Songs To Learn And Sing #26

As we enter the last few weekdays of this feature that if nothing else means we've been able to sit back and let everyone else do the work for us... Actually, tell you what, we had Tom Campesinos! on this feature yesterday and that went down well, so we went and got his band's singer involved too. Gareth Campesinos!:

Bikini Kill - In Accordance To Natural Law

This song is called In Accordance To Natural Law and is by a band called Bikini Kill. It is 28 seconds long. If it was a second longer it would not be perfect. But it's not and it is. It wasn't until not many years ago that I got into the idea of girls playing guitars. I'd visited my friend Hessy for the first time. We were browsing in HMV and she thrust an album at me. I remember thinking it was hideously priced for a collection of just 9 songs. Then she told me the whole album was only 17 minutes long and I nearly choked. But I was pretty much in awe of this girl in the Sonic Youth t-shirt (a GIRL? that likes GOOD MUSIC? woah. It wasn't even that Goo t-shirt that everybody has. And she got it FROM A SHOW!!) so I bought the album and then we went outside and sat on a bench by her bus stop. She smoked menthols and I decided it was time I learnt to smoke. But I never did and she smokes Marlboro Lights now anyways, so it couldn't have been that great. And so she took the CD from my hands and jammed it in her Discman.

She skipped to track 4 and shoved one of the headphones into my ear. What followed in the next half minute is one of those few gaping jaw moments (and that's how long it was. It was merely a moment). I didn't quite realise what I'd heard. I though Hessy had shouted "FUCK OFF!" at me. But it was just the song. In that short space of time, and in what seems like only one breath, a song had said more to me than the entire back catalogue of pretty much any band I had ever listened to before. And I didn't want to be a boy. Boys are rubbish. Boys don't play music like this, they sit in the common room at school, smug, and play Fake Plastic Trees on acoustic guitar. But Hessy was in a band and though I was never allowed to hear them, I just knew they would be awesome. So I guess in a lot of ways, I always just thought of Bikini Kill as being Hester's band.

Now I'm quite sceptical of bands without girls. I mean, how can any band be THAT good if they're so far detached from Bikini Kill that it's just a bunch of sweaty boys with guitars? If you don't like the song, I guess I understand, but at least I've not wasted as much of your time as that Tom Campesinos!