It’s getting near the end of the year, I’m bored at my parents’ house, and I can’t sleep, so you know what that means: a pointless list!

Tonight’s topic: ten songs that are so happy it’s impossible to be down while hearing them.

Katamari on the Rocks (Main Theme) from the Katamari Damacy soundtrack
Get It Together by The Go! Team (the defacto theme of Little Big Planet)
Baroque Hoedown by Jean-Jacques Perrey (used in the Disney Main Street Electrical Parade)
Blue Skies by Bobby Darin
Psyche Rock by Pierre Henry (inspired the “Futurama” theme music)
Reading Rainbow Theme
Sweet Soul Brother by Hideki Naganuma from the “Jet Set Radio” soundtrack
I Hear the Bells by Mike Doughty from Haughty Melodic
All About the Music by Z-Trip featuring Whipper Whip (but only when played along with that video)
Dream Island Obsessional park by Susumu Hirasawa, from the soundtrack to “Paranoia Agent.” (It’s happy assuming you don’t actually watch the video, connect it with the series, or understand the lyrics, of course)

It’s The Go! Team, and they’re loud, English, and awesome. This may be a new record for me: I’ve gone from “never heard of them before” to being a mega-fan in 24 hours.

I heard “samples from 60s and 70s kung fu and blaxploitation movies, horns, cheerleaders, and a pretty hot female rapper” and I was sold. As an extra added bonus, turns out they’re also the ones who did that terrific song from Little Big Planet that I was never able to find ["Get it Together" from Thunder, Lightning, Strike, in case that link goes bust]. So I’ve been a fan for years and didn’t know it.

Also highly recommended: “Milk Crisis” and the PBS-in-the-70s-tinged “My World”. I can’t get enough of this stuff. My favorite by far, though, is “The Wrath of Marcie”, which I’m still hearing even when the video’s not playing:

The word on their website is they’ve got a new album Rolling Blackouts coming out in January (UK)/February (US) 2011.

I frequently wake up with some random 80s pop song going through my head, which means I get to spend the rest of the day wondering what it all means. Occasionally it leads somewhere very dark.

Today’s song is “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. Ostensibly it’s a song about a young man — Mr. Springfield himself, since he wrote the song — infatuated with a woman he can’t have. “Unrequited love,” according to the Wikipedias.

But I can’t help but notice that he seems a lot more preoccupied with Jessie himself than with his girl. We don’t know anything about her, like a name for instance, other than “property of Jessie.” (I’m assuming some kind of mail-order bride type of arrangement). All we know is that she has eyes, and she also has a body (he just knows it). In fact, Mr. Springfield keeps vacillating between wanting her, and being willing to settle with a woman like her.

We know a good bit about Jessie, though. Jessie was a friend — no, a good friend. So good a friend that Mr. Springfield is driving himself crazy thinking about him having sex. As guys tend to do, think about their friends having sex enough to write songs about it. He can’t even fantasize about her, he keeps thinking about her and Jesse doin’ it. It’s like if you couldn’t have a sex fantasy about Catherine Zeta-Jones without including Michael Douglas. The subtext is pretty clear: instead of holding her, why can’t Jessie be holding him in his arms late, late at night? He “feels so dirty” when they start talking cute, which is how they described it back in the 80s before they came up with the term “self-loathing.”

I started to wonder if maybe the whole song is supposed to be creepy-ironic. Like it’s really about jealousy instead of unrequited love. But you don’t usually see that kind of sophistication in a song that rhymes “cute” with “moot.”

Every once in a while I see something that just makes me glad I live in the future. If it weren’t 2010, how else could you see a mash-up of Metropolis, 70s glam rock, 70s prog rock, 40s musicals, disco, millennial hip hop, and James Brown?

Well, if you were more hip than I am, you could’ve seen all that in 2008, apparently, with Metropolis: The Chase Suite from Janelle Monáe. It was a concept album EP about Monáe’s alternate identity Cindi Mayweather, a rogue android who — actually, the liner notes explain it better than I could:

The year is 2719. Five World Wars have decimated the earth. To escape from the ecological destruction, mankind has banded together to create one last great city named Metropolis. Under the rule of the evil Wolfmasters, the city becomes a decadent wonderland known for its partying robo-zillionaires, riotous ethnic, race and class conflicts and petty holocausts….

Into this turbulent world is born Android No. 57821, an Alpha Platinum 9000 named Cindi Mayweather. Unlike other androids, Cindi’s programming includes a rock-star proficiency package and a working soul….

And the videos “explain” the brilliant nonsense better than that. In particular: the “short film” video for “Many Moons” from the Metropolis EP., which handles all the introductions:

She’s doing a big push for “suites II and III” of the story, her new album The ArchAndroid, and that includes a great performance of “Tightrope” on Letterman.

And ArchAndroid is pretty much awesome; it’s tough to think of a musical style she doesn’t touch on in there — funk to big band to Hendrix-style psychedelic rock to straight-up disco. And I liked one of the comments in the Amazon reviews, that described it as somehow sounding even more cinematic and theatrical than a genuine soundtrack.

Big Boi of Outkast is a collaborator and executive producer on both records, and in fact you can’t hear the song “Violent Stars Happy Hunting!” (yeah, that’s the real title) from Metropolis without being reminded of “Hey Ya!” But more than that, I can’t watch or hear any of this stuff without being reminded of how “Hey Ya!” seemed to come out of nowhere — again, for the less hip among us — and blow me away.

But this is like if you took that and added robots!

As far as I can make out, my taste in music got locked in around 1999, along with my clothes. I’ve got friends — friends my age, even — who seem to understand what’s popular on a level that just baffles me; for me, the highlight of my musical year was a terrific concert by The Pogues and another by the Pixies, both of which were just a couple hours hearing music I loved in college.

According to my research, I’ve heard exactly six of the albums released in 2009:

• Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird & The Bee
• Middle Cyclone by Neko Case
• The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists
• Sad Man Happy Man by Mike Doughty

and the only two that I thought were worth putting on a “best of” anything list:

1. Actor by St. Vincent
I’ve already confessed to having a huge crush on Annie Clark now, but I want to say it again: this is some of the best music I’ve heard in years. Best track is either “The Strangers” or “Black Rainbow,” take your pick.

(Incidentally, apparently I had it wrong, and Clark doesn’t call herself St. Vincent, but it’s the name of the band. The name is a reference to St. Vincent’s hospital in New York, which she calls “the place where poetry goes to die.”)

2. The Music of JG Thirlwell for The Venture Brothers
This was just bad-ass and you can also get it on vinyl. And it counts as an album instead of just a soundtrack, because I never really noticed the music that much during the series but I think it’s amazing here. If you can hear “Tuff” and not totally rock, rock out, then you’re a robot.

(And if you like the Venture Brothers music but haven’t heard Thirlwell’s other recordings as Foetus and Steroid Maximus, you should check out Ectopia, the track “Chaiste” in particular.)