There’s a theme to this Friday Random Five, and that’s the goodbyes that we say in our lives. Some are better than others.

Goodbye by The Sundays Album: Blind
I’ve had to say goodbye to some old ways this year, old belief systems better off abandoned. This song has been on my mind from time to time throughout the process. Harriet seems to be giving her views on the Bible, against the Sundays’ trademark jangle.

I vow that its goodbye to the old ways
Those stories were a good read
They were dumb as well

I could never be seen
Falling down on my knees crawling
O no, talk about a sell

I, for one, got sold for a long long time. Silly nonsense. Goodbye to all that.

Ciao! by Lush Album: Lovelife
Lush was not a happy band toward the end, and it showed. During their last tour, the band seemed beaten and tired. Emma was particularly surly onstage. One fan shouted, “C’mon, Emma, smile!” and got the Death Glare. “Ooh,” Miki tut-tutted, “don’t do that.”
It was coming unstuck in interviews as well. From an interview:

Does the band work very democratically or is there a chief?

(Phil and Chris exchange glances, Emma looks down at the table).
Phil: Miki and Emma.
Emma: It depends on what you’re talking about. Miki does the set lists. I don’t think I’m a tyrant or anything… (to the guys) Am I? (Phil nods once, almost imperceptibly, Chris just grins).

You (Emma) and Miki write the songs, how do you present them to Phil and Chris?
Emma: We come with the finished songs…
Chris: “…here, do this.”

(There is an awkward silence at this point and it feels as though we’ve gone someplace taboo.)

Within six months of the interview, Chris would hang himself and Lush would finish.

On this last album, Lush gives the bitterest break-up song you’re ever likely to hear. A duet between Miki and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, the pair take turns slagging each other off and saying how happy they’ve been since parting ways. Ciao, indeed.

John Wayne is Big Leggy by Haysi Fantayzee Album: Battle Hymns for Children Singing
Oh, no. It’s Haysi Fantayzee. Hide.

I think they must have been the first band of the MTV generation to take image to the limit, all the way back in 1982. Culture Club? Jellyfish? (Who?) Imitators. Picture if you will a guy and a girl dressed in thrift store/gypsy/hillbilly/dreadlocks eclectic everything. The cover close-up’s worth a click. And the music? Ira Robbins’ comparison: “like having painful dentistry performed by an overbearing three-year-old” is not far off. Unless you’re in an extremely good mood, in which case it magically transforms into something so loony, so perfect that you must laugh.

What is this song about? What does the title mean? Does it matter? With this loping mix of country and mariachi, it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. So let’s say a cautious ‘goodbye’ to Haysi Fantayzee and move on to…

The World at Large Alone by Stephen “Tintin” Duffy Album: The Ups and Downs
A melancholic goodbye song from Stephen Duffy in his Tintin days. Look at him. The epitome of arch-style, leaning at a rakish angle. This album was cafè style and good taste, well-mannered pop in convenient disc form.

This final song on the album is a torchy tear-jerker. You can hear a sound clip at the new Duffypedia, a great place for all things Duffy. (Check out The Lilac Time while you’re at it.)

Cindy it’s over
Although it never started
I thought I’d better tell you
It’s over girl, it’s over.

There’s a story. The night before I went away forever, I met with The Girl. The one I listened to this album with over and over. Her name was not Cindy, but close enough. “Don’t play that song,” she asked. “Just don’t play it.”

Run Wild by New Order Album: Get Ready
Get Ready is an album of jagged guitar and electronica. But this last song is acoustic, like coming out of the city and emerging into bucolic fields. You get out of the car and sit down on the grass and it’s warm and sunny.

The chorus:

If Jesus comes
To take your hand
I won’t let go
I won’t let go.

Sometimes you can’t say goodbye.

I remember the Pastor. He used to tell us the craziest stuff in church. He said that if we didn’t get into the highest kingdom of Heaven, we’d be resurrected without genitalia. He told us that at some point Satan would be given control of all the water on Earth, and anyone in the water at that precise instant would be pulled under and drowned. He told us that Jesus would ‘probably’ come again in 1986. (Well, at least that one was falsifiable.) And we just slurped it all up because he was so entertaining and he read so many church books.

The other one he told us was that when we played records, there was a certain ‘spirit’ who was assigned to that particular record, and the spirit could ‘come into the room’ when that record was played. How does that work?

Interviewer: So you’re the spirit assigned to the new Britney Spears record.
Spirit: Yeah, that’s right.
Interviewer: The whole record?
Spirit: Nah, guv, just the single.
Interviewer: What were you doing for eons of time before the release of the Spears disc?
Spirit: Well, you know, causing disease and insanity, infesting herds of swine — can’t be bad — and I was also assigned to the original ‘Hotel California’ vinyl release. Which still gets a lot of play, so it keeps me busy, you know!
Interviewer: So how does the infiltration work?
Spirit: Well, when they play the record, I have permission to enter the room and tempt, entice, and ensnare without let or hindrance. Great stuff.
Interviewer: Did you have trouble with the move to CD’s?
Spirit: There was some legal stuff to do with multi-format, but it all got sorted out in the end. Piece of cake, mate.

So you can understand how I was getting Pastor flashbacks when I saw this article: Raunchy music influences teens’ sexual habits

TEENAGERS whose music players are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study has found.

‘Raunchy’ sounds kind of loaded. I thought I’d get it from the source, so I found this month’s copy of Pediatrics. They don’t use the term ‘raunchy’. Instead they settled on ‘degrading’. That’s a lot less opinionated.

I wondered who was behind this study, and it turned out to be some people from the Rand Corporation.

The RAND Corporation is a global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments and commercial organizations.

Notable RAND participants:
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, V.P. Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff
Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of RAND Corporation from 1981-1986 and current Secretary of Defense for the United States (as of May 2006)
Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991-1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man

Could you hang on a minute? That was my warning signal going off again. Sorry. Have to get it checked.

The devil’s in the definitions on these things. How did they tell ‘degrading’ sexual lyrics from ‘non-degrading’ sexual lyrics?

Two raters independently coded the lyrics, obtained from Internet Web sites, of all songs (n = 193) from each of the 16 albums. The unit of analysis was the song. Raters first judged whether a song contained 1 or more references to sexual behavior (implicit or explicit references to intercourse, oral sex, or other sexual acts). For each song deemed to contain more than 1 sexual reference, raters then judged whether the song contained only nondegrading references to sex or contained more than 1 degrading sexual reference.

Two raters, eh? How well did they agree?

To establish interrater reliability for classifying the type of content in a song, raters double-coded one third (n = 63) of all of the songs. These songs were selected via stratified random sampling, with artists as strata. Inter-rater reliability was satisfactory (Cohen’s kappa ranged from 0.74 to 0.92).

I dunno, that kappa seems a little low for a two-class categorisation, especially when they didn’t even bother to check all the songs.

And what kinds of songs turn out to be ‘degrading’? Check the table.

What a surprise. Rap and R&B. Everything else is perfectly fine and non-degrading.

Oops, there goes the signal again. It’s been so sensitive lately.

Could it be that the coders just didn’t like that kind of music? And that sexual activity correlates with other factors, both socio-economic and educational, as shown by their own data? And it may be more helpful to address these trends instead of printing stickers that say “Listening to Ja Rule will get you pregnant.”

Pardon me for saying, but phony, biased, politically-motivated research pisses me off, and I think this one’s at least two out of three.