Wednesday, August 25, 2010

i guess he's an xbox and i'm more atari



I was told when I was a little girl, all done in pigtails and pink shorts, that I should be gracious.

That I should be nice.
Should be forgiving.
Should be kind.

But there are those times in life... the times when someone or something just spits in your face and punches you in the nose, and maybe breaks a couple ribs, and you're left laying in the dirt staring into the bleak infinity and thinking...

Well fuck this.

The new Cee-Lo single from the new album Ladykiller out October 4, is simply entitle "Fuck You."

And it needs the Fuck.
It's a song about reclaiming anger in a way that the quiet singer songwriters that I so love just can't do sometimes. Sometimes I want to let myself revel in the soulful injustice of it all. And Cee-Lo (as you would expect from the other half of Gnarls Barkley) does it in the catchiest way you could imagine. You know what this liberating, sunny, angry song tells me?

I don't have to want the right thing all the time!

We don't have to be so damn graceful about the things that just frankly suck.

It's OK to be a sore loser.

But most importantly; rejection doesn't always need to be so uncomfortably pathetic.

I love Cee-Lo's declarations in this song, so blunt, so often hilarious, and so in the moment:

And though there's pain in my chest
I still wish you the best
With a "Fuck you"
Ooo ooo ooo

This song does not break any musical barriers. It's not awash in sentimentality (on the surface at least), and it doesn't beg for me to overanalyze it. So I won't. I'll just be happy I relate to something so visceral and human. And I'll play it again. Right now.




Fuck You-Cee-Lo

3 comments:

  1. I totally agree with the "reclaimed anger" sentiment you spoke of. For example, the fuck in 'Little Lion Man' is so damn SATISFYING. Never has saying so little expressed so much.

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  2. i like singing this song looking at the mirror, usually while i am getting ready (like, EVERY DAY this past week) and i like singing, "fuck you" and i pause and then sometimes point at the mirror and sing, "and, uh, FUCK HER TOO."

    it is deeply, super satisfying :)

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