STEEL DRUMS really mean STEAL MY FUCKING DRUMS!

Now I love song covers as much as the next gal.  I love covers.  I love mash-ups.  I even love it when you go to a hotel bar and the only thing playing are dance versions of real songs.  I even buy that shit on itunes- Jenny Lewis singing but with phat, farty sounding dance beats? Yes, please!

But there is one thing I will never be able to stomach: steel drums.  Why?  Oh, I don't know, because I'm living in some Larry David-esque world in which a steel drum band practices...not just plays, but fucking practices, in my apartment building.  I see now that it is important to take a moment to explain not only the structure of my building but the lay-out.  I live in a pre-war, ex-hospital of a building  with walls made of little league snack bar napkins.  I wish I were exaggerating.  The walls are that thin (when I say that thin, I'm holding my hands really close together).  I know what all of my neighbors are doing all the time.  When  a woman fell down the stairs at 6 in the morning last month, I heard her spit out her lozenge before I heard the atomic blast of her face hitting the floor .  When the man next door dropped his contact lens this morning, I wondered whether he had dropped an anvil in the tub.  And when, just now, a six year-old screamed at her brother, "I know you not walkin away with my KitKat, Julian," I not only heard him run down the block but I heard him unwrap it when he got to the corner.  You get the idea.  But even more significant than the thinness of the walls is the actual architecture.  The building is shaped like a donut.  My chamber faces the donut hole (realtors call donut holes atriums- buyer beware!).  This layout and my placement in it is great for absolutely no reasons and terrible for countless ones.  Which brings me back to... the steel drum band.

I face the concrete donut hole, and so does the apartment in which the steel drum band resides.  They practice at least three times a week, and they practice in the evening...you know, when people have just gotten home from their job at which they deal with assholes all day.  The first time I heard them, I couldn't stop laughing.  How hilarious, I thought, a steel drum band lives in my apartment.  How comedically inspiring this could be!  This will never get old!

But alas, what happens when you listen to steel drum music for too long is quite the opposite of inspiration.  What happens, in fact, is kind of like that movie "The Awakening" with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.  But it's not the hopeful beginning of the movie, when the encephalitis patients start eating their own cereal and playing cards.  It's like the end of the movie, when all of the patients who have been successfully re-entering society start having seizures and violent outbursts and are ultimately relegated to becoming water-heads again.  Clearly I saw this movie at a formative age and it struck a neurotic chord with me.  But I still think the analogy makes sense: I suffered the creative version of brain swelling because I heard too much steel drum music.  Songs that I used to think of in terms of what notes to sing, I now only think of in terms of what mallet to use when hitting a large pan.

I've reached the point of no return.  I'm stuck here (at least until the lease runs out) and this steel drum collective has made it very clear they're not going anywhere, either.  So tonight, I've decided to turn over a new leaf.  The side of the leaf I was looking at before said "Take lots of pharmaceuticals and go on a juice diet."  So I threw that one away (without looking at the other side) and picked up another one and turned it over.  It says, "Steel drum bands, you can't live with 'em, you can't shoot 'em."  I think this new leaf has really got something, there.  

And lastly, I leave you with a top ten list of songs that I have heard that you probably wish you could hear on steel drums but really you don't mean that.

1. Cruisin' (Smokey Robinson or Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow)

2. Dancing Queen (Swedish band, awful musical, awful Meryl Streep vehicle)

3. One Love (not surprising but has even less melody when no one sings it)

4. Hotel California (as good as it's always been)

5. La Bamba (wasn't a plane crash bad enough? poor Richie Valenz and for that matter poor Lou Diamond Phillips- brother used to be fine)

6. Copacabana or At the Copa (her name was Lola, Barry Manilow, etc.)

7. Mamma Mia (see Dancing Queen- why do Caribbeans love Swedes so much?)

8. Just the Two of Us (this should be on one of those slow jams CDs they advertise for geriatric black couples) 

9. The Wedding March (yup- someone wanted to hear that on their special day)

10. Amazing Grace (of every time somebody you knew died fame)

and lastly, this happy video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-FtTaDNsyCY

enjoy!

-Mrs. God