Airplanes as Shooting Stars

My last post on wishes reminded me of the song lyric "Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now." If you haven't heard the song, the chorus is sung by a female vocalist and the verses are performed by a male rapper. It plays on hip-hop stations (and possibly on pop stations but since I don't have one of those I don't know for sure) and I like it a lot. Or at least I think the chorus is hauntingly beautiful.

I listen to hip hop for 2 main reasons: of the 3 radio stations with good reception in my town, 1 is NPR 2 of them are hip hop; I like hip-hop dance. The genre has grown on me - I listened to very little of it in Boston where I had good access to alt rock stations so I only got the crossover songs.

(But don't you live in LA? Well, no. I live *near* LA in an electrical signal Bermuda Triangle. I get some sort of broadcast to nearly every frequency but almost none strong enough to overcome the static. I couldn't get TV without cable even before the digital crossover. To be fair, there's also a spanish language station that comes in fairly well. But I have to drive a couple valleys over to get the main LA area programming, or listen through my computer which was not a good option until I got wifi, and I have yet to set it up to make it workable and I'm insufficiently motivated to search it out most of the time. Plus, the station that convinced me I could find "my" music in LA folded in the recession.)

But Cranky Otter, you're a super-feminist. Why would you listen to hip hop? Isn't it all misogynistic hate crap? Well, no. There still is a lot of that kind of thing, but the times, they are achanging. Well, that and if I can't make out the lyrics, they can't bother me, can they? And sometimes, they're so overthetop I can't take offense. I like "Golddigger" as much as the next fan.

This year in particular, however, there have been multitudes of hip hop and pop stars who have hooked up in male-female pairings to create some songs that have broader appeal. Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg, Emininem and Rihanna, "B.o.B" and Haley someone (who sound to me like E & R...), and I think there are others. Have you noticed other stars joining forces this year?

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(side rant - I'm now forced to use my google login for youtube. I don't want to use my google login for youtube. And google? I don't want to watch a 15-30 second commercial before I go to a video that I only want to watch maybe 15 seconds of to screen to see if it's what I'm looking for. Overlay ads are tolerable, delay ads will make me stop using your product whenever I can get away with not using it. When your product is snippets of 10 second to 4 minute things that people may or may not watch all the way through, 30 second commercials can absorb more than 50% of the time alotted to that websurfing and completely derail me from my path. Plus, it will make me hate that ad. Ads several minutes into a show, meaning after I've committed to something like a full 22-44 minute episode on Hulu, are perfectly acceptable. When I'm just trying to find something in the first place? They will stop me cold and not achieve any of the goals of watching either the clip or the commercial. And that's why I haven't linked any youtube clips to this post- it was too annoying to vet them. /rant)