Niki Tehranchi

My new favorite group are the Gym Class Heroes. These kids from New York are freaking hilarious, creative, and have totally brilliant hooks (although to be fair, they ahem borrow a lot of that stuff from older hits). Singing hip hop with real musical instruments a la Arrested Development except they write funny hipster songs about the MySpace/Facebook phenomena (New Friend Request) rather than social justice and racial inequality. Of course, they also stick to the bittersweet classic boy meets girl story (Cupid's Chokehold). Their video for their old school remix dance hit Clothes Off takes them to Las Vegas where they have a dance-off a la Michael Jackson in Bad with some furry friends :-) Rather than being some pre-fabricated record company boy band, the band formed organically, with the 2 leading members meeting as teen-agers in their high school gym class in the nineties (hence their name).

I haven't been this excited by a new music group in a loooooooooooonnnng time. As a child and teen-ager, I used to love all kinds of music. I could spend hours in my room choreographing a ballet to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and then go nuts to the Cure. My CD library used to offer everything from Barry Manilow to Tricky, Pari Zanganeh to Jalal Hemati, Dalida to MC Solaar, Nirvana to Pagliacci. Then, a few years ago, I completely lost interest in music. I was driving an extremely long commute to work, something like 3 hours per day (no I am not a trucker) and in order to keep awake, I tuned in to talk radio. After that, I never really found the time or found the interest again to listen to new music. I gave away or threw out most of my CDs. From time to time, I recycled old favorites from iTunes when the mood hit.

Then recently, I quite by accident found the song Cupid's Chokehold in one of hubby's mixed CDs (which is not quite a cover but rather an homage to the earlier Supertramp song Take a look at my girlfriend). It managed to take me back and put a big grin on my face. I love their old school style and now I am hooked. I hope you will be too.