Yo

Sup Ryan, followers.

I'm Paul, gonna be writing for this blog now. Can't decide whether to post my stuff about music finds here or at my personal exclusive blog (http://notionssundriesincidentals.blogspot.com/) but for sure I'll be putting general thoughts here from now on and confining personal shit to my own space.

Some stuff about me: Best friends with Ryan since elementary school, pretty good writer (wanna be one professionally if I can't hold down a real job) but I don't really hold myself up to my typical standards of perfection too much here on the internet, so don't expect too much from me, okay? Also, I'm funny. At least I think I am. Example of how I think I'm funny: my blogger username, DieterFinch, is what Academy Award-winning actor Peter Finch would be named if he was born in Germany. This is a funny thought to me. Ha ha.

Well that's a pretty fitting introductory post, but I feel like I might as well throw in some content too. Ryan and I discussed the pitchfork top 20 tracks of the decade in great length last night, and after sleeping on the issue, I've concluded that, while I agree with most of the songs on the list, the ordering is all fucked. B.O.B. is a good number one (though Pitchfork's justification for it is verbose and contrived) and All My Friends a fitting number two (a song as epic as Murphy's ego), just about everything below it should have been rearranged.

Crazy in Love is a great song, but the similar 1 Thing by Amerie (placed below the top 20) is just plain funktastic. I'm not saying that it should have been #3, but if one of the two songs had to be in the top 10, if should have been the latter and not the former. Then there's the two songs with eerily similar names which are also similarly ill-fitting in the top 20: The Knife's Heartbeats and Annie's Heartbeat. I personally love The Knife, but Heartbeats is not nearly their best song, let alone deserving of the top 20. Also, Annie sucks. If you're going to pick a crappy pop sensation with an inexorably catchy song for the top 20, move Can't Get You Out of My Head back up out of the lowly 30s.

In short: Move Ignition (Remix) up, move My Girls down, move 99 Problems up, move Neighborhood (Tunnels) down, push Idioteque back to the 50s and replace it with the Int'l Player's Anthem, get rid of Maps, move Hey Ya and Losing My Edge up to the top 10, and replace the two Heartbeat songs with Romeo by Basement Jaxx and either Frontier Psychiatrist or Live At Dominoes or Radio or anything else by The Avalanches. All you have left to do is implement the changes in the previous paragraphs, then fill in the Maps-shaped hole with my personal favorite, No Children by the Mountain Goats, and you've got a perfect top 20!

So that's it. Some other things you can infer about me from the overly-long above musing is that I am pretty wordy, ranty, and I have something against Pitchfork. To be honest, I find them the most trustworthy medium for musical recommendations besides Allmusic, but they do often go over-their-head in pretentiousness, flowery prose, and propensity to bump "hot" indie bands over poppier artists and black people. Also, I love the Mountain Goats. And that's all you need to know.

So yeah, hi.