The full title is “Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой,” which I believe translates into something like “A Gleeful Prayer From The Soaring Alter-Ego of Lurch the Butler.”

Update: Apparently there is a domain dedicated to serving this single song: trololololololololololo.com

I got more stories than J.D’s got Salinger
I hold the title and you are the challenger.

Beastie Boys, “Shadrach”

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Beastie Boys, “Shadrach”

By sheer/mere coincidence, just stumbled across rocketboom’s excellent hagiography on the history and mystery of auto-tune, which amounts to the use and abuse of an audio-editing software plugin in genres of tunage to which I have no exposure. The sound is pretty cool, but beware – the meme is apparently now so old that it’s already dead, so this confessional post is definitely uncool.

Begrudging thanks to Weird Al Yankovic for helping to illuminate.

Know Your Meme: Auto Tune (featuring “Weird Al” Yankovic) from Rocketboom on Vimeo.

In the 30 years since the Stooges recorded “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” the song has been covered by a variety of other artists, including Uncle Tupelo, Joan Jet [sic.] and Sonic Youth (“Weird Al” Yankovic even paid tribute, with the parody “Let Me Be Your Hog”). But perhaps the most unexpected—and entertaining— version is this short film by Georgie Greville.

Would Iggy approve?

There’s a barn burning, baby
No I can’t say who’s to blame
No one knows who did it, baby
And you’d best not ask my name.

I can’t listen to Dave Alvin’s King of California without thinking about the fascinating book of the same name by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. The King of California explains how a family of relocated cotton farmers from Georgia maneuvered to build one of the world’s largest agriculture enterprises in the world in California’s Central Valley. Often operating under the radar, the Boswells wielded such power that they were able to make rivers run backward and drain to dust Tulare Lake, which had been the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. The “king” of the book’s title, J.G. Boswell, who passed away earlier this year, was a study in contradictions: a rugged individualist who grew his empire with government subsidies; an agricultural visionary who displaced scores of family farmers; a Stanford man who lost two fingers in a cattle roping accident. He’d make a great subject for a Dave Alvin song.

Dave Alvin, “Fourth of July”

Dave Alvin, “Barn Burning”

Dave Alvin, “King of California”

Today’s online music stores do their best to reproduce that spirit of discovery. Databases and their associative algorithms are able to emulate some of the connective cartilage – and even to strengthen it – but they don’t come close to duplicating the visceral experience of suddenly finding yourself staring at the absolutely unexpected, the cover art that came out of nowhere and clobbered you upside the head with some kind of jaw-dropping amazingness – amazing beauty, amazing camp, sexy stuff your 13-year-old brain wasn’t quite ready for, graphical styles you had never seen the likes of, stuff that crossed the lines of social acceptability, etc. And then there was the stuff that was just so banal it was painful — in a good way.

Thankfully, some of that cover art is being diligently digitized and archived for generations of kids that may never have the experience we did. Utne Reader:

Matthew Glass has been collecting records for the better part of four decades. In a his Manhattan living space he has a “record room” where 10,000 records live. Framed records are his wall art. For years he sold records at the flea market on 24th Street. There are times in his life when he was frequently bringing records home by the box. None of this would surprise you if you were to spend a single short second on LP Cover Lover, the website where he posts strange record covers in daily batches. He’s got a camera on a tripod in his record room and he is forever pulling records, photographing them, and posting them to his site, which boasts a comprehensive collection of “the world’s greatest LP album covers.”

Everyone was in on the action – even pharmaceutical companies:

There was no shortage of cover art on the sexy side, playing with what was at some point in history considered “edgy” but now just appears dumb/sexist (but sometimes endearing anyway):

I have a soft spot in my heart for records specifically designed to show off your new stereo hi-fi system. Dad had records like “Sounds of Sebring” (30 minutes of race cars going around a track, bouncing back and forth between your headphone-clad ears) and “Ping Pong Percussion,” which was basically the same concept, applied to timpani.

Also: Feast your eyes on a spectacular pair, experience music for chubby lovers browse an entire category devoted to big heads. Much much more at LP CoverLover.

(or was that Hairway to Steven?) But the sad truth is that your luxury spending coffers have been vacuumed dry after years of gambling in credit default swaps, and an iPhone probably isn’t in your future. Bad investor! No ocarina! But wait… even in these lean times, hope remains. You don’t need an iPhone to play the ocarina! Just grab a healthy stalk of organic broccoli, carve out a few holes, tune it up and let ‘er rip.

“Ah!” you say, “It’s true I took out a badly structured sub-prime mortgage, and yes, it’s true that my collateralized debt obligations have sucker-punched my liquidity risk… but it’s not true that I want to play the ocarina.” Fair enough. Sounds like the cucumber trumpet might be more up your alley:

Pinched capital flow? Try the radish slide whistle. Negative equity? The Welsh onion flute might be the instrument for you.

Underwritten securitization? Go blow an ostrich egg. Submarined by the shadow banking system? Try your hand at the cabbage slide flute.

Despite a dearth of regulatory responses or substantial loss mitigation guidance, you can have your ocarina and eat it too. iPhone be damned.