You know, what if the Black Eyed Peas were a really good band? They are, after all, immensely popular! What if it's just you? What if you're just a stuck-up and joyless snob?
In any event, while you mull that, the recently canceled Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park is back on, for September 30th, although the Times requests that you remember that delightful night in 1983, when "hundreds of concert goers were mauled" after Diana Ross' show. That was back in an odd little moment when Diana Ross was sort of… Lady Gaga meets a black Kreayshawn? Important archival video documentation above!
What's the least fun thing you can think of? I mean, excepting the obvious, like performing your own root canal without anesthesia or watching your pet die or something. How about going to a Black Eyed Peas concert? How about going to a Black Eyed Peas concert where Tom Cruise comes out on stage in sunglasses and a leather jacket to plug his new movie, to which the Black Eyed Peas contributed a song? And then how about if Will-I-Am tells you that you get to be one of "the first cats" to hear the new song?
You try to stay positive. Even with the recession and global warming and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and everything. You try, despite all evidence to the contrary-shouters comparing Obama to Hitler, toxic algae ruining the planet's beautiful places, everybodydying-you try to hold on to the hope that things are somehow going to be okay, that the world isn't going crazy, that not everyone is stupid and bad.
Seth Colter Walls: Maura, has it been a good first third of 2010, music-wise? What were the highlights? And what depressed the shit out of you? Maura Johnston: 2010 has actually been a great year for music. So far! And there's more to come!! Seth: Really? Because I've felt slightly… underwhelmed. (Though I'm glad you are confirming that the rest of calendar year 2010 is still to come.) Maura: Well, I know the whole existence of the future has been a cause for worry recently. But I am optimistic!
Speaking of Lou Reed, when I first saw the title of Jim Jones' new song, I fervently hoped he might be covering the symphonically depressing classic Danny Boyle used so effectively to soundtrack the overdose scene in Trainspotting. It turns out that the truth is even more odd than one man's fervent hope.
"I was simply trying to find the way the olfactory tubercle responds to odors." That's neurologist Daniel Wesson, proving that science dorks are the very best kind of dorks, as he recalls the time he noticed that the clunk his coffee mug made on the counter in the lab registered a spike in the odor-receiving area of the brain in the mice he was studying. That kismet eureka moment at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, NY, led Wesson and his partner Donald Wilson to the discovery of what they believe may be a new category of sensory perception: the combination of smell and sound: [...]
