The very first album I ever bought was the Space Jam soundtrack.

While I was making my daughter's lunch this morning, I got this line stuck in my head from the song:

I'm the only bunny that's still goin'

Know what I'm sayin'?

I had no idea what that meant.

For decades now, I've been stumped by one cartoon bunny dissing another one .

My last handful of posts were a bit depressing... so I thought I'd share this one that was in my Instapaper queue for some reason.

I love the idea that someone at Stereogum is reviewing every single number one hit since 1958, and it brings me a great deal of joy that they needed to write a piece about this song.

The summary nails it here:

As a band, Crazy Town were fucking godawful, and they were the kind of godawful that’s easy to mock. But “Butterfly”? I’ve never been mad at “Butterfly.” It’s the kind of silly bullshit hit song that makes the world just slightly more fun. Rap-rock faded away in the rearview a long time ago, but “Butterfly” will always evoke a very particular moment. That moment was short, just as it should’ve been. Butterflies aren’t built to live forever.

A recent revelation of mine is that I've kind of been a music snob for most of my life. I basically turned my nose up at the entire emo/punk genre sometime in middle school and never took the time to re-evaluate that position.

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I've been letting go of those unnecessary positions, and I probably don't need to be the one to tell you this, but there's a lot of good pop-punk and emo stuff out there.

I've also found myself lately drawn toward music that reminds me of my middle/high school years. Rap rock is a defining genre of that time for me, and Butterfly is one of those songs that will forever transport me to a time when I would load 5 incredibly compressed MP3s onto my 16MB (that's megabyte, not gigabyte) Cybiko MP3 player and bike up to the middle school for football practice.

Let the mastering engineers do their thing, using whatever technology they find best. Get the reproduced music however you can. And focus on the analog component you are going to have to add to the chain in the end, no matter what: your ears.

A while back, NPR had a test that allowed you to tell whether you could tell the difference between various levels of audio compression.

Even though I did decent on that test, I’ve still never really been able to discern the difference listening to an album on vinyl versus a 320kbps MP3 rip.

That could be because I’m not listening to it on amazing headphones or speakers, but I think the main reason I enjoy listening to vinyl records is that it forces me to focus.

Having a majority of the music ever recorded at our fingertips is incredible, but taking time to really listen to an artist’s work from front to back feels like a luxury. The ceremony of selecting a record, setting it on the table, and dropping the needle feels more special than shouting into the air for Siri to start it.

(Shouting into the air to summon music is also supremely dope, though… don’t get me wrong.)

YouTube’s algorithm brought this video to me and my wife’s attention tonight.

For as many faults as you can place on Google and their algorithms, I sure am grateful they surfaced this.

Two observations:

First, the stunning artistry, my god. The song “Green Eyes” is like listening to an emotional onion being peeled. You start with denial, which fades into anger, which fades into loneliness/lust/regret. What an amazing commentary on heart break.

Second, I never appreciated recorded concerts much until now. I always thought the in-person factor made more of a difference for experiencing music than what could be accomplished via a recorded medium.

It must be what it felt like to listen to a vinyl record in the sixties, or an orchestra in the 1800s, or a gospel chant in the 1400s. Simply an ethereal experience that makes you happy to be alive.

“I think I still feel the same way about it that I did in the very beginning,” Whibley says. “The day that I get sick of playing a song that everyone knows and everyone goes crazy when we play it, and everyone starts jumping around and everyone sings it, I should just quit because I’m so fucking jaded. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. I’ve never understood that. I don’t get Radiohead, even though I love Radiohead, why they don’t play their big songs.”

I respect the hell out of that pull quote, it’s how more of us should feel about things that make other people happy.

It’s hard to express what this song meant to me back in 2001 as an impressionable sixth grader. I’m definitely not an edgy, punk skater kid (nor have I ever been), but this song is still in my regular rotation because it gives me so much life.

Like many jazz students, I grew up learning the standards, and despite not being an amazing jazz musician, I still came across a Real Book or two in my time.

The story behind the Fake Book and the Real Book is so enjoyable, and I think its impact on music is hard to overstate.

This 99% Invisible podcast episode on its origins and the attempt to uncover the identities of its authors is a great listen, especially if you enjoy the cross-section of jazz music and intellectual property rights like myself.

I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice.

We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone. That we are understood. That we are imperfect. And, most important, that we need each other.

The coronavirus has upended our lives, and we are all collectively looking forward to the day when it is safe to embrace a stranger again.

That collective optimism is what gives me hope that it actually will happen.

Michael Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” remembers the force of Weird Al’s 1992 parody of Nirvana.

“ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ comes out, and it’s like the perfect voice for all the simmering anger of an entire generation of kids,” Schur said. “That song is vicious and angry and aggressive but also laconic and disaffected and scary. And it was immediately a gigantic thing in American culture. Then Weird Al does ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ and completely deflates it — the importance and seriousness and angst. That’s a service he has always provided: to remind people that rock is about grittiness and authenticity and finding your voice and relating to an audience, but it’s also fundamentally absurd. Being a rock star is stupid. We as a culture are genuflecting at the altar of these rock stars, and Weird Al comes out with this crazy curly hair and an accordion, and he just blows it all into smithereens by singing about Spam. It’s wonderful.”

Schur paused. He said there were heated debates, sometimes, in comedy writing rooms, about the merits of Weird Al’s work — some cynics argue that his jokes aren’t actually great, that people overrate them because they’re nostalgic for their childhoods. But Schur insisted that, regardless of what you think about this lyric or that lyric, Weird Al represented the deep egalitarian spirit of our culture.

“It’s a truly American thing, to be like: Get over yourself,” Schur said. “Everybody get over yourselves. Madonna, get over yourself. Kurt Cobain, get over yourself. Eminem, get over yourself. No one gets to be that important in America.”

This whole piece is a must-read, especially if, like me, you grew up listening to (and subsequently memorizing) Weird Al's entire discography.

Never did I once contemplate the fate of the man who wrote “The Monster Mash.”

The Memory Palace is an incredible podcast, and they did a wonderful job telling this man’s story.

This is a tremendous piece of reporting by Jody Rosen. I have never had many kind words for the big record labels, but this just takes my distain to a whole new level.

As mentioned in the article, I understand how costly it is to maintain an archive of content as large as this. It’s not economical, and it is likely never to be a profit center.

But one could argue that if your entire business model is to leech the intellectual property of artists, you would at least have a moral imperative to keep that IP in as pristine of a condition that you could.

Of course, though, we are talking about the music industry. Why do something altruistic and beneficial to society with the gobs and gobs of money they make when, instead, they can hire more lawyers?

Here’s a small list of artists mentioned in the article, just to leave you with a taste of what we, as a society, have collectively lost:

Virtually all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltrane’s Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley/I’m A Man,” Etta James’s “At Last,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready.”

The list of destroyed single and album masters takes in titles by dozens of legendary artists, a genre-spanning who’s who of 20th- and 21st-century popular music. It includes recordings by Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward, Sammy Davis Jr., Les Paul, Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Burl Ives, the Weavers, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Bobby (Blue) Bland, B.B. King, Ike Turner, the Four Tops, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Don Henley, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Steve Earle, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Eric B. and Rakim, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent and the Roots.