That Word: I Don’t Think It Was What You Think It Was

So on the Apple TV, there are many apps, one of which of course is the YouTube app. I don’t spend a lot of time watching stuff on YouTube, but when there are a few minutes to kill—say, for instance, I’m waiting for my wife to come and sit down so we can watch House’s minions jab giant needles into people’s spines—I will sometimes call up the YouTube app for a few minutes. Now, I know YouTube has a radicalization problem, whereby its algorithmic recommendation engine tends to push more and more extreme videos based on engagement, but my YouTube experience isn’t like that; for me, the recommendations consist mostly of funny animal videos, people talking about science fiction or fantasy books or shows, various Honest Trailers, a lawyer’s humorous reactions to various legal scenarios both real and fictional, and indie music stuff. Such as this:

Seeing as how Beach House is one of my favorite bands (“Space Song”, anybody?), and I had a little time to kill, I went ahead and watched this video. And of course I had the closed captioning turned on, because I always do. And of course, there were no actual, human-composed captions for this video; the captions were produced on the fly by an interpreter of some sort. And you know what that means.

Yes, today I learned that Beach House’s music is indebted to The Cocktoot Twins! Wait, the what now? Are we invoking Rule 34? No no, we are, in fact, talking about The Cocteau Twins, a Scottish band that was composed of three musicians, which I guess is a required number of members for bands with “Twins” in the name. Now, despite the fact that they were popular* during my musical formative years, I don’t actually have any Cocteau Twins in my collection, so let’s give them a listen, shall we?

Hmm … So, can I see where there’s a resemblance between their music and Beach House’s music? Yes, yes, I can. Do I like these songs? Sure, they’re all right. Do I like Beach House more? Yep. So I probably won’t be picking up any Cocteau Twins** in the future. One’s phone can only hold so many songs, after all.***

* One can only imagine, though, what heights The Cocteau Twins would have achieved if they had only actually been called The Cocktoot Twins …
** Or Cocktoot Twins, for that matter.
*** Unless one uses something like Spotify, which I quite famously don’t. Good thing, too. My wife heard me playing a song from Fisher (the proper Fisher, not that clown with the sunglasses) and tried to find it on Spotify, only to discover that Spotify has like one Fisher album, and it’s not even their best one. Boo, Spotify.