My Spotify Top 99 of 2023, Annotated, Part 2

Part 1 Here

12. "Everything's Alright" - original cast of Jesus Christ Superstar (featuring Murray Head singing the role of Judas)

13. "Black Parade" - Beyoncé

14. Born This Way - Lady Gaga

15. "Nobody Told Me" - John Lennon

16. "I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl" - Nina Simone
As heard in Point of No Return (1993) starring Bridget Fonda and Gabriel Byrne

17. Too Much - Carly Rae Jepsen

18. "Red Right Hand" - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (the Peaky Blinders theme song)

19. "America Has a Problem" - Beyoncé with Kendrick Lamar

20. Rehab - Amy Winehouse

21. "Sappho" - Frankie Cosmos

22. "Material Girl" - Kris Bowers. From the Bridgerton soundtrack; I've neither read nor watched the Netflix Regency romance series, but I like these pop songs done in a chamber music style. 

23. "Suerte" - Shakira

24. Annabel Lee/The Bells - Lou Reed

25. "Chromatica I" - Lady Gaga

26. Come on Eileen - Dexys Midnight Runners

27. "Gooey (Gilligan Moss remix)" - Glass Animals

28. Too Much (Acoustic) - Melanie Chisholm

29. "Chromatica II" - Lady Gaga

30. "Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)" - Elle King, Miranda Lambert

31. "Eames" - Polar Inc.

32. "Hung Up on Tokischa" - Madonna with Tokischa

33. You and I - Lady Gaga. The music video is a Frankenstein story. I had this idea the other day: Someone should write a novelization of the video. 

34. "You'll Be Back" - Hamilton soundtrack, Jonathan Groff

35. "Celebrity Skin" - Doja Cat. Did anybody else use to sing this on Rock Band?

36. "The Raven" - Lou Reed

37. "Tik Tok" - Kesha

38. Paper Planes - M.I.A.

39. "Cain't Use My Phone (Suite)" - Erykah Badu

40. "I'm On Fire" - Bruce Springsteen

41. "This Is Me" - Keala Settle from the Greatest Showman soundtrack

42. "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" - Bananarama

43. "Inside Out" - Eve 6

44. "Heart of Gold" - Tanya Donelly

45. "Heart Shaped Box" - Nirvana

46. "Can't Help Falling In Love" - UB40

47. "Never Enough" - Loren Allred from the Greatest Show soundtrack

48. "911" - Lady Gaga

49. "Get Into It (Yuh)" - Doja Cat

50. "You Make Me Feel Like It's Halloween" - Muse

51. "UMF" - Duran Duran

52. "Hold My Hand" - Lady Gaga

53. Love On the Brain - Rihanna

54. "Come As You Are" - Nirvana

55. "Into the Mystic" - The Wallflowers (cover of a Van Morrison song)

56. "Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)" - Elle King, Miranda Lambert - GOLDHOUSE Remix

57. "Shallow" - Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper

58. "Footloose" - Kenny Loggins. Remember, Tit Elingtin and I saw the musical live on stage in 2023.

59. Here With Me - Dido

60. "Creep" - Radiohead. The original; in the past I've been quite taken with the Scala & Kolacny Brothers cover that was used on The Simpsons (production code PABF04). Also used in Rock Band.

61. Paparazzi - Lady Gaga

62. "Mo Money, Mo Problems," The Notorious B.I.G., Mase, Diddy

63. "What's Up?" - 4 Non Blondes

64. "Our Love Is Done" - Hannah Juanita

65. "Do What You Want" - Lady Gaga, Christina Aguilera

66. "Glory of the 80s" - Tori Amos

67. "The River of Dreams" - Billy Joel

68. "No Myth" - Michael Penn

69. "How Will I Know?" - Whitney Houston - Tit and I also saw The Bodyguard, the musical, live on stage in 2023.

70. "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here" - Bob Dylan

71. "Sirius" - The Alan Parsons Project. Which I believe was some kind of hovercraft. (That's a Simpsons reference, but in real life, this is the song that traditionally introduces the starting lineup of the Chicago Bulls.) 

72. "Bitch I'm Madonna" - Madonna with Nicki Minaj

73. "Queen of the Night" - Whitney Houston

74. Trouble - P!nk

75. "Poor Me Israelites" - Desmond Dekker. I know this song from the soundtrack of Drugstore Cowboy.

76. "Unholy" - Sam Smith, Kim Petras

77. "Drugstore Rock N Roll" - Janis Martin

78. "Malibu" - Hole

79. "Ho-Down" - Paula Abdul

80. "Never Ever" - All Saints

81. "Crush With Eyeliner" - R.E.M.

82. "Can't Stop Lovin' You" - Van Halen

83. "Sleepwalker" - The Wallflowers

84. "20th Century Boy" - T. Rex

85. "Helena" - My Chemical Romance

86. "Party in the USA" - Miley Cyrus

87. "The Devil's Waltz" - The Wallflowers

88. "Rebel Rebel" - David Bowie

88. "Annabel Lee RIP" - MC Lars

90. I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song) - The Ikettes

91. "Dive Bar In My Heart" - The Wallflowers

92. "Blister in the Sun" - Violent Femmes

93. "Country Pie" - Bob Dylan

94. "Rock Your Baby" - Wanda Jackson. Goddess bless Wanda Jackson. She is 86 years old and recently put out a cover of Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts" with Leilah Safka. (Leilah's mother Melanie Safka, who performed under the mononym Melanie, had such hits as "Brand New Key.")

95. In the Air Tonight - Phil Collins

96. "Mysterious Ways" - U2

97. Invisible City - The Wallflowers

98. "Come on Eileen" - cover by Saving Ferris

99. "Toxic Pony" - Britney Spears/Ginuwine mashup

By Britney Spears - Barnes and Noble, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75100779

When Bedtime Reading Enters My Dreams

I had another one of those dreams last night, a dream I was caught in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. When this happened before, I turned the dream into the short story "The Wild Ones," which you can read in Love, Lust, and Zombies, edited by Mitzi Szereto.

I always love a good zombie story, and I still have crushes on SEVERAL cast members from The Walking Dead, but the specific reason for this zombie dream had to do with my choice of reading material before bed. It was TVTropes.org, which I have mentioned several times previously as a favorite resource.

Like Wikipedia, it's also a good place to follow a proverbial rabbit trail. As one writer on Tumblr once said, "Does anyone else go on Wikipedia to look something up and then click on a bunch of random links and then half an hour later you’re 10 articles deep into the inner workings of Vietnamese politics?"

I do; I suppose that's part of the life of the writer. The day I found Wikipedia's pseudohistory category was a pretty clear example of that.

My search into TVTropes last night began with Rihanna. I'd heard her song "What Now" on Spotify the other day. I hadn't seen the video in a while, but I remembered that I contained images of the singer doing some moves that involve contortions and other non-dance moves that may remind viewers of either a person with a mental illness or film depictions of a person who is possessed (by evil spirits, perhaps).

This is the official video from Rihanna's VEVO page on YouTube. It's not available for embedding as of this writing.

This screencap captures Rihanna as she begins to fall backward.

I wondered if anyone had commented about this on TVTropes. Music videos are written of and discussed on the site, and I wondered if anyone had added "demonic possession" or anything similar as a trope in the "What Now" video. Well, there isn't even a page for the "What Now" video. The single and its accompanying video are barely mentioned on TVTropes at all.

This caused me to wonder a very specific thing: When I imagine the trope of what "demonic possession" looks like visually, what am I actually thinking of?

A related question I'd been interested in the past month or so had to do with the origin of the zombie myth in pop culture. Wikipedia actually does a really good job of answering that one. When I think of a zombie, I'm largely thinking of the visual language created by George Romero in his Night of the Living Dead, which I watched as a child and have seen several times since. It premiered in 1968, before I was born.

A fascinating audio book I heard recently (having borrowed it from the library via the Libby app) was Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Dr. Monica Murphy. In it, the authors mention that George Romero's film was inspired by Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. Even though Matheson calls his infected, murderous undead "vampires," the book essentially inspired the modern myth of the zombie apocalypse.

In turn, the bloodthirsty, relentless vampires in the book and its subsequent adaptations resemble animals with rabies. The human fear of zombies is closely related to the human fears of disease transmission and the kind of loss of control associated with neurological diseases like rabies. (Note that in real life, rabies isn't transmittable from one human being to another - not easily, anyway.)

And all of that was interesting to me, but if you visit the page on demonic possession on Wikipedia, you get more of a religious and historical discussion than a pop culture one. So to dig a little deeper into the cultural history of film depictions of demonic possession, I visited the TVTropes page on The Exorcist. (You may remember this post about the ongoing cultural relevance of Pazuzu.)

But then somehow, from there, I ended up on the page for Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1970 rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I've never seen the whole thing, only bits of it as a student in various Catholic schools. (I wanted to watch the TV version that aired earlier this year, but I missed it.)

If you go to TVTropes' Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV, i.e. opinions) page, you see there are versions of this musical in which Judas and Jesus are depicted with varying amounts of sexual tension between them. Now, when you say "Judas" to me, the first thing I think of is the Lady Gaga video. That is also unavailable for embedding, but it can be found here. Here's a little screencap:

Actor Rick Gonzalez (left) portrays Jesus, with Gaga as Mary Magdalene

That Judas? He's Norman Reedus, one of my Walking Dead crushes. I've been into him ever since my first viewing of Boondock Saints. And Judas x Jesus is the reason I had a dream about zombies last night.

It wasn't even a particularly scary dream; it mostly involved avoiding the darkness I Am Legend-style.

So if you're down to do a little wiki editing, someone could add some pop culture references to Wikipedia's demonic possession page and fill in some more of Rihanna's video tropes on TVTropes.org.

By the way, if you're really trying to give yourself nightmares, a good TV trope to explore is fold spindle mutilation. Read the real-life examples if you have a taste for gruesome reading, especially the Byford Dolphin diving bell accident story. It's both tragic and gross, if you're into that sort of thing. (And what human being doesn't have at least a little streak of morbid curiosity?)

Watch Rihanna’s Emmy winning Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 4 on Prime Video today! - this is an affiliate link