My mom on music / Nun / My one friend on "Clumsy".

I've been having Top 40 radio on a lot this week hoping to catch that one Fergie song "Clumsy", and my mom's soundly hated all of it, except for Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls", which she finds kind of catchy. She didn't understand exactly what the bass line to "Stand by Me" was doing in the song, so I had to explain to her what 'sampling' is. She said me and my from high school are both listening to Top 40 radio since we both don't want to get old, though I say it's since the music is good and I like being in on the vibe, and my friend says it's since the music is good and she's never been in touch with the vibe before and likes it, since back in high school she was stoned most of the time, as well as derisive towards pop culture that wasn't the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

In fact, that same friend from high school was telling me that when she had study hall with the post-Vatican II nun who taught us religion, the nun would let her go outside and smoke during study hall, only she told her to do it off school property on the other side of the railroad tracks that ran by the school, not to let anyone see her do it and of course to shut up about it to everyone, and if she did get caught smoking, to say that she had asked to go to the bathroom and had taken off on her own.

Also, that same friend heard Fergie's "Clumsy" after I was telling her about it, and liked it for the same reasons I do, it turns out. She loves how the overproduced techno-ish beats and yelps of Fergie contrast with the underpolished sampling of Little Richard's "Girl Can't Help It", though she's not as exceptionally fond of the spoken word middle-part where Fergie talks about how when a guy dumps her her world just crumbles until the love bug crawls back up her dress and bites, at which point the song goes back into the Little Richard sample...

I really do love spoken word parts in songs; they take me back to the early 60s, and I think there should be more of them. I should make up a list of emotional first person spoken-word parts from popular songs, maybe after I do that list I'm thinking of of songs where they translate the chorus into French for a chorus or two, like Melanie's "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" and Blondie's "Sunday Girl".