Connections (Music Advent days 1-4)

I said last night that I didn't have any nail polish icons, and so after I posted, I went and poked around in the icon communities, and to my amazement, among all the fandom icons I actually found a nail polish one. So don't think this is my nails or anything (my nails haven't been as long as the ones in that icon for some time now!) but hey, I have a nail icon! (And this is my 200th icon, for the record. I've been on LJ for a long time and I was a paid member and then a permanent one, so because of all that I have a lot of space for icons. I think it said I can have up to 235, now.)

That said, I'm not planning to write a whole entry about nail polish again, I'm not saying that might not happen before the end of Holidailies, if I can't think of anything else to write about, but definitely not today, anyway. Instead - as I usually have regularly for the past several years - I'm going to write about Music Advent. (Although there is a nail polish connection down here somewhere.)

I think this is the fourth year they've had Music Advent, where you pick out a music video daily from Dec.1-25. (This mostly takes place on Twitter using the hashtag #musicadvent, but has also expanded to other social media platforms to some extent, I think.) They've had other themes in other years, but this year it's modeled on something called The Chain, which is a BBC Radio thing. You just have to come up with a connection between one song and the next - any connection. I sat in the car one night on the commute home and came up with most of the ones I've used so far, but now (after the four in this entry) I'm just winging it. I figure if I get stuck I can just google the song and figure out some sort of connection to some other song - same producer, maybe, or same year - the possibilities are pretty endless.

So I started out with a connection in mind that I didn't actually use, but I figure if I get organized enough to be clever, I can work back around to it at the end and make it a circle. The one I didn't use was that this first song was on the mixtape that we used at our wedding reception. So if I end with another song from that tape, then I'll have a circle. (I don't think I remember what all the songs were on the tape, but we spent quite a lot of time on that tape and I remember quite a few of them, even after nearly 30 years.)

This song, was, in fact, the first song played at our wedding reception - "Chapel of Love" by the Dixie Cups:

Rob came up with some stuff that I wouldn't have thought of, and some of my friends from Austin helped, too. I was never a really huge fan of all the 60s girl-group stuff, so on my own I would never have thought of this song. (If you followed all my many Music Advent posts from past years, you may already know that I'm a much bigger fan of the oldies of the 80s - although we got married in 1987, so they weren't even oldies at the time - than the 60s.)

For Day 2, my connection was "from the chapel to the wedding" - which maybe wasn't the most glib phrasing I could have come up with, but anyway, it works as a connection.

This is definitely one of my 80s songs. I remember watching this one on MTV, back when MTV was relatively new and people actually sat and watched it.

So this second song was actually the first connection I thought of, because I had some Pandora 80s channel on in the car that night. It's not highly original but oh well. It's Billy Idol/American Idol. Rob and I watched American Idol for years so it was a pretty obvious one to me. And then I picked this particular song because it fit into the next connection, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Once I got to American Idol, I figured I could use anybody who was ever on Idol, really, but the most obvious people to use were Kelly and Carrie, because they were the biggest stars to come out of Idol in the US. Then once my brain got to that point, I thought, "Ooh, nail polish." Because Deborah Lippmann nail polishes all have names that are song titles, and I knew for sure that there was at least one that was a Kelly Clarkson song. I actually got on the website and made a list of songs I might want to use. The song I originally thought of which I knew was a polish was Stronger, but in fact I found at least four songs that I could have used: Miss Independent, Stronger, Before He Cheats, and Superstar. (I don't know which "Superstar" Ms Lippmann actually had in mind, but I knew that Clay Aiken sang it on Idol at some point.) I did get as far as looking for a video of Clay singing "Superstar" but I wasn't blown away by that video, so I went with Miss Independent instead. I do like the "Stronger" video but it's not my favorite of her songs. And I'm not a huge country fan (although I do like Carrie Underwood alright) so that's why I thought the older, more rock-inflected Kelly video reflected my taste the most, of those choices.

And then the other video I used the next day, which is also a Lippmann nail polish, is another 80s song, Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game":

This video feels familiar to me, but I doubt that this is the exact video MTV used back in the 80s because it's a bit risque for back then. (I mean, it's really not, because you can't actually see anything much, but just the fact that the girl in this video doesn't seem to have a top on for a good portion of the video probably was too much, in the 80s, even if it was cable.)

(and four videos is plenty for one entry so I'll continue this later)