1) His real name is not Billy Ocean. It's Leslie Sebastian Charles. One would figure, because "Billy Ocean" is a pretty obvious stage name, one that is so ridiculously stagey that it would have been the name of that pop star guy that came to Bayside to make the anti-drug PSA but then, ironically, tried to get the Bayside gang to do drugs, had it not been taken, so instead they had to call him "Johnny Dakota." (What's completely appalling is that I knew the guy's name was "Johnny Dakota" off the top of my head.)

2) Multiple versions of "Caribbean Queen" were recorded for different regions of the world with the lyrics slightly changed. Such renditions were called "European Queen" and "African Queen." "Caribbean Queen," however, was still the worldwide hit.

Nevertheless, Billy Ocean was the first to remake products for different markets, directly leading to the American remake of The Office and the Communist Party of the United States.

3) Ween's "Ocean Man" is not about Billy Ocean. In theory.

4) Ocean's last top 40 hit in the U.S. was 1989's "License to Chill." The reason this was Ocean's last hit: because it was called "License to Chill." Wouldn't it be a horrible mix-up if he thought he had a license to kill, like James Bond, but he really only had a license to chill, because he's Billy Ocean, but before he finally read all that license paperwork he'd already killed like 40 people? This is precisely what happened, which is really why Billy Ocean has not been had a hit song in more than two decades - because he's in British spy prison.

Jimmy Buffett recorded an unrelated song called "License to Chill," which is precisely the kind of song that Jimmy Buffett, and only Jimmy Buffett, should make.

5) When "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" came out, my brother came up with a clever parody. "Get out of my dreams..." wait for it..."get into my pants." See, what he did there, was that he substituted "car" for "pants," playfully subverting the song's implication that once the girl was in the car that she would be doing the sex with a lyric that makes the sex happen immediately.

My other memory of this song is of a wallflowery pigeon-toed girl (the older sister of the pigeon-toed douchebag who told me there was no Santa) performing this song at the school talent show, which at my school meant "lip-synched to it." Well, and she wore sunglasses. Because that signified "cool."

I believe there were also hand-drawn cardboard convertibles. Which are also "cool."

6) Billy Ocean and Patrick Ewing are not the same person.

Top: Billy Ocean. Bottom: Patrick Ewing

Song: "Almost There," from The Princess and the Frog
Writer: Randy "Short People" Newman
Probably is: A song about friendship or believing in yourself or persistence or some other poorly-defined good thing.

Song: "Down in New Orleans," from The Princess and the Frog
Writer: Randy "I Love L.A." Newman
Probably is: Vaguely racist, and frames for the audience where vaguely racist movie is set.

Song: "Loin de Panama," from Paris 36
Writers: Reinhardt Wagner and Frank Thomas, in the first collaboration because the great-grandson of Robert Wagner (Hitler's favorite composer; the Aryan Nation's Kenny Loggins) and "The Big Hurt."
Probably is: An exquisite, traditional French song with accordion as sung by a woman who you can tell by her voice that she is attractive; or, a man that sounds like or is Charles Aznavour.

Song: "Take It All," from Nine
Writer: Maury Yeston
Probably is: Trippy, theatrical sounding show tune written especially for the movie adaptation of a Broadway musical in an attempt to win Best Song Oscar that sounds so much like the rest of the music that you suspect it was probably a song written for the stage show that was cut because it was a little weak.

Song: "The Weary Kind," from Crazy Heart
Writers: Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett
Probably is: Basically "The Wrestler" from a movie that is basically The Wrestler.

Read each item below and determine if it's the flowery title of a work by Lord Byron, the greatest of the Romantic poets, or the flowery title of a deep album cut by the delightful Athens band who did that "let's pretend we're in Antarctica" song.

a) "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"

b) "Coquelicot's Tea Party"

c) "Our Spring is Sweet Not Fleeting"

d) "Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog"

e) "And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair"

f) "Peacock Parasols"

g) "Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty's Bloom!"

h) "By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept"

i) "The Great Battle of the Unfriendly Ridiculous"

j) "Raptures Rapes the Muses"

k) "Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer"

l) "I Was in a Landscape in Your Dream"

m) "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept"

n) "Let's Do Everything for the First Time Forever"

Answers: a, d, e, g, h, k, m are Byron; b, c, f, i, j, l, n are Of Montreal.

Neighbor: I think he actually called himself “Mikey B” with a straight face
Year: 1998-99
Location: Shitty dorm room
Music: Mikey B. listened only to  mid-‘90s, super-fast, aggressive techno, although he was the kind of guy that would call whatever that shit was by its specific, technical name, so I guess he listened to “house” or “jungle” or “drum and bass.” But seeing as how I enjoy actual music, I don’t give a fuck what precise type of retarded robot masturbation that was. Mikey B. never turned the techno off. Not ever. He would wear headphones when study hours kicked in, and when he left for what I think was his only class, he'd take the time to turn the volume down, but leave it running, so the techno could resume the very second he returned to his cell.

But one weekend, Mikey B. went home. And Mikey B. left the music playing all weekend, turned all the way up, all the way up, on an endless Winamp playlist on his computer, because this was 1998 and he was the kind of douche who had hours of techno MP3s on his computer before anybody else had MP3s of anything. All goddamn weekend: “bumpa bumpa bumpa bumpa wah-wah…” I’m not sure if it was different songs or the same one on an infinite loop of torture. After each spending the first night elsewhere, my roommate and I had had enough by Saturday morning, broke in to Mikey B.’s room, and ripped the computer’s plug out of the wall. Mikey B. used headphones for the duration of the academic year. I still hate him, and I still hate techno.

Neighbors: Methy, white trash dudes with methy, white trash names I failed to learn or remember
Year: 2000-01
Location: Shitty walk-up
Music: On the second floor of a two-floor apartment building was my apartment and that of these guys. The first was an affable but scrawny dude with a flesh-colored beard who only wore stained white T-shirts way before Andrew W.K. made it sort of cool. The other guy also had a flesh-colored beard, but he wore stained black Metallica T-shirts. Also, and keep in mind that he lived on the second floor of a building accessible only by stairs, the guy had no legs and only mangled stumps for arms. The lack of legs did not discourage him from angrily climbing down those stairs each day to go buy cigarettes, nor did his arm stubs prevent him from smoking all 20 of those cigarettes each day.
After receiving many low knocks on my door, I went outside and lit many of those cigarettes. But despite that act of goodwill, the relationship was strained. The only song the meth guy and thalidomide guy seemed to own was Nelly’s “Country Grammar,” which was the style at the time. No kidding – 12 to 15 hours a day for the first week I was there, Nelly’s “Country Grammar,” over and over. This situation did not work. They were living off of Natty Light and disability checks, I was an upper-level college student who was also trying to lose 50 pounds as directed by his doctor. In other words, I was pretty fucking pissed off all of the time, and then I also had to hear “Country Grammar” 50 times a day and well into the night. So to counter the late night Nelly, I put my speakers up to the wall and blasted Radiohead’s “Idioteque” at 7:30 one morning. I put it on repeat, turned it all the way up, and went to class. Nelly was never heard again. 

Neighbor: "Debbie"
Year: 2005-06
Location: Shitty apartment complex
Music: Every Saturday morning, I’d hear the steps on the stairs, the next door neighbor’s door open, some muffled conversation between adults, then two sets of steps go back down the stairs – the ancient American ritual of the weekend divorced dad handoff. And then, a few moments later, and over and over again for a good two hours or so, I heard Los Lonely Boys’ horrible, horrible “Heaven.” It was in this time that cheesy neighbor lady Debbie enjoyed her special momma Saturday morning all by herself chillout and relax time. I imagine, but not too vividly, that this involved sexy dancing in the mirror, a few bottles of cheap red wine, and this song, a ridiculous Mexican restaurant soft rock abomination made for people who think Santana is metal and pizza is fancy. The only time “Heaven” stopped is when the CD would advance to the next song, which sounded exactly like “Heaven.” It would only be on for a few seconds, because the new song would jar Debbie awake enough to get out of the bath and click the button to send it back to "Heaven," which is good, because she'd just fallen asleep in the bath and would have drowned otherwise, or she would have had to have listened to a song that wasn't "Heaven."

“You know that song, ‘Heaven’?" Debbie would say to her boyfriend, the born-again Christian motorcycle enthusiast, when he arrived late in her Saturday morning me-time, “it really is!” And then she would laugh, drink another bottle of red wine, turn on “Heaven,” do the sexy mirror dance for Rick or whatever his stupid name was, and then I would move to a place with a yard and no adjoining walls for once in my goddamn adult life.

I apologize for the light posting in the past few weeks, and I apologize for the light posting for the next few weeks. I’ve been doing about one a week, if I can manage, and will probably up that to a whopping two per week soon. But I’ve got a really, really good excuse: 

I got a book deal. Major publisher. So Winter 2011, look for I Love Music / I Hate Music in stores and on magical e-book devices.

Yup. All this music nonsense will be available for purchase in handy printed and bound form in a few short months. So if you like reading this stuff for free, I hope you will also like reading it in exchange for a small amount of money. But unlike other blog-to-book projects, there’s very, very little overlap – the blog and book co-exist, and do not overlap.

I thank you for your loyal readership and enthusiasm, as you have made this possible. More high volumes of music-related esoteric nonsense forthcoming.