So it turns out my “ear ache” was an “ear infection”. This was confirmed by three trips to a walk-in clinic over the last three days. Actually, the first trip confirmed the primary infection; the second trip found a secondary infection around the ear; and the third trip was to make sure I wasn’t going the full zombie route (i.e. that I was healing ok). My taste for brains, it turns out, is purely psychosomatic.
Discomfort and missed work aside, the major problem with the infection is that I can’t hear anything out of my left ear. Well, in truth, what I can now hear even better than before is my own voice. And I sing terribly. I sing often, yes (if it ever looks like I am on the phone while driving, you can rest assured that the phone is being used as a prop-microphone); but terribly. My singing voice is the high-pitched slur of a panicked 911 caller played on the local news. It’s the primal scream of a startled donkey mid-belch. It’s the screeching of a clay teapot full of nails and glass (and tea?). It’s worse than an ear infection has any right to be.
Ok, now that I have you in the mood for music… Let me point you in the direction of someone with a much more enjoyable voice than mine. Today’s recommendation is ‘Bulletproof’ by ‘La Roux’.
The band ‘La Roux’ is an electro-pop collaboration between two Brits with names and other background information that you can look up on Wikipedia. One is the lead singer; the other is the producer. Only the lead singer shows up on stage or on their album covers, so I am led to believe that the producer must be an ugly chap who even Lady Gaga would not pretend to fellate on stage at the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards (you know, because she’s ‘edgy’). The lead singer is not exactly pulled from the pages of Vogue either. She looks like a cross of David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust. Or with that guy from Labyrinth who’s not Hoggle. But unlike David Bowie, she is still relevant as an artist (prove me wrong, Major Tom).
I am going to go on a tangent for a minute about electro-pop, so if you have something extremely urgent to do (i.e. put out house fire, perform CPR on pets, feed dinner and/or toss cheerios in the direction of my daughter, etc); I will understand if you skip this paragraph. I put it squarely at the feet of Lady Gaga. As someone once said about something (Dr. Goober McToots nods assuredly); she may not have invented the wheel, but she sure sold a hell of a lot of wheelbarrows. Lady Gaga did not cobble together the electro-pop sound in her father’s basement with a hammer and a synthesizer; but she has certainly made it popular again. I can’t turn on the radio these days without hearing a disciple of the Gaga moaning over vibrating synth-beats. And most of those disciples aren’t fit to hold Gaga’s jockstrap.
La Roux is. The British tend to do excess better than their Puritan cousins (poorly made case and point: Though both victorious; Churchill was fat, soused, and chewing on a cancer-flute for much of World War 2; while FDR had polio-legs, initials, and a bad case of rigor-mortis by the war’s end). All of this points to the Brits having a leg up in an electro-pop field defined by excess and inflated presence.
La Roux also does this wondrous thing where the singer stutters words at the beginning of some sentences for rhythmic effect. It gets me every time. As a kid who dropped his r’s, I am a sucker for speech pathology.
A link to a video of the song can be found at:
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