Guilty pleasures

I listen to the radio a lot when I drive because sometimes it's nice to be surprised by a song you'd forgotten you'd ever liked. Of course, this means you do get a lot of drivel too, but them's the breaks, right?

Anyways, my favorite station is the local college one, but they insist on playing horrid bluegrass and the like during the day (indie music comes on at night), so I must constantly hunt for acceptable alternatives while the sun's up. And I am one of those people who is constantly scrolling through my options, too - gotta love the scan button.

So I have stumbled across a station whose music I would mock when surrounded by others but while riding solo I do love to car-dance to. How to describe its music....late 1980s or early 1990s hip-hop/Top 40 I guess. Just the sort of stuff I listened to while in high school; in fact, a lot of the songs remind me of riding on the bus with my volleyball team off to a match or something along those lines. The "bands" - or I should say, "performers," because I really doubt they wrote their own music OR lyrics - are groups like Bell Biv Devoe, Tony Toni Tone, En Vogue, etc.

The other day I heard the song, "Mentirosa." Come on, you know it - it has that riff, "Today you tell me something / y manana oltra cosa." Lyrics half in Spanish, half in English, all idiotic about a guy's girlfriend who's cheating on him? When I was in high school, I took French, as it's such a useful language in growing up in LA. Oh wait, no it's not. But I took it anyways, so I wasn't able to crack all the lyrics to "Mentirosa" while the song was popular. But now, after having studied Spanish (erm, years ago, but good enough!), I can understand them entirely. It's kinda fun, albeit extremely insipid to be so intensely focused on what they're saying.

My favorite part I think is the "spoken word" portion in the middle, where the singer gets to face the woman who done him wrong and accuse her of all sorts of infidelities. The portion where you just know he's thinking, "Ooh, burn!" is when he asks her if she can go to confession...and tell the truth! Undaunted, she claims she does, and lobbies the query back at him. He of course avers he is completely innocent and has nothing to confess. Surrrre you don't.

At any rate, music industry, take note: more Spanglish songs, please! It's like a crossword puzzle for your ears. Or maybe a Word Search for them.