not being tortured by a sadistic husband, but my own steel-trap memory (if steel traps only clamped down on pointless garbage).

Why, for instance, can’t I simply get “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang stuck in my head? No, it has to be accompanied by an endless loop of Kool and the Gang dancing with Wendy’s Chicken Nuggets.

Regardless, I want to give you a glimpse of the hell that has been my brain for the last few days. Over the holidays, I heard “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” more than once. So it got stuck in my head, right? Oh, if only t’were so simple!

Continue reading My Brain Hates Me, Part 8,143