Nirvana? Just a Band.

It's been getting sporty in here. Apologies. My younger sister even recently admitted that she skips the sports posts altogether! Heresy!!

But I don't want this to turn into a sports blog, partly because that would narrow the scope, which is widely understood to be one way to greatly increase traffic, and I wouldn't want a great increase in traffic.

By way of preface, I recently signed up for daily e-mails from the site Very Short List. They write "to you" about one thing per day -- a movie, an album, another web site -- and the e-mails are very well designed. What they're alerting me to is often something I've heard of (Children of Men, for instance), but deleting e-mails all day is what I do, so one more isn't really a problem. And sometimes VSL comes up with something surprising and entertaining. Like today.

I hadn't heard of British hip-hop group Dan Le Sac VS Scroobius Pip. And given that mouthful of a really terrible name, I wasn't sure how to feel about being forced to hear about them. (Oh, and in case it's not clear yet: Mom and Dad, you can skip this post.)

The video for "Thou Shalt Not Kill," though, is a blast. As the site explains:

Pip’s a white, motormouthed Brit with the beard of an Old Testament prophet. He resembles the stereotypical rapper only in his absolute, contemptuous self-assurance. He spouts strong opinions, and like a clever blog, his rants are both spot-on and very funny.

My favorite line from the song is, "Thou shalt not judge a book by its cover, thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover," but there's a lot of competition.

Before I keep babbling, watch it:



Actually, the pedophile bit is probably my favorite -- "some people are just nice." Awesome. "Thou shalt not fall in love so easily" is pretty good, too, especially given what it follows. Not that anyone's gone into the woods and taken drugs with my best friend to cheat on me. Not that I know of, anyway.

Figuring that this song said nothing about whether this band was just funny or actually talented, I looked at their MySpace page. (Yes, I'm 33 years old.) I don't know, the other songs sounded clever to me, too, and I listened to them before I had the three glasses of wine that preceded this post.

The band also seems funny outside of its music. One line in the song goes, "Thou shalt not read NME." (NME is a British music magazine.) On the MySpace blog is the following:

NME got in touch with us and we were a touch dubious!

They were, however, very grown up about us slagging them off and wanted to offer a chance to justify and explain our "Thou shalt not read NME" line.

We agreed to do 10 commandments for readers of the music press which should be run in next week's NME (giving us the chance to change the ways of those that do read NME and follow everything they say).

Now, there's a good chance they will just slag us off but, from the chat, they seemed quite understanding of my gripes with the mag (and many sections of the music press in general) and were very cool about it all.

Let's see how that goes come next week then....