20 posts tagged “music”

hanging out with, among others, the bassist in this band:

And everyone I know hates it.

I've been really digging this album, a collaboration between sad bastard indie-totem Sparklehorse and hip-hop tinkerer Danger Mouse:

Ever since I lamented that I was getting sick of the compost-scraps on my iPod, I've somehow managed to snout out some tremendous musical truffles.

The filet of the bunch so far has been MyPark:

The album goes from post-Portishead fuzz to straight-up, 100-proof Boner Jams.

I want to find a foreign language where Americans sound as cool speaking it as French people do speaking English. And move to where they speak it.

I've also managed to find a lot of great '60s stuff. Or at least it sounds 60s. This is what happens when you borrow your friends' external hard drives, and just crtl-C, ctrl-V everything you like.

That's probably old, right? This next one has a motherfucking sitar. Those have been embargoed since George Harrison ruined them, so must be reaching even further back to the sock-hop era.

And I know, Dad: You tried endlessly to get me to listen to this kind of stuff in the station wagon and I just rolled my eyes and disappeared into Nine-Inch Beastie Doggs or whatever. Everyone has to discover the past on their own.  

Say what you want about the low poverty rate and robust social justice, the real reason I'm still here is that I don't have to survive 300 Starbucks-tinny renditions of 'Jingle the Fuck-Nosed Wonderland' every December. The stores and cafes here have realized that fully-functioning humans generally don't want to hear the same three songs on a loop for 31 grinding Shopping Days in a row, and just play the same gloomy Euro-bivalence as the rest of the year. In the states, I used to spend my Decembers thinking that trough-fed capitalism and Hallmark-tatorship were eroding our morals and making us miserable zombies. But now I realize that, no, it was actually just that fucking music.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I found this.

Is this the beginning of middle age, when you start liking things because they're nice, and they make you smell pumpkin pie coming from your earbuds? Is this a gateway to Thomas Kinkade, Richard Gere and Jesus Christ My Personal Savior? I feel like I have to find some yuletide cocaine or something now.

I've been really digging this song ever since I heard it on Random College Radio in New Zealand like a year ago.

The lyrics are even more melancholy (especially the talky bit) considering that Huey died at twenty-seven of obesity, a glandular disorder and complications from echoing vocal effects. They don't make 'em like this anymore, boy.  

that it's destined for the Top 40

Is that chorus seriously

If you like it
Then you should have put a ring on it

Yeah yeah, rap music is hollowing out our boys, but Jesus, what's R&B doing to our girls? Like there aren't enough other ways they're being blanketed with the magma of nuptial expectations.
 

If the TV networks have equal-time obligations to political candidates, then for every song like this on the radio, it should be balanced out with, like, Sista Spinsta or whatever is popular in the 'I don't need a man' genre these days. 

There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about 'mash-ups', an youth-music subgenre (and possible ADD symptom) wherein the lyrics of one song are pasted over the instrumentals of a another, preferably incongruous, song. Watch

:

Like every other creative amoeba that evolves through the blip-trend-fad lifecycle, mash-ups have been bastardized, overdone, hacked and embarrassed more times than they've been taken seriously. The apex of the fad stage appears to be the latest album by Girl Talk, a genetics-researcher-by-day in Philadelphia who used his Mac to paste together a teenager's worth of pop detritus into something roughly resembling Musical Tourettes.

Yes, it's a big, loud fireworks show, isn't it? The problem with Girl Talk, though, is that none of the songs really work as songs. There's no structure, or buildup, or even coherence to each track. No thread runs consistently through the album, if you can even call it that. The tracks just remind you that the 90s are still bouncing around in your head. It's the musical equivalent of a Post-It Note: Did you know you still remember the lyrics to 'No Diggity'? Well, you do. 

You get the thrill of recognition, but if you didn't know the samples being used, every track would just sound cacophanous and stressful, like sitting in a car with someone who flips the radio dial the minute their ascending attention loses momentum.

The best mashups, if that term hasn't dried out from jumping the shark so many times, are the ones that actually work without winking, the ones that sacrifice the talent-show obsession with incongruity for something that tries to be more than the sum of its parts.

The following track is the best of the DJ mixing genre I've heard, mainly because it takes something familiar and makes it completely new. The thrill doesn't come from recognizing all the elements, but from the fact that the four minutes you're listening to works on its own.

Though Girl Talk will probably only be remembered as in Vaudeville terms, the track above makes me think the short-attention-span genre might have a little juice left in it.

I'm not saying it's Leaves of Grass, but when was the last time Beyonce attempted to harmonize some shit like 'Out there in the dark / There's a beckoning candle'?

In other news, if McCain wins, I've decided to spend at least 24 hours eating peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and watching this video through a black veil.

Either way, I'm definitely going to start collectively referring to Copenhagen's gay bars as 'Dixieland'. Look away, bitch.

That's right, the 14-day waiting period between music festivals is over. I'm off to Madrid to see the following nonsense:

2manydjs — Blondie — Breeders — Cornelius — CSS — Etienne de Crécy — Foals Grinderman — Ian Brown — Interpol — Kings Of Leon — Kooks — Mogwai — Primal Scream — Raveonettes — Sex Pistols — Shout Out Louds — Sons & Daughters — Tiga — Verve — We Are Scientists

Then I'm northing to the worn-out, inflatable lovedoll that is London for some extracurricular traipsery. My goals for the next 10 days are cartoonishly humble. See some friends, listen to some music. If I can't pull that off, I might as well move to Belgium.