SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

Artist: The Black Eyed Peas

Why this song is an adrenaline rush: “Let’s Get It Started” might be one of the greatest party records ever conceived. It alternately grooves and rocks but never stops, with each member of the Peas taking a turn leading the festivities. The chorus couldn’t be more infectious had it been concocted in a bioweapons laboratory. You could blast “Let’s Get It Started” in a mortuary, and people would dance.

Lyric line that’s fun to belt at maximum volume:

Get messy — loud and sick.
Your mind past normal on another head trip.
So, come dumb now, do not correct it.
Let’s get ig’nant, let’s get hectic…

Fun factoids:

• The song was originally released as “Let’s Get Retarded.” You can see why this would be a problem in today’s politically correct environment. Fortunately for the Peas, they rejected such alternate titles as “Let’s Get Crippled” and “Let’s Get Republican.”
• At one time, “Let’s Get It Started” held the record for most downloaded song. It was recently surpassed by another Black Eyed Peas number, “I Gotta Feeling.”

Other songs by the same artist that I could have chosen instead: The aforementioned “I Gotta Feeling”; “Boom Boom Pow.”

[Late to the party? Here’s an explanation of 36 Days of Adrenaline.]

In a New Year’s effort to force myself back into more consistent blogging habits — it’s hard to believe that I used to be good for at least four posts per week, not so long ago — I created a meme for myself, so that for at least 36 days, I can’t use “I have nothing to write about” as an excuse.

Some time ago, my iTunes account and I threw together a pair of 18-song CDs that I play in my car at eardrum-rending volume when I’m driving to the voiceover studio. For me as an actor, emotional energy is vitally important to my confidence, which in turn is essential to my performance. The more juice I can generate before I step in front of the microphone, the better off I am. With all that’s gone on in my life over these past many moons, I can’t always gin up that energy from whole cloth. Music enables me to get there. (The technique has proven effective against my persistent social anxiety also.)

These 36 songs have only one thing in common: They pump me up. They span a broad range of genres, from bubblegum pop and arena rock to heavy metal and hip-hop. Some of them are among my favorite songs — or at least are songs by some of my favorite artists — of all time. Others are songs by artists of whom I’m not particularly a fan, except for this one example. A couple I like only because they’ve got a good beat, and I can butt-dance to them in the driver’s seat of my Subaru.

All of them provide adrenaline.

I’m going to cover these in the order in which they appear in iTunes’ juvenile alphabetizing system (first names first, which annoys the devil out of the copy editor in me), with the exception of the first song, which I moved to the front of the line for lyrical appropriateness. Over these 36 posts, you’ll learn something about each of these songs — and probably more than you ever wanted to know about me.

Just so we’re clear: I won’t finish this project in 36 consecutive days. I don’t usually blog on the weekends, and Fridays are reserved for comic art and related folderol. I will probably interrupt on occasion to write about other matters of moment. But I will finish it.

The adrenaline rush begins tomorrow.