Category: Music

Categories
Music

“Before the Music Dies”: The Full Documentary

In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:

What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.

That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.

I mentioned that the interview comes from a documentary titled Before the Music Dies,  a documentary film in which filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen “traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation.”

A reader named “Tomas” said in a comment to the article that Before the Music Dies was posted in its entirety on Google Video. You can watch it in the little video window above, or at a larger size on its Google Video page. If you really care about music, whether as someone who plays it or simply enjoys it, watch it; you’ll find it’s two hours well-spent.

You can also buy the video on DVD for US$14.99 or download it for as little as US$2.99 from the Before the Music Dies site.

Categories
Music

Vatican Forgives Lennon

Home Simpson shows Bart and Lisa the Be Sharps album "Bigger Than Jesus"

I think it’s rather sporting of them:

The Vatican’s newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a "boast" by a young man grappling with sudden fame.

"The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a ‘boast’ by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll," Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said.

The article, marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ The White Album, went on to praise the pop band.

"The fact remains that 38 years after breaking up, the songs of the Lennon-McCartney brand have shown an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time, becoming a source of inspiration for more than one generation of pop musicians," it said.

There’s still no word on whether or not Paul McCartney will be forgiven for a lot of his post-Wings stuff, especially the phoned-in Wonderful Christmastime. Some things are just too big.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Music

Happy 10th Anniversary, “Baby One More Time”!

Before November 3rd passes, I must make it known, that today, November 3rd, 2008, is the tenth anniversary of the release of Britney Spears’ single Baby One More Time. I wonder if Ms. Spears wishes she could take a time machine back to those more innocent days and re-do some of her life choices.

Here’s the video for the original:

Scene from the video for Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time"
Click the picture to see the video.

Here’s the version by Travis:

…and here I am, performing it at Hemingway’s at Jay Schneider’s birthday party:

Categories
Music

“Take on Me”, Literally

I love this: it’s the video for A-ha’s 1985 hit single, Take on Me, but with lyrics that match what happens in the song’s video to high-larious effect.

This isn’t the first time the video’s been parodied — Family Guy took a crack at it (click the picture below to see the animation):

Stills from the 'Take on Me' scene in Family Guy

And for nostalgia’s sake — I was seventeen and selling snow cones on Yonge Street the summer this song was a hit — here’s the original:

Categories
Music

“Musical Key to Unlocking Teenage Wasteland”

Mrs. Lovejoy: \"Won\'t somebody please think of the children?!\"

In Australian newspaper The Age, an article titled Musical Key to Unlocking Teenage Wasteland took the results of a study in the most recent Australasian Psychiatry journal and created a chart which seems designed to make parents paranoid about the music their teenagers listen to. I’ve reproduced the chart below:

Your Sounds: What Studies Say:
Pop Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance.
Heavy Metal Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex.
Dance Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.
Jazz / Rhythm and blues Introverted misfits, loners.
Rap Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

I must be severely screwed up, as my music collection has healthy doses of all the above!

Buried in the middle of the article is a statement by the author of the published study: “it’s important to point out that music doesn’t cause these behaviours. It’s more a case of teenagers who may have a mental illness or are involved in these antisocial behaviours being drawn to certain types of music.”

The remainder of the article is just the same sort of freak-out fuel for parents that’s been around since the dawn of rock and roll.

Recommended Reading

In this Southern Spotlight article, Professor Kevin Dettmar observes that rock and pop music have historically been attacked during moments of national crisis: “fears of communism and greater teen independence in the 1950s; anti-war movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s; concerns with lyrics and formation of the Parents Music Resource Center in the mid-1980s; or the emergence of rap and hip-hop music today.”

“If you look carefully at those moments, you’ll find that we are not dealing with the real issues,” he said. “We are displacing a lot of nervousness, insecurity or anxiety onto rock ‘n’ roll. It becomes a scapegoat for bigger issues and bigger problems.”

Categories
Geek Music Uncategorized

Music Video of the Day: “New Math”

Here’s Bo Burnham singing his nerd-folk/filk song, New Math:

In case you were wondering what the lyrics were, here they are:

What’s a pirate minus the ship? Just a creative homeless guy
And an anteater plus a large hungry mutant ant? An ironic way to die
And what’s domain, domain, range (x, x, y) — a kid with too much in his pants
and two balls minus one, six titles at the tour de france.

Split a decision with long division,
Take the circumference of your circumcision
Live like your data and when you’re all “set”
Put it all together and whatever you get…

Is new math

What’s a bag of chips divided by five? That’s a Nike worker’s meal
And Santa Claus mutliplied by i? Well, I guess that makes him real
And the square root of the NBA is Africa in a box
How do you trace a scatter plot? Give the pencil to Michael J. Fox

Take the approximate moral proportion of the probable problem of a pro-life abortion
Live like your data, and when you’re all “set”
Put it all together and whatever you get…

Is new math

And if you made a factor tree of the factors that caused my girl to leave me you’d have a tree
…full of Asian porn.
C-A-L-C-U-LATOR (see you later) mathematical minds make industrial smog
and whats the opposite of ln(x): Duraflame, the unnatural log

Support the farmers with a pro-tractor
Link Kennedy and Lincoln with a common factor (fact, or)
Live like your data…blah blah

Word problems

If there’s a fat guy in a pastry shop with a twenty dollar bill and he’s ready to buy
In order to predict his volume change you need to know the value of pi (pie)
And theres a metal train that’s a mile long and at the very back end a lightning bolt struck her
How long ’til it reaches and kills the driver, provided that he’s a good conductor
And if ten percent of men are gay and twenty percent of men are Chinese
What are the odds that a man chosen at random spends his free time and mealtime while on his knees
And if Kim is half as old as Bobby who is two years older than twelve year old Tori
For how many more 30 day months will their threesomes be considered statutory rape

Cause havin’ sex is like quadratic expansion: if it can’t be split then it’s time to stop
and havin’ sex is like doing fractions, it’s improper for the larger one to be on top
And havin’ sex is like math homework, I do it best when I’m alone in my bed
And squarin numbers’ are just like women, if they’re under thirteen just do them in your head

And new math

Categories
Music

“London Underground”

I should’ve posted this video during the recent (and blessedly short-lived) transit strike here in Accordion City, but I remembered it just now. It’s London Underground, a musical rant about Jollie Olde London’s subway system, performed by the team of Adam Kay and Suman Biswas, known as Amateur Transplants. Be advised, it’s pretty sweary:

Here are the lyrics:

Some people might like to get a train to work
Or drive in in a Beemer or a Merc,
Some guys like to travel in by bus,
But I can’t be bothered with the fuss today
I’m going to take my bike,
Coz once again the Tube’s on strike.
The greedy bastards want extra pay
for sitting on their arse all day
even though they earn 30K.
So I’m standing here in the pouring rain,
Where the fuck’s my fucking train?

London Underground
London Underground
They’re all lazy fucking useless cunts
London Underground
London Underground
They’re all greedy cunts I want to shoot them all with a rifle.

All they say is “Please mind the doors”,
and they learned that on the two day course,
This job could be done by a four year old.
They just leave us freezing in the cold.
What you smell is what you get
Burger King and piss and sweat
You roast to death in the boiling heat,
With tourists treading on your feet
and chewing gum on every seat,
so don’t tell me to “Mind the gap”
I want my fucking money back.

London Underground
London Underground
They’re all lazy fucking useless cunts
London Underground
London Underground
They’re all greedy cunts I want to shoot them all with a rifle
La la la la
La la la la

The floors are sticky and the seats are damp,
Every platform has a fucking tramp,
But the drivers get the day off when we’re all late for work again,

London Underground
London Underground
Wah-wah-wankers! They’re all wankers!
London Underground
London Underground

Take your Oyster Card, and shove it up your arsehole.

If the TTC go on strike again, I’ll write and record a Toronto version.

Here are Amateur Transplants performing London Underground live. I love how in this version they’ve replaced the line “chewing gum on every seat” with “nailbombs on every seat”:

If the Tune Sounds Familiar…

If London Underground gave you a certain feeling of musical deja vu, that’s because Adam and Suman borrowed the tune from Going Underground by legendary late-70’s/early-80’s Brit band The Jam. This tune as well as another hit by the Jam, A Town Called Malice, are part of the soundtrack of my youth.

Here’s the video for Going Underground: