Rhymes With Five: Gossip Girl stole my iPod

And this really confuses me. Not only because I like the music in a totally different way than I like Blair's headbands and chilly one-liners ("I am not a stop along the way-- I am a destination!") and Chuck's ridiculous sweaters clothes eyebrows pervasive smarminess everything, but also because, um, should I feel weird about songs I like really being featured, consistently and unironically, in a CW drama targeted to teenage girls?

Answer: I don't know. But if I should feel weird, dear Paste reader, so should you: I dare you to put your playlist on shuffle and deny that one of these ditties would eventually pop up. Like, OMFG, it's no wonder this show is changing the way we watch television.

Here are my top five Gossip Girl approved tracks. What are yours?

"Someone Great," LCD Soundsystem
In a particularly scandalous episode, Serena and Blair and some of their friends break into their prep school's swimming pool and throw a party. There is vodka involved and, unsurprisingly, someone almost dies! Oddly, this song plays before that happens, in a particularly jovial pool party scene in which a girl removes her bikini top.

"Panic," Phantom Planet
Of these five, this song is the most appropriately-placed, playing over a montage of the show's characters totally freaking the hell out over the SATs. (And for good reason, apparently: As the episode progresses, for various reasons, it becomes increasingly obvious that no one ever told them you can re-take the test if you do poorly or, more applicably, if one of your BFFs spikes your Diet Coke the night before and you wake up on the test morning mysteriously hungover, pristinely disheveled, and two boroughs away from the test center. Shockingly, you don't always have to be incredibly loaded and/or beautiful to earn a little leeway in this world.) I loved Phantom Planet in High School and remember the original version of this song from a live EP I found at a used CD store. This new, nearly unrecognizable take is from their new album.

"Ballad of Gus and Sam," Ferraby Lionheart
This song is about ghosts and murder, and was featured in an episode about the hazards of brunch on the Upper East Side. It works because all of those things are mysterious and frightening.

"Crimewave," Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH
To be honest, I didn't recognize this song on my own. I'm kind of an old lady, so I like to have Closed Captioning on during the show (sometimes the young'uns just talk so fast!). This means that I often see what song is playing before I can actually hear the song, and when I saw HEALTH I braced myself: It was gonna be loud! Heads would explode! Extensions and headbands and brain matter everywhere! But no. Crystal Castles have stepped in to make the original HEALTH song less skull-detonating and more dance-clubby-- natch, as this scene took place in a club. (Gossip Girl's characters spend a lot of time in clubs. And not, like, dive bars where no one cares if high schoolers drink, but real actual clubs where the kids sit at the bar and order cocktails themselves. Also, they never appear to pay. Yet another mystery of the Upper East Side.)

"The General Specific," Band of Horses
My favorite track from last year's Cease to Begin played as Dan and Serena commenced to hook up for the first time, and as Blair's dad showed her photos from the summer house he and his partner had just bought in Lyon. As Ben Bridwell himself asks, "What's going on?"

Note: Welcome to Rhymes With Five, the weekly blog post where I feature five things that I like that somehow relate to each other. I came up with a few other names, like "Five Alive" and "Five Jive" but, as you probably already figured out, those names all sucked. See you next Thursday!