Tag: music

Booster Patrol Backers

All of you should have received an email now containing a link to download all of the high-quality, fully-licensed covers that we promised you nearly three years ago. If you haven’t, please email me and I will get it to you. If there are additional rewards owed, such as the promised cover of When The Man Comes Around, rest assured the band will get one recorded and delivered to you.

On a related note, I plan to launch a very small crowdfunding campaign next week for the Soulsigma album, a 10-song collection of original music which I wrote and produced using AI technology and digital audio tools, on FundMyComic, which graciously added a Music category at my request yesterday. Soulsigma is very different than the Booster Patrol covers and Vibe Patrol tunes which you’re accustomed to hearing, being more in the hard alternative rock category. This isn’t a major community project, so don’t feel any pressure to back it if you’re not genuinely interested in the music. The big campaign for which we’ll be hoping for massive support will be at the end of March and I will soon have some very exciting news about that.

I understand that a lot of people are either skeptical or openly derisive about AI music, and understandably so in light of what we’ve seen from ChatGPT, but they simply don’t comprehend that there is a massive difference in the degree of difficulty in producing meaningful text and meaningful music due to the way in which music is much more easily reduced to numbers and numerical patterns. The three best musicians I know, world-class musicians who compose in three very different genres, are uniformly excited about the possibilities being created for them on the AI front, and to be honest, theirs are the only opinions on the matter I take seriously.

I’ve just never had much patience for the buggy whip crowd. Even in these early days, the quality of what can be produced is much better than what was being professionally produced by the record labels in the 1990s, and it’s only going to get better as the technology improves and is further refined. The fact that the particular form of the evolution happens to favor lyricists at the moment only makes it more interesting to me; as we learned from games, the earlier one gets in and masters the development technology, the more one can reasonably hope to accomplish.

Anyhow, if you’re a UATV subscriber and you’d like a taste of the coming campaign, this is one of the alternative mixes of a song that is on the album, the Midnight Ride mix of Ride and Die. UATV

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They Smoked it Out

Curses! Those cunning Ukrainian disinformation agents have smoked out the plot!

Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation has accused the viral pop song ‘Sigma Boy’ of being part of an “information war” aimed at promoting a positive image of Russia among young people.

Sigma Boy, performed by 11-year-old Betsy (Svetlana Chertishcheva) and 12-year-old Maria Yankovskaya, has gained attention on TikTok and other platforms since its release in October 2024. The track has reached the top ten on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, peaking at seventh place, and has accumulated millions of views.

Ukraine’s disinformation watchdog, which operates under the National Security and Defense Council, has claimed that Moscow could have manipulated the song’s popularity, drawing comparisons to alleged Kremlin interference in the 2016 US elections. The agency has argued that Sigma Boy “erodes critical perceptions of Russian content” and helps normalize the nation’s cultural influence abroad.

“Sigma, sigma boy, sigma boy, sigma boy
Every girl wants to dance with you
Sigma, sigma boy, sigma boy, sigma boy
I’m so special, it will take you a year to win me.”

I’m pretty sure that under ASCAP’s rules I qualify for a writer’s credit on that one. I mean, I wrote nearly one-quarter of the lyrics.

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The Shadow Can Only Mock

It’s really fascinating to see how the manufactured “creative talents” who are inevitably mediocrities falsely proclaimed as geniuses, are prone to committing shameless and easily proven acts of plagiarism. Such as, just to give one example, the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Robert Zimmerman:

Beginning with his first album, which contained “House of the Risin’ Sun,” Dylan showed a penchant for lifting other performers’ work. At the time the album was recorded, fellow performer Dave Van Ronk was preparing his own version of the song. Dylan knew this; Van Ronk had even asked him not to record the song before he got his version out, but Dylan went ahead anyway, even using Van Ronk’s arrangement.

Charges of plagiarism only started gaining traction against Dylan around 2003. Around that time, with the Internet having made it easy to directly compare music from different sources, people started to notice how much of Dylan’s work sounded like other people’s stuff.

The melody from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for example, comes from a 19th-century spiritual called “No More Auction Block.” His 1962 song, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” turned out to have been lifted wholesale from folk singer Len Chandler. Lyrics from the 2003 album Love and Theft were line-for-line copies from the autobiography of Japanese author Junichi Saga.

In 2006, he released Modern Times, which lifted passages from Classical poetry, 19th-century Confederate verse, and a blues song from 1940. Dylan won two Grammies for the album.

The plagiarism didn’t stop with the music. While much of what Dylan lifted from others without attribution was already in the public domain, and whatever wasn’t got reworked enough to count as Fair Use under copyright law, Dylan’s autobiography includes several passages lifted from novels and plays, and even from early-’60s issues of Time.

JRR Tolkien had these satanic frauds pegged from the start.

The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.

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The Only Skull

As you may or may not be aware, George Gordon Byron is one of my favorite poets. And his “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull” is my favorite poem that wasn’t written by a particular friend of mine, Dante, or A.A. Milne. And while it’s not well known, but I am actually a published poet, as I wrote a poem that was published in Bucknell University’s poetry journal when I was studying there.

Of course, as always seems to be the case, the combination of my talents with my iconoclasm not only caused the poem to be accepted for publication, but also caused half the staff to quit in protest after it was published. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

In any event, I put the Byronic poem to restrained nu-metal, took the liberty of changing the two instances of “quaff” to drank/drink since it just didn’t work, put together a chorus that fit the context, used the final verse as a pseudo-chorus, and threw on a lyrical outro. The poem is well worth reading, and if you want to hear the musical version, you can hear The Only Skull on UATV. When I put the album out in the spring, this will definitely be on it.

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I drank like thee;
I died, let earth my bones resign:
Fill up thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm’s slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods than reptile’s food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shown,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not—since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Now rhyme and revel,
Rhyme and revel,
Why—not rhyme and revel?
Rhyme and revel with the dead!

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Georgian Inspirations

According to Spotify, Charles Darwin is dead.

Got my mind on those genes baby, fixation’s slow.
Hundreds of generations don’t you know?
Natural selection’s got its groove, but it’s a crawl
Evolution’s math… it’s a mighty tall wall.

Mutations happen but they take their sweet time
Fixation in the genes, it’s a mountain to climb
Survival of the fittest, you’ve heard it before
But it’s the math that’s tricky. There’s so much more.

Get your groove on
Cuz Darwin’s dead y’all
Math don’t lie. And that’s a fact
Generations passing, one by one
Fixation’s slow but the funk’s begun!

DNA is twisted. A double helix spin (spiral!)
But changes in the code, man, they take years to win
Thousands of years just to make a minor shift
Mathematical reality disproves genetic drift.

TENS has been disproven, the numbers don’t compute.
Mutational fixation means the question is moot.
Populations change but it’s super slow,
It’s a long-winding journey through genetic flow.

So we DNA dance, shake it to the groove
Gotta feel that rhythm, there’s nothing to prove.
Natural Selection’s not a night at the club
But we’re caught in this math, yeah, there’s the rub!

Get your groove on
Cuz Darwin’s dead y’all
Math don’t lie. And that’s a fact!
Generations passing you comprehend
Fixation’s slow but the funk don’t end!

It’s also on UATV, of course. If, however, you’re an Unauthorized subscriber and you’re not sufficiently evolved to handle a beat and a bassline that funky, why not rhyme and revel with something a little more Byronic.

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