Breaking the rules

The Eagles demonstrated a considerable degree of confidence when they refused to cut the length of “Hotel California” to suit the demands of their label to accomodate corporate radio. At six minutes and 10 seconds, the song is precisely three minutes longer than radio generally expects, so only a seriously compelling tune will force the DJs and producers to play one song in the place of two. And, as history shows, the Eagles were exactly right to stand fast. What on Earth would you cut? Even at over six minutes, the song contains no musical fat.

I find their stubborness intriguing, because it shows how some bands clearly know when they’ve written something that is, if not necessarily great, at least destined to be very popular.

Of even more interest to me in this regard is “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. I find it impossible to believe that it is merely an accident that the chorus, and the words that make up the title of the song, don’t appear until three minutes and 21 seconds into it, 11 seconds after the widely known “radio limit”. This displays a degree of confidence in the strength of the chorus, as the band utilizes a “missing chorus” technique after the second verse to build to what results in a powerful and aurally satisfying musical climax that doesn’t appear until AFTER the guitar solo.

Given that timing, I suspect that the band knew perfectly well they were breaking the rules of radio by doing so, even in the album-oriented era. It’s fascinating that what some have described as “the perfect rock song” so completely violates what are understood to be the rules of pop music.  Of course, they also broke the rules of urban geography as well, for as Steve Perry admitted, he loved the way “south Detroit” sounded, “only to find out later it’s actually Canada.”

So, that’s your random thought for the day. This is the sort of thing that happens when I don’t switch to my playlist in the car. Aren’t you glad you don’t live with me?


Three landmark moments in pop

Several people have asked me to share my thoughts on the recent performances at the MTV music awards.  I have seven of them.

  1. Neither liked nor cared about Billy Ray Cyrus.
  2. Neither like nor care about his daughter.
  3. Michael Jackson’s televised moonwalk marked the beginning of the overt negrification of American pop culture.
  4. Madonna’s rolling around on stage in a wedding dress marked the beginning of the overt sexualization of American pop culture.
  5. Whatever it was that Miss Cyrus was doing the other night marks the moment at which those two forces, negrification and sexualization, combined to complete the enwiggification of American pop culture.
  6. Umberto Eco was correct in Apocalypse Postponed when he pointed out that “pop culture” is an oxymoron.  There is nothing cultural or civilized about pop; it is intrinsically anti-culture.
  7. Demographics is destiny. Don’t expect the plumbing to long outlive the melodies.

“When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.”
– Plato, Republic 


Women love the strong horse

In the absence
of Christians and others of the traditional civilized West willing to stand up against modern trash culture and the
third world invasion, women will naturally be drawn to the masculine strength they perceive in
Muslims, even skinny, pot-smoking Muslims armed with pressure cookers.
After reading “a poem for dzhokhar“,
it is apparent that Amanda Palmer wants nothing more than to run her
hands through the surviving bomber’s dark, curly hair, bury his face in
her breasts, and give her all to ease his noble suffering.

you don’t know where your friends went.
you don’t know how to dance but you give it a shot anyway.
you don’t know how your life managed to move twenty six miles forward and twenty eight miles back.
you don’t know how to pay your debts.
you don’t know how to separate from this partnership to escape and finally breathe.
you don’t know how come people run their goddamn knees into the ground anyway.
you don’t know how to measure the value of the twenty dollar bill clutched in your hurting hand.
you don’t know how you walked into this trap so obliviously.
you don’t know how to adjust the rearview mirror.
you don’t know how to mourn your dead brother.
you don’t know how to drive this car.
you don’t know the way to new york.
you don’t know the way to new york.
you don’t know the way to new york.
you don’t know the way to new york.

If the Muslim doesn’t know his way to New York, then obviously Amanda must go to the Muslim.

She will look beautiful in hijab.

As one author comments:  “This is our
culture, this is our field, this is what’s permissible and expected. May God have mercy on our souls.”

I look forward to reading Ms Palmer’s other poems, including “A Hummer for McVeigh” and “Say What You Like About the Tenets of National Socialism, Girl, Those Uniforms Were Hot”.

UPDATE: Sarah Hoyt adds her two cents on the matter, not so much on the Vogon-like “poetry”, (which frankly, in my opinion, is glorious in its unabashed self-satisfied myopia), but on the contrast between the reaction of the SF/F community to this versus Orson Scott Card’s insufficient enthusiasm for abnormal sexual relations.

Orson Scott Card was near-crucified for expressing an opinion one would EXPECT from someone with his religious beliefs.  (I disagree with his opinion but while religious I’m very odd.  Also, my religion is not his.) HOWEVER it is not only permissible, it is ENCOURAGED to publish a poem empathizing with a mass murderer, who murdered in the name of a religion that HANGS gay people, mutilates women, and aims at world-wide dominance.

Wait, what?

But see, the second religion a) has been identified as “of little brown people” which is why we keep getting told being anti-Islam is “racist” – even though most of them look about as dark as I am.  b) it aims to destroy America, and so it must be good, right?

(And before you tell me the repulsive terrorist-glorifying poem was written by one of my colleague’s wife, not himself.  Yes.  Indeed.  However, DO rest assured that in this field we have to watch what our spouses do too – or we had to.  I frankly can go indie and my give-a-d*mn is broken. – Imagine as a thought experiment that my husband wrote a poem about the Koch brothers, sweet Libertarian bachelors who have not in fact ever killed anyone.  How long do you imagine it would take before ANYONE refused to talk to me at conventions?)

So this is the way things are.  Why would they upset me, if I’ve always known they’re that way?

Because I suddenly realized, with a swimming sense of nausea and shame that this is as much our fault as theirs.

She is right. It is our fault. It is our fault for not mocking these lunatics, idiots, and shysters. It is our fault for enabling them. It is our fault for buying their books, watching their movies, and generally supporting them as they shit ceaselessly on our society, our culture, and our civilization. It is our fault for permitting them to have it both ways. It is our fault for not calling them out when they call good evil and evil good. It is our fault for permitting them to blithely pass off talentless hacks as artistic geniuses. It is our fault for letting them first infest, then pollute, then degrade, and finally kill off our literary traditions just as they have attempted to kill off our societal and civilizational traditions.

We have failed to stand up for the Orson Scott Cards and failed to spit on the Amanda Fucking Palmers.

The choice is stark. Western civilization or idiot women writing Vogon mash poems to Islamic killers. I would say the choice is simple, but then, as we have learned, MPAI.

UPDATE 2: Gawker piles on:

This weekend, as law-enforcement officers across the country devoted their resources to the manhunt and capture of the dangerous criminal Reese Witherspoon, an actual crime against humanity was being ignored: Musician Amanda Palmer was writing the worst poem ever composed in the English language, “A Poem for Dzhokhar.”

I don’t know that we really needed a litmus test for “are you willing to crawl up Neil Gaiman’s intestinal tract in the faint hope that some of his glamor might rub off on you”, but we appear to have found ourselves one anyhow.


Productivity

It is said that men are always proud of the wrong things.  That may be, but I think everyone here will most certainly agree that working in “aw, he got the velcros” into the conversation, in correct context, makes the week productive, by definition.


It is awesome

I don’t think the socionomic implications of this song becoming a hit really need to be spelled out to anyone here.


Everything has fallen into place

In music, as in all artistic endeavors, one often waits for inspiration to strike.  Sometimes one is inspired by a sudden desire to create something beautiful.  Sometimes, one is inspired to share a particular emotion or experience.  Sometimes, one is inspired to challenge the status quo.  And sometimes, one is inspired to mindlessly imitate works by superior and more original artists over and over again.  But rather than doing a “reboot” of Thriller, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or a dubstep remix of “You Light Up My Life”, the Pink Rabbit Posse happened to find inspiration in an interview on Canadian radio during which the interviewee inexplicably announced himself, again, to be inclined towards engaging in a certain activity that is quite rightly denounced by all decent and law-abiding Canadian citizens.

Hence Everything is Falling Into Place (Groove Kittens mix) by Rapey McRaperson and the Pink Rabbit Posse.  McRapey really did an amazing job on the vocals; he nailed them in just one take before rounding up a few local college girls to help with the backing vocals.  This is the first single for the Pink Rabbit Posse, which is presently hard at work on a techno opera based on the works of Isaac Asimov and his hitherto unknown career as a flasher.


Music from the Responsible Puppet

The Responsible Puppet writes:

Several years ago I wanted to teach my kids the weekly bible verse from
our church’s five year bible memory program so I started making up
songs. One of the pastor heard about it and asked us to sing at the
yearly bible verse kick off. After that, people started asking us to
record.

We started off slow and rough and we have
now produced five CDs. The most recent CD is the entire Sermon On The
Mount (every word, every verse), using several musical styles and the
gifts of nearly fifty musicians and multiple song-writers. It’s good,
main stream, not highly-produced family-friendly music. It includes the
Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and many other favorite passages.

Just to be clear, this is the RP’s deal, not mine.


Just because they are awesome

In general, my rock tastes tend to run more to the barely repressed violence that is Disturbed, but this nondescript little English guy in a red suit with no flashy guitar pyrotechnics or moves like Jagger is a capital-R ROCK STAR in a way that Axl Rose and other overly self-conscious performers could never be. The guitar line is so simple, and yet so awesome when it kicks in. You can see the crowd just waiting for it.


A teachable moment

I was driving to the post office today, listening to the pure essence of awesome that is Rock Sugar, when it occurred to me that a previous attempt to “correct” me served as an ideal example of the frustration regularly experienced by more intelligent individuals forced to deal with the regular attempts of the mid-witted to demonstrate their intellectual “superiority” to all and sundry.

In my experience, those of very average or sub-normal intelligence seldom attempt to correct people. They simply don’t dare. And with the exception of the socially retarded sub-set, those of high intelligence also seldom bother, either because it’s so much more trouble than its worth or because they view one isolated correction as being akin to attempting to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon. But mid-wits love little more than demonstrating that they know more than somebody else, especially in public, and they will readily leap at any opportunity to do so.

Anyhow, some time ago, I mentioned that Shook Me Like a Prayer was one of my favorite Rock Sugar mashups, and that I particularly liked the way it incorporated Hell’s Bells by AC/DC. Someone, I don’t recall who, immediately took the opportunity to jump on that statement, explaining that it wasn’t AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells, but rather, You Shook Me All Night Long that was the song that had been mixed together with Madonna’s Like a Prayer.

That was both true and false… and this is precisely why I hate midwits. First, they seldom have a sufficient grasp of the subjects they address, and second, they tend to inadvertently assume a position that requires the assumption that the person they are correcting is a complete and blithering idiot. I mean, let’s consider the facts that had to be known in this case to the midwit concerned:

(1) The Rock Sugar song is called Shook Me Like a Prayer and Rock Sugar songs are usually named after the two songs most utilized in the mix. Precisely how dumb does someone have to be in order to hear the song and somehow fail to recognize either chorus or the significance of “Shook Me” in the title? 65 IQ? 55? Actually brain-dead?

(2) To quote Wikipedia, “You Shook Me All Night Long is one of AC/DC’s signature songs from their most successful album, Back in Black.” It also has one of the most recognizable introductory guitar lines in rock history.

(3) Its occasional use during defensive stands in NFL games notwithstanding, Hell’s Bells is less well known than You Shook Me All Night Long and anyone who knows the former is almost surely familiar with the latter.

(4) Rock Sugar usually mixes in elements from at least three different songs even if only two of them serve as the primary sources and are referenced in the title. For example, Voices in the Jungle also contains the famous guitar melody from Sweet Child o’ Mine in the second and third choruses.

(5) There are freaking BELLS sounding in the middle of the Rock Sugar song.

Any one of those known facts should have been enough to give the correcting individual pause, but as we saw, they did not. Then add to those five known facts the two unknown ones that the midwit might have known, but couldn’t be reasonably assumed to know:

(6) AC/DC’s Back in Black was the first album I ever bought.

(7) I was a founding member of a band signed to Wax Trax! and TVT Records, and can therefore be expected to pay at least a little more attention to the more subtle elements that go into a song than the average individual.

Now, if you simply listen first to Hell’s Bells from the 22 second to the 40 second mark, then to Shook Me Like a Prayer from the 2 minute 28 second mark to the two minute 44 second mark, it should be completely obvious what I was describing. Despite not being one of the song’s two primary elements, Hell’s Bells is cleverly and seamlessly worked into the mix, which is precisely the aspect of the song I was praising.

The basic problem this example reveals isn’t that the midwit has no idea what he’s talking about, but that he has a partial understanding he erroneously assumes is a complete one. For those who find themselves tempted to be constantly correcting others, it might be worth keeping this example in mind to encourage a moment’s hesitation and contemplation before you leap in and embarrass yourself by attempting to “correct” an understanding that is materially superior to your own. At least on this blog, I have noticed that errors inspired by a combination of trigger words with insufficient reading comprehension appear to be the most common variety.

And on a barely tangential note, I was amused by DL’s email this morning:

I was putzing around in my SNES emulator the other day and loaded up “X-Calibur” or some such at random. Imagine my surprise (and triple-take to make sure I hadn’t misread) to find your past gig providing the music. Not a terrible little game, either. : )

Psykosonik: like the Spanish Inquisition, only louder, faster, and electronic.


A lost opportunity

I think Michael Medved could have gotten a lot further with his Nazi Boy theme if he’d known that I not only believe Laibach to be the world’s finest Slovenian Nazi-Industrial band, but for a brief while had the distinct and immeasurable honor of being label mates with them at Wax Trax!.

So, in honor of a brief conversation with Spacebunny this morning – I have what must be considered the endearing habit of quoting entire verses of Laibach when certain trigger words are mentioned – I present a true magnum opus. You can keep your Taylor Swift and your Beyonce; this is without question the greatest video of all time.

Actually, I really liked a lot of Wax Trax! music that was being released around that time, particularly Sister Machine Gun. It very much amused me that their main remix of Wired was named the Silicon Satan mix.