Do you remember that mid-1990s song “Lovefool”? Don’t lie, everybody knew that song…whether they wanted to or not. It was everywhere. It was like a plague. The Cardigans, a Swedish band, had created a monster in 1996 with the catchy, poppy track and it didn’t matter what you did, you’d hear “Love me, love me, say that you love me” everywhere. We actually had to sing that in a middle-school music class I was in…well, that was the task, but I might have been in the second row, changing up the verses here and there to suit my tastes. However, the day I first put Gran Turismo 2 into my Playstation two years later and saw the opening movie, I learned that the five-piece band was much more than pop. With a two-note guitar hook and a rich, fuzzy baseline, “My Favourite Game” was something to be enjoyed without shame. Even the bastion of cool music in Seattle at the time, 107.7 The End, was playing them. I didn’t see the video for the song until years later. Filmed near Barstow, California, you have singer Nina Persson as the completely unhinged driver of the droptop Eldorado with a rock on the gas pedal, hauling tail up and down a desert highway, playing hell with the traffic and running down pedestrians. The video’s amount of car crashes (and any of the five endings that were filmed for the ending crash involving the other band members in a Ford van) caused the video to be censored badly in European markets, but here in America…let’s just say that the combination of Nina in a droptop Cadillac already drew a strong following, and that the car crashes were just the icing on the cake.
