Monday Music: the vague stab at Europop/the shadow of the past edition

Because Safiya has been on my case about this (she’s been on my case about lots of things, which is nice of her), this Monday Music edition will feature some electronic and not so electronic Euro-poppery. With special thanks to Helen.

Starry Eyed (Jakwob remix) – Ellie Goulding
Triangle Walks (Rex the Dog remix) – Fever Ray
Only You – Yaz
Saturday Night – Stray & Grass
Take On Me – a-ha
Halcyon & on & on – Orbital
Sash! – La Primavera
LDN – Lily Allen
Despre Tine – O-Zone
Lollipop – Mika

I need to give you some background on “Halcyon & on & on.” I’m not going to talk about how it’s a remix and stuff. You can find all that information on Wikipedia (and while Wiki doesn’t feature my cleavage in the banner, it more than makes up for it in other ways, ha). I need to tell you about a certain point in time that this song was the soundtrack for.

One night, at a party, me and my friends decided to take off and drive to this guy’s beach house on this obscure island on the coast. We got lost maybe 25 times [citation needed] on the way there. The darkness was immense. I kept trying to nap and couldn’t, because the situation felt like a set-up for the most gratuitous made-for-TV horror film of all time. The guys kept saying stuff like – ” and now we’re going to turn this corner, and it will be a dead end, and there will be a chanting mob carrying torches and stuff” – and I kept screaming at them to stop.

When we finally made it to the beach house, the night was ending. The ocean waves were like little cat-tongues. We smoked, and took turns freestyling, which I actually joined in that one time, albeit in Russian (so no one could tell if I was Andre Nickatina or Vanilla Ice), and as I looked out onto the water and the moon doing whatever it that it was doing (you can never tell with the moon, is it rising? Is it setting?), I put on my headphones and listened to Orbital. And the less night there was left, the more I realized that I was falling in love.

It was, I think, the happiest morning of my life. It was completely random, and nothing epic even happened, unless you count an alleged “battle between a dolphin and some sharks” which I’d missed anyway. But there it was.

Life is in a wholly different chapter right now, a chapter I think I’ll title “WHAT THE SHIT & WHO STOLE MY TABASCO” in my memoirs, and in keeping with that theme, and the theme of this post in general, here’s Erika:

Speaking of classics, here’s Techno Viking (yes, I know that’s not POP music, whatever):

I’ve always believed that the Techno Viking should run for European Parliament. Maybe he still will. The days now are short. Either our hope cometh, or all hopes end.