too much, you took too much

Last night my MP3 player shuffled in "Hey Ya!" by OutKast.  I hadn't listened to it in years, I'd say, and—for the first time since maybe probably I guess it was 2004—I found myself thinking, "Hey: this is a really good song."  Which brings me to my question.  The song became unlistenable because it was so, so overplayed.  But of course, it was so, so overplayed because it was so, so good...right?  I think that's right.  Or was it that there was just something overplayable about it, and a truly great song would remain good no matter oversaturated the universe became with the sound of it?  I hear one gets tired of Feed the Animals after a while; I haven't gotten there yet, but then I have been inclined to listen to it over and over and over and over and over and over again,* so I can imagine its happening—but then, again, does that mean there's something wrong with it?  Another way to phrase this question: does the fact that one does not particularly want to hear "Hey Ya!" anymore have anything at all to say about the inherent value of the song "Hey Ya!"?**  (Side question: is there such a thing as the inherent value of a song?)

The flipside of this—contrapositive?—is the experience of seeing a band live and then not being able to listen to them anymore, by which I mean that the concert is so irritating, or irritating in precisely such a way, that for a while you no longer take pleasure in the recorded music.  I felt this way when I saw:

1. Mr. Bungle,
2. They Might Be Giants, whose fans were so irritating that I was embarrassed to have liked Flood, Lincoln, and John Henry during the year 1996,
3. the Pixies, even, a little, partly because the fans were disappointing (which of course, as above, is totally unfair to the band, but so it goes), partly because my expectations were so damned high, partly because no reunion tour can ever truly live up, and partly because halfway through the second of the shows I saw (at Stubb's) I thought to myself, "You know what?  I'd be just as happy going home and throwing Surfer Rosa or Doolittle on the hi-fi,"*** and
4. Tim & Eric, not musicians but comedians, whose television series I thought was hilarious until I was made uncomfortable by their live performance, which I did not think was hilarious.

This all links to the question I asked in my "journal" in 2005: is there a difference between the music we like and the music we say or even think we like?  I was driving yesterday, and when I drive I listen to music, and when I listen to music I often sing along (loudly), and it occurred to me (again) that the music I sing along to with the most passion is not necessarily the same as the music I'd list as my very favorite—there's a lot of overlap, but it is not precisely the same list.  What music do I sing along with with the most passion?  A list, very incomplete:

• 20th-century Weezer
  
• 1960s Rolling Stones
  
• Pavement
  
• the Kinks
  
• LCD Soundsystem
  
• James Brown
• the Beatles
  
• the Beach Boys
• the Beastie Boys
• the Velvet Underground

I don't know...I guess this is kind of a list of my favorite music.  My point, though, which I have not demonstrated but will simply assert, is that my top 2 stated favorites might not be my top 2 favorites to sing along with.

Ah, forget I said anything.  Look at the pictures.  There's boobies in one of 'em.

* Lyrics: "Weird Al" Yankovic.

** After much discussion with people who could reasonably be called experts, and finally the consultation of an authoritative tome (I'm going to call it a tome), I concluded that when quoting something that includes a question mark or exclamation point (which goes inside quotes, unlike a comma or a period, in American English) but then following that quotation up with a question mark or exclamation point, one drops a punctuation mark, either the one inside the quotes or the one outside the quotes, as appropriate.  But what do you do when it's gotta be a question and you've just used the same quotation again and again with the punctuation included?  It would have looked weird to say "'Hey Ya'?" after saying "Hey Ya!" again and again and again.  Or is it that a title isn't a quotation?

*** I'm not sure that I own a "hi-fi."