XM - Xtended Mediocrity

One thing about XM's gigagargantuan music collection is that you end up hearing the "extended dance mix" of songs. I'm not sure if people still do "extended dance mixes" in this day and age because I've never been one for clubbing, and I'm sure no one's downloading this crap to their iPods.

Twice on XM, I've heard the classic '80s oddity AEIOU Sometimes Y by the band that loves the alphabet even more than Cookie Monster, EBN-OZN. And twice, I've heard the extended dance mix. That means roughly 80 more repetitions of the little synthesized bass line and the ... well, the other synthesized lines. Let's face it -- the music in this song is just there to provide a couple of interludes in the guy's amusing story of picking up a Swedish woman who was having cappucino but decided, though she was high at the time, that things were getting a little too intense on the first "date," so she takes off and only has a chance to call him because he was, in the best phrase of the song, "feeling cavalier," and she calls him so he can scoff "Huh! Do I want to go OUT!" before she apparently takes him back to her place and does something -- can't imagine what -- to make him start chanting "Lola, Lola" until we all wonder what kind of name "Lola" is for a Swedish woman. I guess "Ingrid," "Hanna" or "Moerskedjsvik" wouldn't fit the meter.

So the extended dance mix in this song struggles mightily to fill the void between verses. When you're remixing roughly four notes from a synthesizer, there's only so much you can do. At some point, there's a bit more to the story, but it's forgettable. And at some random point, the guy screams for a really long time. Not a fun rock scream like in Won't Get Fooled Again, but an intense horror-movie scream, as if delaying gratification with this hot Swedish chick and being unable to understand why because her language has more vowels than his is roughly akin to being stuck in a torture device of the Spanish Inquisition or perhaps waking up from a near-death, permanently scarring experience only to be told that Amidala is dead.

I can't blame EBN-OZN or their producers for making the mix. But I can ask XM why they play this version more often than, you know, the good version.