Tag: music

The GenX Election

This may be the only US Presidential Election that Generation X ever decided. And, even so, we still had to choose between two candidates who weren’t one of us. Let’s face it, most of us would vote for an infant or a corpse over a Boomer. Any Boomer. Except, in this case, the old Boomer was much closer to our values than the young one.

Still don’t like this “Red State” nonsense. Democrats are the Reds.

Megan Fox, a fellow GenXer, attributes our generational hostility for the Surveillance State to our semi-feral childhoods. Which is probably at least partly true. We don’t see what business our employers or government agencies could possibly have poking into our business when our parents couldn’t usually be bothered with it. It’s actually kind of comical when our children are disappointed that we don’t keep closer track of the details of our lives; they have no idea how much more interested we are in them than our parents were in us.

And now we’d very much like to see President Trump transform into God-Emperor Trump and burn the whole Deep State structure down to the ground. If you listen to last night’s Arkhaven Nights, you can hear, not one, but two versions of FOUR MORE YEARS, although listeners should be warned that they contain 100-percent raw hopium.

I woke up in the morning in the Real America
The sun was shining brightly, the dawn of a new era
It felt as if the last four years were nothing but a dream
From nightmare to insanity and nothing in between

Hey hey hey nana nay the man is back in town
Hey hey hey nana nay the second time around

Four more four more four more years
Four more four more four more years
This time he’ll do it right
Four more four more four more years
Four more four more four more years
The future’s looking bright, hell yeah!

I think we’ll have to make a video of the second version. The bass really drives and the guitar solo is epic.

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Booster Patrol Goes Pro

If you’re a backer of Booster Patrol, we’ve completed the necessary permissions to get the 10-song e-album out to you. As part of that process, we put some of those songs on Spotify, so if you happen to use that app, you can now fire up some proper boosting on demand now. The available songs are:

  • Possession
  • Don’t You Want Me
  • More Human Than Human
  • God’s Gonna Cut You Down
  • Thought Contagion
  • Wow

That’s pretty much more guitar solos than were recorded in the 1980s, so it should keep you a while. I understand our first original effort may be done soon, which features Rachel on vocals, so you’ve got that to look forward to as well. In case you missed it, there’s now a video for Wow, which is a very boosted cover of the Kylie Minogue song.

In other music news, here’s the first live performance of Babymetal and the two guys from Polyphia playing Brand New Day, which is a really nice and well-written song in the From Dusk Til Dawn vein.

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200+ Videos

And that’s on the Legend’s channel alone. If you haven’t resubscribed to UATV yet, this is a good time to do so. The new backend now permits a vastly improved method of uploads for pre-existing videos, which is why there are 20 new videos from The Legend Chuck Dixon available; we should be caught up with his YouTube channel within two weeks.

Why bother subscribing to UATV when you can get a number of the creators on YouTube? Because they’re probably not going to last there much longer. The first big wave of YouTube censorship took out Big Bear, Stefan Molyneux, and me because we were amassing significant numbers of subscribers. The current wave, which is just getting started, is likely going to take out a number of the creators who took our places; sooner or later every right-of-center creator will find himself ejected from SJW Central. That’s why we constructed UATV in the first place.

JDA’s recent ejection from Kickstarter after no less than 10 very successful campaigns there is an object reminder of the absolute need to build and utilize our own platforms. The censorship pogroms come and go in waves, and it is evident that the latest wave of thought-policing is just gathering strength.

In other UATV news, Booster Patrol debuted our new video for WOW! on the Darkstream last night. So 80s, much wow. Sadly, John did not play the guitar solo wearing a pink plastic jumpsuit, as the Stylistic Imperative clearly demanded.

The 80s were 100 percent pure cheese, but they were a LOT more fun. I know. I was there.

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Diddy and Biggie

I have succeeded in living my adult life with very limited exposure to any knowledge of Sean Combs. I think I’ve heard parts of four songs in which he was directly involved in some way, which includes the abomination in which he rapes a famous Police song. His complete lack of talent combined with his inexplicable stardom and his ubiquity always made me assume that he was a complete satanic sellout, but the revelation that he was the Black Epstein of hip hop makes me wonder, in retrospect, if Biggie Smalls was the sacrifice he made to ensure his ascent.

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Radical Optimism

Original Castalia Library subscribers may find this anecdote from Dua Lupa to be amusing.

The pop icon also revealed that she knew what the title of her album was going to be from the very beginning. ‘I knew the title for ‘Radical Optimism’. It was a term that my friend told me, I was doing an interview with him, and he was like, “You know what the world needs? Is radical optimism.” ‘And I lived with that thought for so long, and it just became more and more prevalent as time went on.’

Radical, relentless…

But speaking of music, check out Spotify!

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An Elegaic Opus

Some artists just know how to exit stage left.

A celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is the definitive swan song of one of the world’s greatest musicians. In late 2022, as a parting gift, Ryuichi Sakamoto mustered all of his energy to leave us with one final performance: a concert film featuring just him and his piano. Curated and sequenced by Sakamoto himself, the twenty pieces featured in the film wordlessly narrate his life through his wide-ranging oeuvre. The selection spans his entire career, from his pop-star period with Yellow Magic Orchestra and his magnificent scores for filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci to his meditative final album,12. Intimately filmed in a space he knew well and surrounded by his most trusted collaborators, including director Neo Sora, his son, Sakamoto bares his soul through his exquisitely haunting melodies, knowing this was the last time he would be able to present his art.

I’ve loved Sakamoto since he was teaming up with David Sylvian, who is probably my all-time favorite musician and singer. Not that I’m any expert on pianists, but he’s my second favorite after my friend Cornelius. I think this documentary will be a must-see.

Recorded and filmed as he was dying of cancer, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Opus” — the Japanese film composer’s posthumous album and documentary of the same name — is clearly meant to be his final farewell.

As an album, it is fitting that the 20-song, hour-and-a-half recording of sparse piano played by Sakamoto is a retrospective, taking the listener on a journey through his half-century career.

One standout is the first-ever recorded version of the playfully lyrical “Tong Poo” from his early days with techno-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, also known as YMO. They were pioneers of 1970s electronic music and a Japanese act that landed on the global stage.

The album “Opus” is set to be released Friday from Milan Records. It showcases solo piano versions of the film scores that form the pillars of Sakamoto’s legacy, starting with the majestic theme for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” a film set in the final days of imperial China leading into its communist rule.

It won an Academy Award for best original score, making Sakamoto the first Asian to win the honor. The 1987 film, starring John Lone, also won best picture. The score also won a Grammy.

Elsewhere, the track “BB” is Sakamoto’s homage to Bertolucci, a tender love poem for his brilliant collaborator.

“Opus” also features the forlornly pensive music Sakamoto did for Bertolucci’s 1990 “The Sheltering Sky,” which juxtaposed emotionally lost American travelers with the ruthless vastness of northern Africa.

And it includes the music for “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a World War II prisoner of war camp, directed by Nagisa Oshima, in which Sakamoto also acted. It has become his signature piece.

Sakamoto’s sound has an unmistakably Asian feel that’s challenging to define, but evident through the utilization of certain harmonies, pentatonic motifs or scales. His sound is also evocative of Debussy but, to be fair, this is all Sakamoto.

Minimalist is another way some have described his ability to speak in the silences between the notes.

All the songs on “Opus” were immaculately recorded in Tokyo’s NHK 509 Studio, performed without an audience in 2022. The piano pedal shift, and, at times, his breathing, are present.

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A Tribute to Mr. Tubcuddle

This is, almost certainly, the greatest song ever written about a dedicated bathtub enthusiast. Booster Patrol was inspired by the intrepid saga of the man known as Mister Tubcuddle even before the peculiar revelations of the BathBookNeil blog. The full lyrics are at Sigma Game, for those who are interested. But click on the image below to hear the unforgettable audio experience that is Mr. Tubcuddle.

In other, and obviously completely unrelated news, a professional comics illustrator sent me this last night, which appears may have been loosely based upon an incident at a certain writers’ workshop.

UPDATE: Fandom Pulse has a piece that discusses the song and reveals a new observation that may render the whole situation even more absurd.

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I Think We Know This One

Blind Item #1
In this song released earlier in 2024, the sleep-inducing A+ comic writer’s wife appears to have confirmed everything he’s been accused of and more.
– CDAN

The song is obviously Whakanewha by Amanda Palmer, which makes it pretty clear that she knew all about at least one of her ex-husband’s accusers, and lends credence to that accuser’s statement that Palmer was aware of at least 13 other similar situations. It also tends to suggest that there is a connection between the growing scandal and why she left him in the first place.

It’s actually a pretty good song from an otherwise mediocre artist, which is a reliable indicator that it’s coming from a place of genuine and powerful emotion. And it also appears that the media embargo on the Neil Gaiman sexual assault accusations is beginning to crack.

Another forest metaphor
You’ve heard a million before
The trees know everything, I tried a wedding ring
But you just cringed and said, “What for?”
And now the whole thing’s turned to ash
You try to cover it with cash
Another falling tree no one can hear but me
Another suicidal mass
Landing on my doorstep, thanks a ton
Oh, darling, how can I repay you for what you have done?

And then you lied to me at Whakanewha
And you sealed it with a kiss
I wanted to live with you, but, fuckin’-a, fuck you
No one on Earth could live like this

Another clear-cut load of crap
A few more corpses in the sack
You’ll get away with it, it’s just the same old script
This world is shaped to have your back
You said, “I’m sorry,” then you ran
And went and did it all again
I’m such a fool, I know
Street smart but gullible
I see the good in everything
A pound of flax, a pound of steel
I may be dumb, but I can feel
I wonder when you’ll realize what you had

A frightened bird, a crystal ball
So sad, you could’ve had it all
But you hate yourself too much to want all that
I had so much hope for your broken heart
But you’ve made your choice, and you chose the dark
And so I’ll bury you at Whakanewha
And have a party with my friends
I’ll miss you terribly, but, fuckin’-a, fuck me
It feels so good to love again

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