336. "My Hope" by Molly Lewis

This might've been the least fun Eden's ever had doing a 39-40 contribution... she just had a frustrating time doing the song. I was cooking up a killer chicken and mushroom masala for most of the time she was working on it (that's the type of hands-on control I exercise over the blog these days) and it turned out that what she really needed was someone to scroll they lyrics down for her while she was playing. I still managed to make things difficult by not doing it right, which is why you can hear her whispering "Down!" and "Up!" from time to time. In the end, as always, she nailed it to the ground.

It's a very cute song by one of her latest YouTube uke artists (there should be a sub-area of it called UkeTube, honestly). I have a little bit of a hard time parsing exactly what demographic she's taking to task here: I don't typically think of Jonas Brothers fans as the worst offenders in terms of MySpace self-humiliation, but Molly's probably just a little, well, young. The song dates back all the way to 2008, which is staggering in a way... was it really only two and a half years ago that MySpace really had enough cultural currency to be worth mocking? In fact one of the slightly vexing things about the YouTube musicians, who are damned straight by and large more interesting and engaging than most of the "regular" pop music the "regular" kids are into these days, is that it's so tied to current tech and pop ephemera that it's not likely to age so well. Yes, occasionally some nods to contemporaneous tech become transcendent in the long run-- The Modern Lovers' power of the AM, Kraftwerk's homecomputer, Mark E. Smith being into CB, and 808 State's... erm, 808-- there's a far greater likelihood of ending up with a "Pac Man Fever" or "Convoy", isn't there? Going for today's kids is that they're doing this stuff with a serious panoply of timeless musical settings... I mean, ukulele, for Bowie's sake, how can you beat that for old tech?

Oh, another weird little generational-nomenclatural divide: the kids all say that they have "a MySpace" or "a Facebook", whereas most adults would either say they have a "Facebook" account, or that they are "on Facebook". I have no idea what that signifies, but listen closely and see if I'm not at least a little bit right about it.

Personnel: Eden

"My Hope" performed by Molly Lewis

"My Hope" performed by Eden Hain