deebeedee

There’s this Citibank commercial that cracks me up each time I see it. It shows a woman at a grocery store who mistakes a full-figured woman for being pregnant. The offending woman, embarrassed, utters a simple “thank you?” and all is fine and dandy. The voiceover goes, “It’s amazing what a simple ‘thank you’ can do.” Boy, I wish uttering those two words in real life can diffuse awkward situations just as easily.

“Thank you” songs are similar in a certain sense. There’s something light-hearted about them that takes the edge off of a stressful day. Dido surely feels this way when she sings Thank You, perhaps the most famous pop song about gratitude. Geggy Tah’s Whoever You Are, is so fun to listen to. Its chorus, “All I want to do is to thank you even though I don’t know who you are. You let me change lanes while I was driving in my car,” is a catchy little ditty that never fails to put a smile on my face. Del the Funkee Homosapien ends his 1993 underground hip-hop classic album with a tune called Thank Youse. In it, he takes time to thank his listeners, which is quite a nice departure from the rest of the album where braggadocio lyrics prevail.

Giving thanks has a way of focusing oneself towards the positive instead of the negative. And songs of gratitude, when directed towards the Creator, express the realization that every good thing is a gift from God and is not something earned.

*This was supposed to be my Thanksgiving post but it totally slipped my mind because of the busyness of the holiday.

Quick! Launch iTunes and get today’s free download, Nelly Furtado’s Try. It may not be there tomorrow. Apple has been giving away free songs from different artists almost every other day since it released its latest version of iTunes a week ago. At that rate I can fill up my 1st gen, 5-GB iPod with free mp3’s* in about, oh, five years.

*or more accurately AAC’s. Bah, it just doesn’t flow.

Update: I really should be more thorough researching stuff before posting anything. It was only the first week that Apple was giving away one song a day. After that, it’s been one free song a week.

Look at what I unearthed while doing some spring cleaning in the garage several days ago: a BusinessWeek magazine dated November 26, 1984 with Steve Jobs and John Sculley on the cover.

A year and a half before this issue appeared in the newsstands Jobs lured Sculley from Pepsi to become the CEO of Apple with this line, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” A year after the issue came out, Jobs stepped down after a boardroom drama had ensued that left Sculley at the helm. Sculley eventually resigned from Apple in 1993 and Jobs, the prodigal son, came back in 1997. Ironically, Steve Jobs is now in partnership with Pepsi to promote Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Hmmm, is that a symbolic sea of “sugared water” behind Jobs and Sculley?

The New York Post reports that a song featured in one of Apple’s iPod commercials is not available in iTMS (must be a slow newsday*). Looks like a familiar problem for Apple’s online music store. The songs of one of my all-time favorite hip-hop groups, De La Soul, are not available either, despite the fact that the group appeared in an Apple Switch ad back in 2002. It’s understandable that legitimate online music stores such as Apple’s are, at this time, still building up their music catalogues. But don’t you expect that if a song or artist is featured in an ad, some effort should be made in getting their songs available for download?

(*and by extension, a slow blog day, hehe)

Excerpt from VH1’s interview with hip-hop group the Black Eyed Peas:

VH1: Your Filipino background plays a big part in Elephunk’s “The Apl Song.”

Apl.de.Ap: Definitely. I was always inspired by Filipino folk songs, so the chorus is me singing in Tagalog, “Listen, I got a story to tell of all the events that have been going on in the promised land I was born in.” In the song I talked about the Philippines and the way of life over there.

Will.I.Am: A lot of people in the urban areas talk about the ghetto life, but that’s luxury compared to where he comes from.

Apl.de.Ap: In the Philippines, you’ve got to dig up the ground to do a number two, and then you’ve got to cover it up. You got to pump the water out of the ground to wash your clothes and your hands. That’s my ghetto! I remember coming to America for the first time, and going to Will’s house. He still lives in the projects. I was like, man, I want to live here! It’s so dope!

Will.I.Am: Yeah, we have dogs for pets and cats and birds. This fool had a bison! Right?

Apl.de.Ap: We’d wash our water buffalo, tie ‘em to the tree next to our house, and then the next day we use them to dig out the soil to plant like sweet potatoes and rice and corn.

Will.I.Am: He’s adopted. He’s like one of those Sally Struthers 25-cents-a-day kids.

The Apl Song, sung by African-American/Filipino Apl.de.Ap, can be heard via iTunes, now available for Mac and Windows.