Here we go again. I’ve stolen blog ideas from my good friend Jordyn at Popped Density before, and by golly if I’m not about to do it again. This time, as they say, it’s personal, for I am about to start the 30 Day Song Challenge, a fun little game you may notice dominating your friends’ Facebook walls. For me, the 30 Day Song Challenge harkens back to the days when MySpace ruled the social networking streets, before Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger made their way into my life (though after Elftown; let this be the last time I ever speak of that place again).
MySpace had a function called Bulletins, which were special kinds of messages that spammed all of your friends at once. Though they could be used for useful, important functions, most bulletins I received were short, self-centered surveys (“What’s your favorite movie? Who is your idol? Do you have a secret?” Etc.). I will not lie, dear readers, I enjoyed the crap out of those little bits of digital egocentrism, and I’ll be damned if I’m not jumping at the chance to do it again. Plus, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on the subject of music, so this’ll be a good shot in the arm for my music cred (ha).
Without further ado, let’s get things crackin’:
Day 1 - Your Favorite Song
This series comes out of the gate swinging, doesn’t it? Perhaps this song wouldn’t pose as huge a problem for most others, but I don’t really have favorites; okay, so I do have a favorite game, and my favorite movie will go hidden until another time, but that’s about it when it comes to favorites. At least I’m confident of one thing: no matter what happens in this blog from here on out, they will all be easier than this post.
The worst part about this sort of post is deciding what constitutes as “favorite.” I’m a rather emotional when it comes to my music-listening preferences; I’m much more likely to play a song that matches my current mood than a song that may alter my mood, so my favorite pop punk song might seem wildly inappropriate when, say, I’m at the bottom of a messy breakup depression. At the mo’, though, I’m going to take “favorite” to mean “the one that’s always there.” There may be songs that I like more when I’m happy, there may be songs I like more when I’m sad, but this song is always a constant.
It took a great deal of introspection to find my favorite song. For this is no ordinary list—it’s a list about music, and that means that I take it for cereals. After crawling through my iTunes, Page Down-ing through all 3,800 songs and glancing at every playlist, I had a handful of songs that I knew were “up there,” oddly similar to The Bachelor. But to whom would I bestow my rose of favoritism (which would be a great name for a band, btw)? The answer, like most things in life when you really think about them, was simple:
Autopilot Off – “Clockworks”
Autopilot Off was one of my first “favorite bands,” and I wouldn’t have found them if it weren’t for this song. I first discovered “Clockworks” through SSX3 for the GameCube, a fact whose surprise factor is inversely proportional to how well you actually know me, and was caught off guard by the energetic melody and soaring chorus. Then I heard the real version (the one on SSX was sped-up, for some reason), and that was all she wrote.
Truth be told, the song isn’t terribly special, constructed out of boilerplate pop punk tropes with lyrics that I still don’t understand to this day. I’ve never been one for lyrics, though (or at least as much as one can be into music and not be about lyrics), and the song’s relatively uncreative structure hardly bothers me at all. When I listen to “Clockworks,” I hear an enormous wall of sound; I hear a driving energy that only pop punk can provide; I hear an infectious urgency that I’m not even sure what is urgent about. My favorite songs get me hyped up for tackling life head-on, and I’ll never forget my first slice of pop punk and feeling the notion that, hey, I kinda like this.
How I know it truly passes the test? I put the song on the car stereo, just to see what it was like, and had a car-dancing fit the likes of which I haven’t experienced in quite some time.
Historical significance and involuntary rock spasms? Sounds like a winner to me.
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