10/13/06

Well Gabe may be attending New York literary festivals and everything, but is he being given impressive-sounding titles on the sports blogs of prominent political magazines? I think not.

Actually, lame self-promotion aside, something weird is going on in the relationship between mass entertainment and indie music. It has long been noted (or at least for like the last year or so) that prime-time TV shows have begun using music from relatively sophisticated and at-least-slightly obscure bands. Gray's Anatomy went with The Postal Service last year, and a friend of mine's sister, who's a NYC-based singer-songwriter, had a song on Six Degrees the other nite. But now it seems to be spreading beyond TV dramas with artistic pretensions, into the heretofore determinedly unartistic world of professional sports programming. In case you didn't follow the link above:

Not only did FOX play Fugazi's "Waiting Room" last nite, they also played the intro to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "My Yellow Country Teeth" before a commercial break. It was, frankly, fantastic.
There's still a ways to go though: FOX also played "Do you really want to hurt me?" during a brief in-game segment on the Mets' injury woes -- after which the announcer felt compelled to add, his voice tinged with poorly concelaed homophobia: "I don't know why we have to listen to Culture Club, or Boy George."