Friday, 28 September 2012

• Playlist Friday: Yellow

  Greetings, oh land of the interwebs. It is the best day of the week, which is Friday. Why, is it the best day, you ask? Because it's now time for...

  

  This is a supposedly weekly feature in which I present for your admiration and listening pleasure a list of songs on a particular theme. Lately I have been on a colorful theme. See HERE for red and HERE for orange. If you remember your art class lesson on rainbows and ROY G. Biv, you know that it's now time for Yellow.
  

   

  1. Yellow, Coldplay
  

  Something tells me this list is going to be a lot easier than the Orange list...
  

  So, I'm something of a fan of Coldplay, [pause for ridicule] but this is not my favorite of their songs. Back when I was in college, a band came to play at said college, which was called Stand, and they did a cover of this song. Now, by this point Coldplay was pretty big but not massively huge, at least not in my circles, and so this was the first time that my ex heard the song and then after that she went on to be a fan of Coldplay, and I went on to feel pretty awesome because I'd heard of them before she did. Which wasn't surprising at the time because she was really just into listening to Elton John and Ben Folds and almost nothing else, and so it wasn't quite as hipster of a mindset as you might think.
  

  But anyway, that's my story about this song, since I'm pretty sure you all have heard it before.
  

   

  2. Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell
  

   

  If you don't listen to older music, maybe you know this song because it was covered by the Counting Crows (with Vanessa Carlton) a few years back. This is the original. I don't remember when I first heard this song, maybe when I was in high school or so. I didn't actually know the title for quite a while, because it's not really about a big yellow taxi.
  

  The lyrics are pretty deep, and I like how they seem to work on several levels. On the one hand, this song is a protest against DDT and the excessive use of pesticides, which was a big thing to protest against back when this song was released. It's also about turning beautiful pristine paradises into parking lots and shopping malls. And it's about loosing someone important to you when they leave in a big yellow taxi in the middle of the night, though that's sort of tossed in there so briefly it's hardly noticed. But the overall theme is that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone, whether that is beautiful wilderness, chemical-free foods, pristine paradises, or the person you love.
  

   

  3. Yellow Submarine, The Beatles
  

   

  As I mentioned last week, nearly everything having to do with Yellow Submarine, the movie and the album, is fairly nonsensical and catchy. Whenever I am doing housework and I have no other songs in my head, I will almost always sing/hum this song, or at least the chorus. And then I can't stop singing it. I just go around, doing dishes or vacuuming or whatever, singing "we all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. we all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine," over and over and over.
  

  On a semi-related note, I could never live in a submarine, nor spend more than a few minutes in one, because I'm terribly claustrophobic. I don't think that the color would do much to help me in this matter. :P
  

   

  4. Jeremy, Pearl Jam
  

   

  Rather than exclusively use song with the word "yellow" in the title, I include this song for the lyric at the beginning describing the picture that Jeremy draws, with a "lemon yellow sun."
  

  This song got a lot of attention when I was in my last year of high school, because that was when Columbine happened. Even before then, there were school shootings. The video for this song seems to assume that's what this song is about, but the lyrics don't really state that explicitly. The song is about a boy who is alone and disturbed, who you can tell by his drawings is disturbed, who speaks one day in class. What happens afterward is never stated so far as I can tell, but it's obviously awful because the narrator, who I think is another kid in Jeremy's class, says, "try to forget this. try to erase this from the black board."
  

   

  5. Mellow Yellow, Donovan
  

   

  I don't know what this song is about. Probably drugs. I think because it came out in the 60s and was sung by Donovan. Even the most innocent seeming songs in the 60s were apparently about drugs.
  

   

  6. Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road, Elton John
  

  So here is a good song to end the playlist with, Elton John backed by the Muppets.
  

  In case you didn't know, because maybe you didn't but I have a ridiculously large store of trivial knowledge regarding Mr. John, this song appears on the album of the same name. Like a lot of songs that Bernie Taupin (the lyricist for Elton) wrote during this time period, it's about tossing aside society's notions of "success" and returning to his country roots, which is not something that Elton ever actually did, for he went on to have a long career after this song.
  

   

  Well, that's all for today. As expected, this playlist was infinitely easier than last week's. Continuing through the rainbow, next week's songs will be on the theme of Green.
  

   

  What songs with Yellow do you know/like?
  

  What did you think of these songs?
  

  What do you think of the color Yellow?
  

   

  Have a fab weekend, everybody.
  

   

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