ONE-TRACK SMACKDOWN...................................................05 DEC 2005
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Artist:
TIM O'BRIEN |
[Editor's note: The following is the second in a series of occasional short features that opprobriate singularly unpalatable tracks.]
If Steve Earle and Steve Erkel were to collaborate on a break-up song, the result might be something like “Runnin’ Out of Memory.” One of two original tracks on his new album, Cornbread Nation, Tim O’Brien’s paean to geek love and sexual frustration pounds away at a PC metaphor until it’s as painfully distended as Michelle Duggar’s womb.
The storyline is simple: a poor schmuck is all amped up at the prospect of downloading a "full-length picture, jpeg format," some girl has sent him. Unfortunately, his sh*tty computer is unequal to the task, and despite several desperate maneuvers, his equipment lets him down. This relationship is tanking, and, clearly, it’s because our hapless swain’s “computer” is irrevocably impotent. "My color screen won’t even function," O’Brien wails, "My hard drive it went soft, my application coughed, and I’m a runnin’ out of memory for you." So what’s a poor, lonely soul to do? Continue to flog a dead horse, apparently, since O’Brien’s narrator consoles himself by (futilely) "strokin’ on the old mouse pad."
In summation: One Mac pun, perhaps, but an entire song in which dying love is likened to a crashing computer? That’s more corn pone than anyone should have to swallow.
hl