Warped 0.1

Written by Jackie Day & The Go All-Nighters Monday, 16 February 2009 01:33

"Put on your pretty red dress – let's go see about this mess."

- Hank Ballard

I really hope she liked that Pipettes record.

After writing the above statement, like so many other ultimately hopeless and scatterbrained authors, I only now realize its significance. See technically, I shouldn't really be giving a damn as to whether or not she liked that record, We Are The Pipettes, the staggeringly 60s Go-Go girlie-pop altar call of 2008. Heck, she wasn't even buying it for herself – it was a birthday present for that boyfriend of hers: Josh, or Jared, who was in medical school with her, or who maybe was a deadbeat, or maybe who I had just hoped was a deadbeat.

But if the future me came back in time to grill me on all the codswallop I've put out in my lifetime, I don't think I could say to my future self that, when I met her somewhere in between Rows "C" and "M", and I found out she was buying records for that boyfriend, that my inner-self wasn't trying to cash every last "Redeem This Ticket For Instant Cool" voucher that it had on its person. Of course Mr. Inner-self , to its predictable and utter shock, grasped at empty pockets – and in a moment of desperation, coaxed me to dive for the familiar glow of that canary yellow record cover adorned with the visage of three pixieish pale-skinned Brit girls.

Granted there were records before that one that I pointed out to her, those records that I only pulled out halfway from the stacks so that she could make out the name of the band on the cover. "This one's solid", I would say, "It's the Clientele's latest album. I hadn't heard of them before I read about them on *ambiguously reliable, but religiously elitist* website, but yeah, its really...um, cool."

Those records didn't matter though – they were only filler to the big finish. I had been given that chance, through brave bounds in conversation on my part, to help choose some records for Josh or Jared's birthday, but you know that it's really going to be the parting album, that one album before you part ways, that's going to stick the landing, and write the little Cliff Notes blurb next to your picture in that person's mind – or in this case – her mind.

So there I was – forever emblazoned in a soft-eyed nursing assistant's consciousness as the guy who recommended wholeheartedly she absorb what could easily be mistaken as the British music industry's attempt to euthanize the remaining limbs of the Spice Girls with a retro-borne replacement. She was  to go on back to the deadbeat, and I went back to being a deadbeat.

I suppose a bit of that story sinks into a bit of every other I've had in the dark, dank underground of collecting and listening to actual records – or music of any form for that matter.

I mean honestly: How many times have you been assaulted by a friend with an album and a song that they thought was the freaking 6th Scroll of the book of Revelation, only for you to listen to intently, maybe even a number of times, yet still make no significant connection to it? No one is immune, and it's happened to you and to I more times than we can probably remember, whether we desire it or not.