The trial of “#musicMonday” recommendations being worth even short posts here is over; thanks for playing. New weekly recommendations, for the time being, are back on Twitter only.

Your recommendation this week: the 2004 self-titled EP from 50 Foot Wave (listen on Rdio or Spotify). This hard-rocking band includes a couple former members of Throwing Muses: Kristin Hersh and Bernard Georges.

Pitchfork says: “Truck-collision guitars and flayed screams scrape over a pounding rhythm section, and the lyrics that make it to the surface either sound pissed off or grotesque (sample truism: “Bones were made to be broken.")”

It’s great power-trio stuff, and you can preview it on Rdio or Spotify, as usual. Or, you can just download all their music for free from their website, http://50footwave.cashmusic.org/ (get the self-titled EP I’m recommending, plus several others, in one big zipfile from this page.) It’s not only all free, it’s actually Creative Commons licensed (by-nc-sa): “Share This Music. Please repost, podcast, burn it for friends, burn it for your enemies, USE it. Thank you in advance for your time, energy and enthusiasm.”

Standout track on 50 Foot Wave: “Clara Bow”. Rock on.

This week’s recommendation: the 1987 debut album from Sinéad O’Connor, The Lion and The Cobra (listen on Rdio or Spotify).

Before the dramatic stare-and-cry-into-the-camera video, before ripping up papal pictures on SNL, before becoming an ordained priest of the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, before all that nonsense, this amazing young singer shaved her head and made an album of powerful, beautiful music that’s hard to file into a particular genre. There’s not a bad song on here, and as much as I love “Troy”, the standout track for me is the very first, the haunting “Jackie”.

Another Brian Phillips Grantland post worth its weight in gold, Stop Making Sense. As always with Phillips' writing – and I never use words like “always” lightly – the whole thing is worth your time. But basking in the afterglow of the final, and turning a brave face to the next four bleak World-Cup-less years, the passage below sums it up perfectly (note that it was written on July 3, just before the quarterfinals; thus “Germany-France on Friday”, “next 10 days”, etc.).

Every World Cup does one thing better than any other event that human beings organize. It focuses the attention of the world on one place at one moment. Around a billion people watched at least part of the final in 2010; that’s several Super Bowls. When a game becomes so ubiquitous, it almost ceases to be entertainment and becomes something else, an atmospheric phenomenon, an object of astronomy. Will more people watch Germany-France on Friday or see the moon over France and Germany? Only the Olympics brings people together like this, and hey, due respect to the Olympics. But oh man is it ever not the same thing.

And this, even more than neuron-blowing games or unbelievable outcomes, is the magic of the World Cup. Over the next 10 days, a substantial portion of the living population of the Earth will have its feelings altered simultaneously by the actions of 22 men chasing a ball around a field in Brazil. Whether you watch alone or in a group or at a stadium, you will know that what you are seeing is being seen by hundreds of millions of people on every corner of the globe, and that your joy, despair, or disbelief is being echoed in incomprehensibly many consciousnesses. Is there anything more ridiculous than this? There is nothing more ridiculous than this, but it’s an extraordinary feeling, too. When something incredible happens — Messi curls a ball around three defenders; Zidane head-butts Materazzi — it’s not just an exciting moment. It’s a bright line connecting you with the human race.

People call soccer “the world’s game”, and it’s kind of a cliché, but it’s also pretty much actually true.

I read a (typically) great post by Brian Phillips on Grantland recently, a Brazil World Cup travelogue but with Brian’s (typical) brilliant outlook: Train in Vain. Lots of good stuff in there about the national character of the country, its history, and some of the problems faced there, in light of hosting the largest sporting spectacle in the world. I recommend reading the whole thing, but the following philosophical aside really struck me.

Think of it this way: Almost every other sport tries to be exciting by augmenting human capability in some way (football pads, baseball bats, tennis rackets) or at least by perfecting it (agile giants flying toward an NBA rim). Soccer diminishes capability. Instead of making athletes superhuman, it gives them an extra problem to contend with: no hands. When a soccer player scores, she’s overcoming not just her opponents but also the absurd demand of the game itself, which tells her to be agile and then takes away the tools of her agility.

If you think of it that way, can you understand the appeal that soccer has offered to billions of people? It exploded among the poor in so many colonized countries in part, of course, because it required so little equipment. But that can’t be the only reason. A soccer player is essentially belittled by the universe. But he outwits the universe. He grins at his ridiculous problem and overcomes it through grace and guile. Soccer is the beautiful game partly because it makes beauty seem so unlikely, seem virtually impossible, and then gives players just enough freedom to do something beautiful anyway. In its best moments — which don’t happen often, which don’t occur even in every match, and which are therefore to be savored — soccer is ballet breaking out of an enforced clumsiness.

This week’s recommendation: the first full-length album from the Welsh indie-pop band Los Campesinos!, 2008’s Hold On Now, Youngster… (listen on Rdio or Spotify). Lots of good songs (and great titles), but the standout track I’ll point to is “We Are All Accelerated Readers”.

This band’s clever, literate lyrics are delivered by his & hers counterpoint vocals, on top of snappy – almost manic – musical arrangements. And okay, I can see where they might be a little overly twee ("adjective, Brit., chiefly derogatory; excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental"), but if you don’t hate them, you’ll love them.

A runner-up for standout would be “…And We Exhale And Roll Our Eyes In Unison”, and the ending lines, their build-up, the delivery, it’s just perfect indie pop.

And woe is me And woe is you And woe is us Together

The World Cup starts this week in Brazil (finally!), and there’s lots of music to go with it. But this week’s Music Monday recommendation won’t include any official (or unofficial) songs by Shakira, Pitbull, or J.Lo. Instead, I’ll point you to the 2007 self-titled debut by Brazilian singer/songwriter Céu (listen on Rdio or Spotify). Standout track: “Roda”:

If you watch much World Cup action, especially any games featuring the Brazil national team, you’ll probably see fans in stereotypical Brazilian get-ups (women in bikinis and big Carnival headdresses, etc.). This beautiful, down-tempo, tropical music is a good counterbalance to that one-dimensional view of the fifth largest country in the world. Yes, the lyrics are in Portuguese; no, you don’t have to understand a scrap of it to enjoy this trip to the Southern Hemisphere. So while you’re waiting for the next match to start, mute ESPN, make yourself a cold caipirinha, and put on Céu. Saude!

P.S. Okay, okay, if you still want some Shakira in your 2014 World Cup, and who can blame you, there’s always La La La.

This week: the 2006 debut from Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (listen on Rdio or Spotify). Though “Mardy Bum” and “Dancing Shoes” are a couple of my favorites, the standout track has to be their breakthrough single, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”:

Featuring crisp, rollicking rock with high-speed vocals that are heavily British in both accent and wry humor, the album has come to be considered (per Wikipedia) one of the best rock albums of the decade (an NME poll from 2013 even puts it at number 19 of all time). Their subsequent albums haven’t been bad, and the 50s throwback look they’ve adopted make them a favorite on the Tumblr blogs of my daughter and her friends, but it’s this uncompromising debut that put the stake in the ground for a band so good that they could overcome a dumb name like “Arctic Monkeys”.

This week’s recommendation, an album I just bought last week: the latest from Warpaint, the self-titled Warpaint (listen on Rdio or Spotify). Standout track: “Biggy”.

Atmospheric, haunting, but with some edge & some texture to keep it from going down too easy. Wikipedia says, “Warpaint have been compared to Cocteau Twins, Joni Mitchell, and Siouxsie and the Banshees”, and quote NME describing their style as “Intermittently emerging from plaintive moods into harder rocking . . . expansive, lushly-harmonic psych-rock songs”.

This week’s recommendation: the Grateful Dead live album, Reckoning (listen on Rdio or Spotify). Standout track: “Jack-A-Roe”, their version of a 19th-century tale of cross-dressing and women in the military. Now, if you don’t really know the Dead, chances are you think of them as one of two things: the band behind the “drivin' that train, high on cocaine” song (aka “Truckin'"), or a jam band famous for half-hour psychedelic instrumentals in the middle of their concerts. And, okay, they were both of those things. But one overplayed radio hit and concert improv stamina do not a thirty-plus year career make. They also recorded lots (and I do mean lots) of other music, much of it just good, folk-inspired, almost-country-but-in-a-good-way, rock songs.

My recommendation here is the 1981 live album Reckoning. It doesn’t include either of their (in)famous jam tracks, though there is a 9-minute song, “To Lay Me Down” (a lovely snoozer that you are hereby permitted to skip). The rest is solid folk-rock, great for road trips and backyard barbecues.

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d take a stab at a quick music recommendation each Monday, hashtagged #musicmonday. Not “new” as in recently released, necessarily, but more like “new to you”. Or possibly not either of those, but maybe even just a pointer to some good music that you’d forgotten about.

The first five:

• 1st #musicmonday: Deltron 3030 http://open.spotify.com/album/2DjihrD64h6Yw5byJD6d6f not a big rap fan, but: a sci-fi concept album + humor = yes please thank you
  
  
• #musicmonday rec: The Cardigans' "Gran Turismo" http://open.spotify.com/album/4gNjfAA5axfUEBbHJoAKBO one standout track: "Erase/Rewind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkv_2fQ-OLU
  
  
• #musicmonday rec: Veruca Salt, "American Thighs" http://rd.io/x/QVkeQCJc8dM/ standout track has to be their hit "Seether" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC9AUR-iTo0
  
  
• #musicmonday rec: U2's first, "Boy" http://rd.io/x/QVkeQCJcKbE/ a bit 80s, but solid songs. standout: An Cat Dubh > Into the Heart > Out of Control
  
  
• #musicmonday rec: Massive Attack's "Mezzanine" http://rd.io/x/QVkeQCJcZgo/ standout track (and video): "Angel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbe3CQamF8k
  
  

I’ve been enjoying it, but the 140-character limit has kept me from adding more about why I like each recommendation, or what I like about it. Meanwhile, here’s this blog, with nothing much going on most of the time. . . so here we go (see next post for this week’s pick).

We are now less than 50 days from the start of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, and I just finished what might be the perfect book to get ready for the big event: Soccer in Sun and Shadow, by Eduardo Galeano (published as Football in Sun and Shadow in the UK).

The introduction includes a truly great line, one of my favorites, which I’ve seen reproduced in several other soccer books. After feeling guilty for wanting to cheer for the star players of Peñarol (Uruguayan arch-rivals of his own beloved Nacional), Galeano writes:

Years have gone by and I've finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: 'A pretty move, for the love of God.'

And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.

The whole book is similarly lyrical and charming. The structure is kind of unusual; it’s a chronological collection of short vignettes, many less than a page. Some are philosophical ruminations on the modern game vs the good old days, some vivid sketches of glorious individual goals and players, and others fascinating time capsules of current events surrounding every World Cup, from 1930 through 2002.

An example:

The Cicada and the Ant

In 1992, the singing cicada defeated the worker ant 2-0.

Germany and Denmark faced each other in the final of the European Championship. The German players were raised on fasting, abstinence and hard work, the Danes on beer, women and naps in the sun. Denmark had lost out in the qualifiers and the players were on holiday when war intervened and they were called urgently to take Yugoslavia’s place in the tournament. They had no time for training nor any interest in it, and had to make do without Michael Laudrup, a brilliant, happy and sure-footed player who had just won the European Cup wearing a Barcelona shirt. The German team, on the other hand, came to the final with Matthaus, Klinsmann and all the stars. Germany who ought to have won, was defeated by Denmark, who had nothing to prove and played as if the field were a continuation of the beach.

It’s great stuff; I highly recommend it. Get a copy from your local bookstore or Half.com, or get the ebook from Amazon or Apple.

And get ready for June, when we’ll see new stories of victory and loss, glory and defeat. And some pretty moves, too, for the love of God.

The whole business of Brendan Eich having to step down as CEO of Mozilla because of a prior political contribution (and an unwillingness to renounce said contribution), is just a real tragedy.

As Marco Arment summarized: “Ten days ago, Brendan Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO. But Eich previously funded anti-gay bigotry, which caused a huge public uproar. Three members even quit Mozilla’s board. Today, he’s out.”

I remember first hearing about that contribution of Eich’s, and being disappointed. Not that the laws on the books in California care one way or the other, but I didn’t agree with his opinion then, and I still don’t now.

Arment continues, in another post:

A hundred years ago, saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote was a “political view”. Now, that would be a ridiculous and highly offensive opinion regardless of what any religion or political party said on the topic. Most discriminating “political views” of this sort eventually become widely recognized as unacceptable, barbaric bigotry with no place in civilized society — it’s just a matter of time.

As much as gay-rights opponents would like to believe otherwise, that time has come for their “political views”.

Which sounds fine, but at the time of Eich’s political contribution, it was a “political view”, by definition. So I wonder: where, on Arment’s timeline of “political view” eventually transitioning to “unacceptable, barbaric bigotry” does the statute of limitations kick in? Yes, Eich had ample opportunity now, in 2014, to recant and acknowledge this change, and he didn’t do it, so it could be argued he hasn’t changed his view.

But I just can’t read his post, Inclusiveness at Mozilla, written during his very brief tenure as CEO, without being impressed by someone who sure doesn’t sound like he’d turn the organization into a hate-mongering monster or the Chik-fil-A of Internet technologies.

I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.

You will see exemplary behavior from me toward everyone in our community, no matter who they are; and the same toward all those whom we hope will join, and for those who use our products.

You should read all of it, it isn’t long.

There are two things that I keep coming back to. One is a Cincinnati City Council election, many years ago, in which one of the candidates fell prey to a whisper campaign that she was a lesbian. It was a close race, which she lost. Whether questions about her sexual orientation substantively affected that outcome, I don’t really know. But I do remember wondering, and arguing, ‘who cares?!’ What possible impact could her orientation have on whether she can serve in the job she was standing for? None. Absolutely none. (Thankfully our society is getting to the point now where more people realize that, even deep in the heart of reddest Texas.)

The comparison, I hope, is obvious. The difference is that Eich would indeed have been in a position, as CEO, to affect the Mozilla organization with his exclusionary views. But that was very publicly known, acknowledged, and disavowed clearly by him. Mozilla is a public, non-profit corporation [edit: not publicly-traded, actually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation with all profits reinvested into the Foundation], and you can bet your bottom dollar that the slightest “anti-gay” policy there would have been pounced upon (as it should be) by the board, by other employees, by the community. But we could have waited to see if and when that ever happened, rather than pre-judging, jumping to the conclusion that it definitely would happen.

The second thing to consider here is, this is Brendan frickin' Eich we’re talking about here. The guy who created JavaScript (yes, warts and all, he’s long been the first to admit), a guy who helped create Mozilla in the first place. Kids today can use Chrome and take the state of the open web for granted, but this outcome was far from assured in the early 2000s. The guy has literally dedicated his career to foundational technologies that make modern-day life what it is. And not just in the past, but right up until his resignation: running Mozilla, speaking, working on ECMAScript 6, etc.

(An aside: with all due empathy (or as much as I can honestly claim from outside their experience), and I get the point he’s making, but for the guy at Rarebit, a company founded to make web apps for the Mozilla Marketplace, to say “He actively took steps to ensure that rarebit couldn’t exist!” goes beyond hyperbolic and into the realm of plain old asinine.)

Here’s how Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic and cofounder of Netscape, put it on Twitter the other day:

Javascript in browser became BY FAR most widely used programming language in human history. Breathtaking achievement. Beyond amazing.

Years later, after Netscape/AOL and AOL/TimeWarner mergers, Brendan called me to see if I could help free Mozilla into a nonprofit.

I called Jim Barksdale who was on AOL-TW board; with Jim’s help, Mitchell Baker and Brendan successfully established Mozilla Foundation.

This was an unnatural act for a big company, could have easily not happened. Mitchell and Brendan made it happen, redefined web again.

So, if you like your browser, your Firefox, and/or your Javascript, whatever your political beliefs, you owe Brendan a debt of gratitude.

I’m not saying that influential or famous people should get a free pass on owning the consequences of their words or actions. But here are the two sides of the scales as I see them: on one side is a giant of the tech industry who has contributed so much in so many ways that it’s hard to even quantify, and who wants to increase his level of contribution even further. On the other side, there is one ultimately ineffective political contribution made six years ago.

But, wait. That’s not actually all that’s on the second side. There’s also the righteous indignation of OKCupid and a horde of other angry Internet villagers. Ultimately, inevitably, their weight was too much.

I’ll end with some words from the Andrew Sullivan post that really got me thinking about all this:

When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance. If a socially conservative private entity fired someone because they discovered he had donated against Prop 8, how would you feel? It’s staggering to me that a minority long persecuted for holding unpopular views can now turn around and persecute others for the exact same reason. If we cannot live and work alongside people with whom we deeply disagree, we are finished as a liberal society.

Time again for my annual best-of music review! As in the past, here’s the introductory explanation from my 2011 post, copied & pasted for your convenience:

A couple years ago, I started doing my own personal "best of the year" selections in iTunes. It's easy to make an iTunes smart playlist that includes all the tracks added during the calendar year. Just set "Date Added", "is in the range", and pick the dates (I also add rules to exclude some tracks, like audiobooks, podcasts, etc.).

I use “date added” rather than “year”, so my selections are based on music that I bought during the year, regardless of when it was originally released. If I discover an old artist or pick up an old album years later, then so be it. Also, I buy full albums only; I never buy just single tracks. And so that’s what I pick 10 favorites of: albums.

Here are my 2013 selections, in alphabetical order by artist. I’ll pick the top 10, but I won’t order them down to a number one, sorry. The links are to Wikipedia, and a playlist of these albums (minus Giant Drag) is on Spotify.

The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, Neko Case - Neko Case’s latest holds up every bit as well as 2009’s Middle Cyclone. It has a few less-great tracks, but is mostly solid, with some real standouts (“Man” and the seriously intense “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu”). Her performance at the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival was great, even if Atoms For Peace were drowning out the quieter moments from across the park. If you have a chance to see her live, take it.

Waking Up Is Hard To Do, Giant Drag – The last album by this band, made up mostly (entirely?) of the very odd and very funny Annie Hardy, was 2005’s Hearts and Unicorns. This new release is more eclectic and less rockin', but there’s hardly a bad song on it. Unfortunately, as of this writing, her indie label doesn’t seem to have a deal with Spotify or Rdio, so you won’t find it there.

There’s Always Another Girl, Juliana Hatfield – I’ve never been a big fan of Juliana Hatfield’s solo work, though I loved Blake Babies and Some Girls. I don’t remember how I came across this, but it’s similar to Some Girls' music, and I really liked it. It even prompted me to back her followup this year on PledgeMusic. The result, Wild Animals, was unfortunately not nearly as good.

Wolf’s Law, The Joy Formidable – Man, do I love Joy Formidable. Their last CD, 2011’s The Big Roar, was on my top-10 list last year, and this new one is every bit as good. I had the good fortune to see them live three times in 2013: a free mini SXSW show at Waterloo Records, a headlining show at Emo’s (with IO Echo; see Best of the Rest, below), and a great festival set at ACLFest. They’re just fantastic live, and live up to both words in their name; I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Wed 21, Juana Molina – A late entry, which I didn’t pick up until the end of the year, but an easy choice for a favorite from this year. Unique, beautiful, haunting music, as her previous albums have all been, but with fewer slightly-too-weird-to-be-listenable tracks. Yes, the lyrics are mostly in Spanish, but it’s so ethereal you’ll hardly notice. The video for “Eras” is more toward the creepy end of the spectrum than most of these songs, but has a visual style that matches the eccentricity of the music really well.

Silence Yourself, Savages – The post-punk sound of this band manages to keep the power that sound had when it was new, without being diluted by seeming too throwback. It’s serious, darkly intense music, but I can still listen to the whole thing over and over again. I was able to see them at ACLFest, too. They’re not a band you’d expect to see on a hot, sunny stage at midday, but they more than held their own, black clothes from head to toe be damned.

Apocryphon, The Sword – I’d never heard of this Austin-area heavy metal band before I happened to buy a six-pack of Iron Swan Ale, their Real Ale tribute beer. I thought the prog-rock design and imagery were a hoot, and only later discovered there was an actual band that unapologetically and unironically rocks that same imagery in their music. I don’t have much metal in my library, but something about songs like “Eyes of the Stormwitch”, “The Chronomancer”, and “The Veils of Isis” works for me.

The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, Talking Heads – I’ve had just about every Talking Heads album for years, including the great live album Stop Making Sense, but somehow had never known about the existence of this one. It’s a double album, and it’s long (a little over 2.5 hours), so I admit that I don’t often listen to it from beginning to end. But nearly every one of these (33!) songs are really good versions; even titles I don’t care much for in their studio form are good here.

Sorry, White Lung – I think I heard about White Lung from the Sound Opinions podcast, but whoever tipped me off to them: thank you. Where Savages might be post-punk, White Lung is just plain punk-punk. A fast, angry, energetic ride, the album length stands in stark contrast to that huge Talking Heads entry above: 10 songs, 20 minutes, done. Great stuff; I’m looking forward to future releases.

Versions, Zola Jesus – When I first heard about this album, made up of previous songs arranged for string accompaniment, I was skeptical. I’m not usually a big fan of remixes and the like. But the source of most of these songs, 2011’s Conatus, was good enough to earn a spot on my top-10 last year, so I gave it a try. It’s fantastic. The orchestral sound transforms the songs entirely, in some cases possibly even making them (gasp!) better.

So those are my ten favorite “new” albums of 2013.

And then there are all the rest of the albums. Some are so good they were almost in the top ten (Janelle Monáe, Sleigh Bells), some are honestly barely worth saving from the delete key (Boss Hog, the aforementioned Wild Animals). But to complete my annual time capsule, I also make a playlist, ordered in painstaking mixtape order (not best-to-worst), of favorite single tracks from all of the year’s albums that didn’t make the best-album cut. This “Best of the Rest” is also a playlist on Spotify (minus the Juliana Hatfield track).

1. The Bomb — Bitter:Sweet (Drama)
2. Man Like That — Gin Wigmore (Man Like That EP)
3. Born For This — Paramore (Riot!)
4. Happy Now? — No Doubt (Tragic Kingdom)
5. Satellite Mind — Metric (Fantasies)
6. Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay) — Sky Ferreira (Night Time, My Time)
7. Another Girl — Wild Belle (Isles)
8. Lights — Ellie Goulding (Lights)
9. Tiananmen Square — IO Echo (Ministry of Love)
10. Los Adolescentes — Denver (Música, Gramática, Gimnasia)
11. Parted Ways — Heartless Bastards (Arrow)
12. Young Man In America — Anaïs Mitchell (Young Man In America)
13. Tracks — Juliana Hatfield (Wild Animals)
14. Vuelve — Julieta Venegas (Los Momentos)
15. Coco — Astro (Nacional Records Amazon Sampler 2013)
16. Aura — Lady Gaga (Artpop)
17. Standing There — The Creatures (Boomerang)
18. Q.U.E.E.N. [feat. Erykah Badu] — Janelle Monáe (The Electric Lady)
19. Blackout — Anna Calvi (Anna Calvi)
20. Get It While You Wait — Boss Hog (Whiteout)
21. Price Tag — Jessie J (Who You Are)
22. Happily — One Direction (Midnight Memories)
23. What You Wanted — Seapony (Falling)
24. Walk Or Ride — The Ditty Bops (The Ditty Bops)
25. Wet Blanket — Metric (Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?)
26. Proof — Paramore (Paramore)
27. Mr. Freakshow — Gin Wigmore (Holy Smoke)
28. Bitter Rivals — Sleigh Bells (Bitter Rivals)

As last year, there are some tracks on here that come to my iTunes library via my teenage daughter. I don’t have everything she bought (yes, bought; trying to raise decent, law-abiding citizens here), but I may as well try to keep up with kids these days. She and I did go to a Metric/Paramore concert together, and while Metric being the opener and not the headliner still seems crazy to me, it was great. In any case, let the record show that I would not have bought One Direction, for example, but that I can play them in the car with certain passengers and not be sick. So in the spirit of an annual time capsule, and of trying to not be too cool to have a guilty pleasure or two, those tracks are here, too.

Enjoy!