Stunt 2009: Week 18 – Flying Nun

*This is a companion piece to a similarly-themed article on Karen’s site which, all things being equal, should be published at roughly the same time.*

Sometimes, on a playlist, there are one or two songs that are just playlist-filler. It turns out that this phenomenon propagates to the next level up, too. This entire playlist is book-filler.

1. **Nothing’s Going To Happen** Tall Dwarfs – perhaps I’m just very suggestible, but I felt like nothing happened in this song.
2. **Point That Thing Somewhere Else** The Clean – guitars playing the same thing over and over and over again. I feel like it’s playing fast and loose with the definition of the word “song”.
3. **Pink Frost** The Chills – cheery, upbeat lyrics about rabbits and kittens and no, not really, it’s about death. Start to finish, uninterrupted death. Not in a profound, inspiring or humourous way. Just in a really 6th-form, “hey isn’t death depressing” kind of way. The first 20 seconds seems to be a different song entirely. I wonder what happened there.
4. **Death & The Maiden** The Verlaines – it seems strangely ironic that a punk band from New Zealand, who can’t sing or play their instruments, would write a song that references a 19th Century French poet, a Munch painting, and a Schubert composition. It’s like putting a pile of gravel onto a plate and then christening it Raymond Blanc. If you called it gravel, no-one would be disappointed. “Yes, that’s gravel” they would say, and they could appreciate it for the gravel that it is. But if you try to dress it up as something higher, they’ll say “no, that’s not Raymond Blanc, now leave me alone, you lunatic.”
5. **Not Given Lightly** Chris Knox – the highlight of the playlist, for me. It’s friendly and light, clearly written with the intention of being excessively sappy (the author confirms it) but I’d rather listen to cheesy lyrics about love than four minutes of miserabling about death, and so to me this is more than just a novelty. It’s actually a very complete song.
6. **Nude Star** Garageland – very loud wall of guitars and ignorability in spades. I’ve been finding that I tend to tune it out until the last few seconds, at which point I notice that it’s finishing.

There were 10 songs on the playlist, but I have a certain “effort threshold” for obtaining the songs for this stunt, and obtaining the other 4 would have caused a violation of said threshold.

The next week’s playlist

Random number: 17
Only one playlist on this page – The Band. The book says:

> Psychedelic songsmith Robyn Hitchcock has been called the human jukebox for his ability to play any song, any style. For this book, he sent in an entry for The Band: “In Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson had three great character actors to sing his songs. Garth Hudson was the alchemist who found melodies on keyboards and horn that hadn’t ever been found before. Though Levon contends that the songs were not Robertson’s as much as Robbie claims, no one could accuse Robbie of overplaying.”

Doesn’t give much away, does it?