Home | Away

Friday, December 01, 2006

ABF Friday:  Colors and Numbers Edition!

During our 23-person Thanksgiving bacchanal, one of the Guest Kids fired up the DVD and started a game of “Riff,” a music-trivia game available at your local box store for about $14.  We were immediately hooked, because the very first question required the two teams (we divided the room of ten people into two teams, you see) to trade answers as quickly as possible, and the question was simply, name a rap act.  It was hilarious.  For one thing, it quickly broke the room into pre- and post-Tupac quadrants, with the over-40s like me yelling out “Treacherous Three,” “LL Cool J,” “Too Short,” “Kool Moe Dee,” and “EPMD” (as well as the classic Grandmaster Five, Sugarhill Gang, and—who could forget—Kurtis Blow) and the under-25s yelling back . . . well, to be honest, I’m not sure what they were saying.  It sounded like a series of numbers and letters, 50 this and M N or J Z that and a mess of other ludicrousness.

Anyway, it went on for a good eight or ten minutes, with each team giving the other only a few seconds to respond.  Because if you couldn’t think of someone in ten seconds, you were obviously scraping too hard at the bottom of the mental barrel.  Seriously, by that time we’d even exhausted Vanilla Ice and Kris Kross.  But come to think of it, I’m not sure anyone said the Geto Boyz.

In a later game, Riff asked us to do rapid-fire Beatles songs.  Of all things!  In this house!  Nick and I batted titles back and forth for about five minutes, with help from Janet and her sister Todd, but when we started naming “Old Brown Shoe” and “Ask Me Why”—no, not “Tell Me Why”—and “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” well before anyone had said “Yesterday” or “Help,” we were effectively saying to each other that we could go on all night and were willing to reach deep into the L/M songbook for things like “A World Without Love,” and start a fight about whether it was properly a Beatles song, not to mention songs written and recorded but not released, like “If You’ve Got Trouble” or Harrison’s “You Know What to Do” and “Not Guilty.” So we declared it a tie.

But the challenges that drove us crazy were these—which is why I’m passing them along, at a $14 savings, to you.  One: bands with colors in their names.  Two: bands with numbers in their names.

Both questions elicited dozens of answers, but when we woke up the next morning we were racked with remorse for not having said (for example) Cream or Ladysmith Black Mambazo.  “Shit!” I remarked, wittily.  “Ladysmith Black Mambazo?  We didn’t even say Black Uhuru.” We did manage to dredge up most of the obvious suspects, including Green Day and Pink Floyd and Black Flag and the White Stripes, and we credit ourselves with remembering to throw in the Indigo Girls and the New Riders of the Purple Sage, as well as the deservedly obscure Blue Cheer.  But we were apparently too addled with wine and tryptophan to call to mind Shocking Blue, Tangerine Dream, and the immortal Frank Marino and Magohany Rush.

Bands with numbers were even worse.  We decided that jazz combos didn’t count, from Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five right through to Thirty-Seven Guys Playing with Wynton Marsalis.  Again, we disposed of the obvious pretty quickly, from Blink-182 and 98° and Matchbox 20 all the way down to the Bobby Fuller Four and the Fives Associated with Dave Clark and Ben Folds.  The Treacherous Three and Fab Five Freddy reappeared from the rap thread; 10,000 Maniacs and André 3000 (yeah, he’s a band) represented some of the higher numbers.  I was duly proud of myself for remembering the seventeens, Heaven 17 and 17 Pygmies (I still own a vinyl copy of Jedda by the Sea, which stunned the Charlottesville postpunk scene twenty-two years ago and is quite beautiful), and of course I did not fail to name Haircut 100, but somebody deserves a handshake for thinking of Nine Inch Nails and Sixpence None the Richer and even Three Jacks and a Jill.  When we ran out of bands we began to try to pass off things like “Butterfield 8” and “Twelve Angry Men,” which fooled no one, not even the under-25s.

So we’re bequeathing these to you, dear readers.  Bands with colors and numbers in their names.  Go ahead!  Make us feel even more remorse for all the things we forgot!  (I’m sure a certain Insufferable Music Snob® would have pwned us all.) Have a fun color-by-numbers weekend, and don’t forget to check out this fascinating look into the work of the Iraq Study Group!

Posted by Michael on 12/01 at 12:21 PM
(239) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages