Click here to view the embedded video.

Thank you to Bryan for posting a biscuited video for Daft Punk right below this. Cause the most interesting music conversation going on right now is how these two brand new and absolutely brilliant albums of 2013 relate to each other. The conversation’s as interesting as anything about Madmen, G.O.T, or the stupid IRS. Join the fun and download these albums immediately. And happy Memorial Day all my loved ones!!!

My favorite lyric of the year: “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth.” Fuck Ezra Koenig for saying true things like that. But also thank you for my favorite expression of the year: “What you on about?”

Now go find a way to use it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*although certain friends and I refer to it as the love-frog.

When we had our first kid — lo, these almost nineteen years ago — we learned pretty quickly that most media produced for children in this era is toxic to adults. Nickelodeon shows, Disney Channel, inane computer animated features or, worse, live action films of dogs with computer animated mouths. No thanks.

When other parents would complain to me about the horrible music they had to endure in the car — I never could get down with that Wiggles shit or whatever it was called — I would give them a stern talking to: Jesus gave us the Beatles, I told them, so that parents would never have to listen to that garbage, and so kids didn’t grow up with stunted aesthetic sensibilities. Even if your kids won’t listen to anything else you own, they’ll listen to the Beatles.

Fast forward to kid number three. His sisters are pretty much all grown up, and though they spent many years listening to the Beatles and grew up with a Beatles poster on their wall that I’d purchased for my room when I was a kid, they’ve settled into their own musical tastes. And number three, who likes to sit in the back seat controlling the iPod plugged into the dash, is a little bit of a Beatles fascist. It’s about to drive us all insane.

He’ll listen only to the Beatles. Nothing else. (As I type this he’s on another computer in the same room, watching Beatles fan videos on YouTube.) And for the longest while it was only Yellow Submarine.

Of all the songs to get stuck on, “Yellow Submarine” is probably one of the most mind-numbing in the group’s repertoire. Try listening to it for months on end, time after time, to the point that you have every lyric, every bit of orchestration memorized. It starts to appear in your dreams, which take on psychedelic hues. (“Dad,” he calls from the computer across the room, where he has a search window open. “How do spell ‘yellow submarine’?”) You might drop him off at nursery school, get back in the car, and drive halfway home before you realize it’s still on. It colonizes your brain to the point that you fear that your aesthetic sensibilities will be stunted. Suddenly the smugness I used to display to other parents — just play the Beatles! — has returned to haunt me. The Beatles are the enemy. And to make matters worse, the kid’s older sister has turned against him. Thirteen years different in age, they fight over the car stereo. (“UGH! I can’t listen to ‘Yellow Submarine’ another time,” she howls.)

To survive, I’ve developed a few strategies. One was to find alternate versions. This one, from the first season of Sesame Street, helped quite a bit. If you know Sesame as well as I do — see above about the three kids bit, and did I mention I run a vintage Sesame Tumblr? — you can make out the voices: Henson, Oz, and Spinney. It’s unusual to hear them all together like this. Think about how much fun this must have been to make:

It’s better than the original. But it will only keep you sane for so long. Then I started focusing on the album’s later tracks, the film score, which really are the record’s saving grace. These provided me with an excuse to talk to the kid about orchestras — to listen for specific instruments, to match the score’s sequences to the film’s action, to find the right words to describe the mood being invoked. But that has its limits too: how many times does any of us want to think of new words to describe the sound of the blue meanies on the hunt?

Eventually I realized that I would have to use each new occasion of listening to “Yellow Submarine” as an opportunity to cultivate mindfulness. I breathe. I meditate. Or I pretend I’m listening to WFMU, maybe a conceptual piece by Kenny G in which he plays “Yellow Submarine” over and over for his entire show. I can usually handle it that way: the zen of FMU. I try to find that sky of blue and sea of green deep in my own consciousness.

If all else fails, I turn the song into cosmic allegory. The car we’re driving in becomes the yellow submarine. The body becomes the yellow submarine. The family unit becomes the yellow submarine. The human condition becomes the yellow submarine. In the town where we’re born we encounter old men who’ve been to sea, and they tell us of their lives in the land of submarines. But then the chorus kicks in and *surprise*! We’ve all been living in a yellow submarine all along. Are we trying to get to the land of submarines or have we been kidnapped and hauled there against our will? Is the land of submarines adulthood? But before you know it, the entrance to the parking garage has come into view. Breathe. You’re home. It will start all over again, of course, as soon as you’re upstairs and in your apartment. Breathe. Zen. Take a good look at this little Beatles fascist, singing his guts out. And — poof! it’s true! — you may be living beneath the waves, but you’ll realize that the land of submarines is a perfectly fine place to be.
 

I’m an absolute shark in these waters, because usually when I’m getting on a train, I’m going to be there a good long time, and I want a window seat so I can 1) lean against the window when it’s time to sleep, which isn’t comfortable but should be, and 2) more easily plug my phone in since no matter how many books I bring, all I ever do on a train trip is read the Harper’s Index, do the Times puzzle, and then sink into the spiritual quicksand of the smartphone FOREVER.

Lately, there’s another factor that finds me cutting off the elderly and disabled to make sure I’m near the front of the clumpy non-line thing that forms around the beleaguered gate agent. It is the quiet car I speak of. (And then I speak no more.)

The Times had an article about the quiet car, or maybe I should go ahead and capitalize it: The Quiet Car. The regrettable pull quote that makes everyone who rides The Quiet Car seem like Roderick Usher or the alternate universe librarian version of Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life, by association: “Respecting shared public space is becoming as quaintly archaic as tipping your hat to a lady, now that the concept of public space is as nearly extinct as hats, and ladies.” Does anybody still wear a hat? But truly. Respecting public space is not that mousy a thing to wish for.

I love quiet. Well, I just like it sometimes. I like being able to have it. I think what has happened is that I live in a city where much of your day is spent in situations where there can be no reasonable expectation of existing in your own soundspace, so I’ve basically gotten completely psychotic about something I was originally just a little uptight about.

The sound of bachata from a leaky pair of headphones that overrides my own musical choices at this point spurs bloody fantasies in me. I spend absurd sums at the 2-3 restaurants in my neighborhood that don’t have a television playing sports at all times. Every time I walk out the doors at the end of the long echoing tunnel out of my subway station, I feel like the chorus of prisoners in Fidelio who are released and see the sunlight for the first time in, well, ok, in this case 45 minutes. (Oh, whatever. I hate Fidelio.)

Part of the problem is that there’s a, to me, counterintuitive social contract that you can’t say anything because you don’t want to stop anyone from banging their own fucking drum. I broke this contact once. A guy was riding an uncrowded C train with me and had his music playing through his phone’s speaker. I said, in as honeyed a tone as I could muster “do you have any headphones?” He turned a deadish, hateful gaze on me and said “could you knit somewhere else?” It’s times like these when I wish I were 6’2″ and not knitting a dainty lace-pattern cravat and people had at least some fear that I might kick their ass.

Like the Times columnist, I recently got shooshed on the Quiet Car. I wasn’t using my cell phone, but I struck up a quiet conversation with the woman beside me. Quiet conversation is a Quiet Car grey area, it seems to me. I guess what I looked like to the shoosher was those people on my subway line that I always give a futile withering glare* and to whom I want to say “she’s sitting right next to you. I think she can hear you fine without you should yell.” Quiet is relative.

You begin to wonder what behavior runs absolutely no shoosh risk. Knitting needles occasionally click, and I’ve come to suspect I am not the world’s quietest chewer. I said to the person I was shooshed with, “do you mind if I eat here?” and she said “of course not!” like I was slightly nuts, which I took to mean she on the Quiet Car but not of the Quiet Car. This turned out to be true. She had sat there because there were no seats elsewhere.

It turns out to be ok to be shooshed on the Quiet Car. It’s reassuring really, because then you can tell yourself you’re just someone who likes a little rest from the noise of the city and not a total quiet fundamentalist and OMG I kind of left off in the middle of a sentence I was typing at work and then came home on an A train where a guy was playing (standing up!) the Bach cello suites which, don’t get me wrong, I’ve known and loved since I was in high school but SHUT UP I WANT TO LISTEN TO THE NEW VAMPIRE WEEKEND. It’s not about quiet. It’s about choice. That didn’t totally make sense or loop back to the Quiet Car, but it sounded like a conclusion so let’s call it a blog entry!

*I am afraid I have built up such muscle in my withering glare that when I move to California, where everyone isn’t wholly inured to anything short of gunfire, it may kill people.