So, like just about everyone, I’ve had my fantasies of musical competence, even of musical creativity. Sometimes I’ve even fantasized about being so good people might drop a looney or two in a bucket set up by the front door of a café where I’m playing. In my absolute wildest dreams, I’ve even managed to convince a few gullible people who can actually play real music to make me a part of their band, and then have people show up to drop a looney in the bucket to see my band play.

But unlike most of the people that I know, I don’t have fantasies of playing rock and roll. Unlike a significant minority of people I know, I also don’t fantasize about playing orchestra or symphonic music. No, I (futilely) aspire to something much different.

 

I aspire to play something best described as dirty lounge-punk. It’s not something you come across very often. The band Cake has some lounge tones in it. Maybe you could describe cake as lounge-alternative, but in no way could it be called lounge-punk. No, lounge-punk is so rare, even though I actively search for it, I’ve almost never heard any. That’s even before you hit the sub-sub genre of dirty lounge-punk. But a couple of days ago, I nearly hit the jackpot: Nadéah, a performer also of Nouvell Vague, did me right by covering the Dead Kennedys’ Too Drunk to F*ck. To be sure, this is clean lounge-punk. But hearing Nadéah and the other artists put together such a perfectly lounge version of this quintessentially punk classic sent me wild anyway. For your enjoyment:

If you like her work in this, she also graces youtube with a great lounge cover of Billy Idol’s Dancing With Myself (as part of Nouvelle Vague) and a straight-up cover of Mercedes Benz (under her own name) that Joni Mitchell might have recorded herself. Seriously. It’s amazing how much she sounds like Mitchell at times.