Warning: foul language, juvenile humor, possible misogyny, and terrible sound quality. The song is called "Girl," and it is from fall, 1989, just a couple months into my college experience, recorded in the excruciatingly awful sounding method of tape-to-tape dubbing, which is what I used from 1987 or so through spring 1991.
This was my first collaboration of any sort with Steve Petrinko, whose MayTricks material has appeared in this blog before. I should say that due to its foulness, Steve has been against this ever seeing the light of day, despite his bitchin' guitar-solo and "bitch"-saying little sampling keyboard that we used. It was also my first, though very knocked off, co-writing effort, and I find it amusing that even for this piece of drivel, I was egotistic enough that I remember very clearly who wrote which lyric lines and felt the need to point that out whenever I would play this for anyone so that the lyrically inferior parts wouldn't be attributed to me. I will resist doing so now.
If someone wants to post a comment re. the line between humor and misogyny, be my guest. Later, in 1997 or so, I wrote (purely in my head; no tape was stained by this idea that I recall) an Elvis-ripoff song called "Rape My Life," which has irritatingly never left my memory. The joke of that song was that it was the opposite of euphemistic, meaning that whereas a euphemism expresses something offensive in less offensive terms that might not even be recognized as offensive by innocent parties, this song was making a bland, unoffensive point (about changing ones life for the better) by using over-the-top, needlessly offensive language. One of the verses went like this: "I want to rape my life, want to do it in the eyes; I want to f*#% that skull 'till it's paralyzed. I want to rape my life. I want to rape my life. I don't need a gun, I don't need a knife, I'm the man, I'm the one, I want to rape my life." (Procedural point: it's OK to say "fuck" in a blog post, but not when it's next to the word "skull.") My wife pretty much cried (not in a good way) when I sang it at her, even with my explanation of the subtle and complex humor involved, so away it went until now. Lucky fucking you.
Some technical crap: This was digitized from cassette with some processing back in 1994. My work on this just now was applying my bitchin' noise reduction plugin-in to it after bouncing it (along with a dozen other old recordings, some of which showed digital glitches and things) from my decrepit DAT machine, which I purchased in 1993 and looks like this:
It apparently no longer rewinds, so I need to open the little tapes and spool them back by hand (well, with a little screwdriver, actually). Luckily, most of my master mixes (I used this as the mix destination all the way up through 1998.) have already long since been bounced to PC (the DAT is digital storage, so it's just a matter of transferring the data, though you still have to actually play the tape while hitting "record" on the PC program), but I still have a small shelf of these tapes. I actually keep the DAT machine in my active stereo setup as a pass-through digital-analog converter for listening back to my computer and sometimes for digitizing cassettes; it's not strictly necessary, but it's convenient, and it doesn't require that the machine be able to rewind.
[…] my case–as should be obvious if you read back into the history of my music blog posts here, like this one–I hoard every little thing I’ve ever worked on.) So there’s some little pressure […]