I'm currently in total grading hell, plus a lot of other things besides, so I haven't had time to post anything.
But with this post I'm officially changing my short-lived "Earworms" series -- dead meme, anyway -- to "Your New Favorite Song."
I've written about the "Orientalist" pleasures of Shonen Knife before, and this particular song -- yes, it's about food, and yes, there's a kind of infantilized pleading in the lyrics, and yes, "strawberry" is charmingly pronounced "stroh-berry" -- won't change naysayers' minds. It's not even typically punky like the best of the tracks from, say, Let's Knife. But there's something about this 1996 song (left off Rock Animals and collected on The Birds and the B-Sides) that made me keep pressing the rewind button just so I could hear it again.
The refrain before the chorus ("But I can't make strawberry cream puff / And I can't get strawberry cream puff") perfectly encapsulates the paradoxical ephemerality of the pop song -- okay, this pop song -- as well as, um, strawberry cream puffs:
It can easily disappear
It's just like a daydream
If you eat it only once
You'll be obsessed with it all your life!
Here's your new favorite song: Shonen Knife's "Strawberry Cream Puff." (3mb mp3)
Posted by the wily filipino at November 13, 2003 09:29 PM