As promised yesterday, I’ve compiled a complete list of all the Inappropriate Walk Up Songs. This should prove useful to those of you who need to settle arguments in bars, or as a handy crib sheet on your next midterm exam. Enjoy!
This list is arranged in alphabetical order by artist. Why? Because that’s how you organize music, dammit. I’ve been doing it that way ever since I started buying albums, and I ain’t about to change my ways now, dagnabbit.
What did I discover while compiling this list? Not much, except that I accidentally used Johnny Cash twice, despite my declaration that I wouldn’t use any artist/band twice. Boy, is my face red!
In my defense, tell me you could resist using “Wo Ist Du Haus, Mama”. That is comedy/German gold right there.
So without further ado, the list (after the jump):
For previous Inappropriate Walk Up Music posts, click here.
This is it, folks. Today is Opening Night–an abomination in the eyes of God, if you ask me (and God). I’m not a traditionalist when it comes to most baseball matters, but the first game of the year should take place in the daytime, dammit. It should be a horrible, rainy afternoon where you can’t feel your toes and you wonder why you gave up a whole day’s pay to drink overpriced watered down Bud Lite while watching it.
In any case, that makes this the final edition of Inappropriate Walk Up Music. Shed a tear, if the mood moves you. Do I have some enormous climax for you to mark this momentous, bittersweet end?
Um, no. Just three more songs. Sorry.
But I will have a full list of all of the Inappropriate Walk Up Songs tomorrow, listed in alphabetical order by artist. Why that way? Because that’s how I’ve always organized my albums, even when I was a kid. How else would you do it, you maniacs?!
Without further ado, the end.
* “Bicycle Race”, Queen The Wife spun this tune on the House Stereo yesterday, after hearing it on a classic rock station. I know I’ve heard this song many times before, but the true weirdness of it never really struck me before. Wow, this is bizarre–even when judged against the scale of Queen’s other mock-operatic work.
I also considered “Body Language”, which is just as weird and a much worse song. But “Body Language” doesn’t have a video in which tons of naked people ride bikes.
* “Fingertips”, They Might Be Giants I may be cheating here, because this isn’t one song per se. It’s 21 separate minitracks on Apollo 18. A couple of them break the 20 second mark, and one is over a minute, butmost range between 5 and 12 seconds. Apparently, TMBG wanted you to employ the shuffle function on your CD player, so the listener would hear lots of tiny non sequiturs in between the “real” songs. But I loved to listen to “Fingertips” as one long miniature opera of weirdness. And I have a feeling most people who bought the album listened to it in the same way. And this is my stupid feature anyway. So screw it, it’s one song.
I remember listening to “Fingertips” repeatedly, at the expense of the rest of the album. Some tracks cracked me up so much that I had to hear them over and over, so I made sure I was near the CD player so I could hit the back button and not have one mini-song polluted by the sound of another (I think I’ve mentioned I’m a dork, right?).
A lot of the goofier TMBG material falls into the “I was 13 and a dork when I loved this” category, but think this holds up well. What’s great about it is that each mini-song sounds like an excerpt of a longer tune, yet you can’t imagine them being any longer. “What’s That Blue Thing Doing Here” still makes me laugh (and those are all the lyrics, right there). And “I Walk Along Darkened Corridors” is probably the best song Morrissey never wrote.
* “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory”, Johnny Thunders Good way to close out this list: Wistful and hopeless. Kinda like Johnny Thunders. Peep this video for a rare clip of Johnny singing in tune and remembering all the lyrics.
For previous Inappropriate Walk Up Music posts, 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:
* “Wonder Woman”, Attila When I revealed my shameful, bygone love for Billy Joel yesterday, The Wife reminded me that The Piano Man was once in a prog rock band called Attila. What does it sound like? Exactly what you think Billy Joel belting out prog rock would sound like, pretty much.
If you find this tune tasty, peep this post at WFMU’s blog, which features some other choice cuts from their 1970 self-titled album–including an instrumental called “Brain Invasion” which sounds like Mr. Joel trying to write music for the Atari 2600.
* “Sneaker Night”, Vanessa Hudgens FOT Emma added this to the ongoing discussion of Worst Song Ever, and I had to share it here. Maybe not the worst song ever, but seriously some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard: “Are you ready? Did you eat? Do you have the energy?…Don’t want you passin’ out af-ter a couple-a hours a piece…” It sounds like it was written by a 12-year-old who has no idea of rhythm or meter, then shoehorned into a beat that was already done. Music for the thoroughly undiscriminating, cadence-challenged High School Musical teenybopper set.
* “Big Yellow TaxI”, Joni Mitchell (or any of its 7000 cover versions) For reasons chronicled here.
As promised yesterday, I’ve compiled a complete list of all the Inappropriate Walk Up Songs. This should prove useful to those of you who need to settle arguments in bars, or as a handy crib sheet on your next midterm exam. Enjoy!