“Beetlebum,” Blur
One time I was on this Christian retreat with a youth group I was not even a part of at all, but my friend had a crush on one of the guys in the thing and it was a weekend at a cabin so, moral supportively, I went with her and we played trust games and slept in a heap on a trampoline. By the way the guy she had a crush on was also the son of this long-term French substitute teacher we had. Anyway, “Song #2” was mad popular at the time and even though there was other music, my friend kept putting this CD on the house stereo. Of course “Beetlebum” was first on that record, and it is a pretty long slow awesome bummer of a drug song to start off a damn album, BLUR! and I remember she wouldn’t even skip the track to get right to the money, so we listened to this song more than anything that weekend, and it made me feel super uncomfortable slash guilty. It was months before I even gave the album a fair chance on its own, and even today I still kind of feel jittery when this song starts up. Like someone’s going to bust in any moment and accuse me of not praying when everyone else was praying and wondering too frequently what the part about sucking your thumb and slipping away really meant when WASN’T IT OBVIOUS (sin). Oh well anyway. Enjoy the part where Damon looks directly into your soul and then rolls around on the ground, it’s exactly what needles and sex do to you they tell me.