He Sounds So Put-Together
So I haven't read Special Topics in Calamity Physics. But man, Gawker gets it right in making fun of Marisha Pessl's music taste.
From her bit with the Onion A. V. Club's Random Rules:
Atlantic Starr, "Always"
U2, "One"
Nick Drake, "Northern Sky"
Tom Petty, "Learning To Fly"
Kings Of Convenience, "Toxic Girl"
Bloc Party, "Blue Light (Engineers' Anti-Gravity Mix)"
Linkin Park, "Numb/Encore"
Louis XIV, "Finding Out True Love Is Blind"
Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Free Bird"
Some of those songs are pretty good, for sure. And everybody is allowed to have some Skynyrd. And I may or may not have a few Linkin Parks songs still in my iTunes from high school. But... still. It's really uninspiring.
And really, it's her comments about the songs that are the worst. This is the part that Gawker pointed out, on Nick Drake:
MP: I never knew who Nick Drake was until the Garden State soundtrack, and then I got his greatest hits, and I really like it. It's really restful and thoughtful, something so pure about his sound. It's good for when you're walking around New York listening to your iPod--nice to listen to instead of all the craziness happening around you. I don't know anything about him, though.The A.V. Club: He was a reclusive, depressive guy who died very young from a drug overdose.
MP: Really? You're kidding. He sounds so put-together.
Oh dear.
But really it's ok, because while Jenny Lewis had some better tunes come up on her list, she also sounded kinda silly in talking about them. And Matt Friedberger totally had that "She put the lime in the coconut" song come up on his shuffle.