I’ve found a new musical obsession to temporarily displace my beloved Lady Gaga: Mika. (That’s pronounced “me-ka.”) He’s an up-and-coming British pop singer. His music is super-happy-fun-complex pop — which I love love love. I’m most myself when in a state of crazy, wild joy at the mere fact of my own fabulous existence, and I connect with that feeling with Mika’s music. Oddly, Vivaldi’s Violin Concertos and String Symphonies give me the same feeling. (In college, I bought the fantastic ten-disc Vivaldi Collection by Shlomo Mintz and Israel Chamber Orchestra. I still adore it.)

In this post, I’ll tell you how I came to acquire Mika’s albums. The story is rather awesome for hooray-for-technology reasons. However, if you hate super-happy-fun-complex pop, please don’t torture yourself by hitting any of the “play” buttons below.

I first read about Mika in a post on Trey Givens’ blog: Straight Privilege. The post wasn’t even about his music, but instead about his sexuality. For some unknown reason, I googled him, then listened to the first track that came up: “Grace Kelly.”

I liked the song quite a bit from the get-go. That’s unusual for me, as I’m almost always somewhat slow to warm up to music that I like. I can tell the stuff that I don’t like immediately, such as Rush.

Then I checked out some of his videos on YouTube. Here’s “Grace Kelly,” for example:

Bonus! He’s cute! (Gay or straight or whatever, I enjoy gazing on tall, wiry guys with longish dark curly hair and large, angular facial features.)

And here’s “We Are Golden“:

Here’s “Love Today“:

Here’s more of a ballad, “Happy Ending“:

After I decided that I wanted to buy some of his music, I checked his discography on Wikipedia, and then bought his two albums — “Life in Cartoon Motion” and “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” — on iTunes. Then I thanked @TreyPeden on Twitter. (Trey might not be a fan; I don’t know.)

Since then, I’ve been listening pretty obsessively, as I always what I do with a new album that I like. Like with Lady Gaga, I enjoy every song on these two albums; that’s definitely a rarity. I’d only call a handful of the albums in my rather vast collection “perfect” in that way. So far, my favorite song is “One Foot Boy”:

So why is that story remarkable? Just fifteen years ago, I couldn’t have done any of that. Back in those stone ages of the internet…

• Blogs didn’t exist.
• Google didn’t exist.
• Lala didn’t exist.
• YouTube didn’t exist.
• Wikipedia didn’t exist.
• iTunes didn’t exist.
• Twitter didn’t exist.

As depressed and worried as I often get about the direction of this country, I’m so happy that the fabulous innovators, capitalists, and workers of this country make my life so much more awesome on a regular basis.

Hooray!