Category: Music

I remember being introduced to Jonathan Coulton’s music while staying at Ethan Zuckerman’s and Rachel Barenblat’s place in the Berkshires back in the early summer of 2005. Wendy and I were visting to work out the details of our wedding ceremony (Rachel was one of the officiants). While having a very delicious dinner, Ethan and Rachel played us selected tunes from their music library, one of which was Coulton’s Skullcrusher Mountain, a love song from an evil genius to the woman he’s infatuated with.

Coulton’s sound could be described as Ben Folds’ and They Might Be Giants’ musical style married to Weird Al’s and MC Frontalot’s nerd sensibilties, with a dash of Green Day’s power pop thrown in for good measure. Among the songs in his ironic, clever and geeky oeuvre are pieces were office culture and zombies intersect, an ode to SkyMall, quite possibly the only pop tune about Benoit Mandelbrot and ubiquitious household items.

If you’d like to find out more about Coulton, he was featured in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

One of Coulton’s best and most rockin’ numbers, Code Monkey, is an incredibly spot-on portrait of what it’s like to be a developer at a medium-to-large sized company, something that Coulton was until he decided to become a full-time musician. Here’s the first verse:

Code Monkey get up get coffee

Code Monkey go to job

Code Monkey have boring meeting

With boring manager Rob

Rob say Code Monkey very dilligent

But his output stink

His code not “functional” or “elegant”

What do Code Monkey think?

Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write

    god damned login page himself

Code Monkey not say it out loud

Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

If I had a dime for every time I’ve had to stifle the urge to bitch-slap a manager with a cast-iron skillet because he had know-nothing issues with my code, I’d probably be living a Jimmy Buffet-esque lifestyle on a very nice yacht.

The second verse reminds me of my days in a dot-com-era startup called OpenCola, which grew out of an ad agency, which meant that the women were young, good-looking and outnumbered the men by at least two-to-one:

Code Monkey hang around at front desk

Tell you sweater look nice

Code Monkey offer buy you soda

Bring you cup, bring you ice

You say no thank you for the soda cause

Soda make you fat

Anyway you busy with the telephone

No time for chat

Code Monkey have long walk back to cubicle

    he sit down pretend to work

Code Monkey not thinking so straight

Code Monkey not feeling so great

Code Monkey like Fritos

Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew

Code Monkey very simple man

With big warm fuzzy secret heart:

Code Monkey like you

In honour of RailsConf, the Ruby on Rails conference that’s taking place this week in Portland, Oregon (and which I’ll be attending), I hereby declare Code Monkey [4.3 MB MP3] the song of the week. Download and enjoy — and if you like it, send some money Jonathan Coulton’s way!

If you can sing and there’s a fifteen-year-old inside you touchin’ himself to Boris Vallejo posters [warning: might not be safe for work], you might want to audition for Necromancer, as the poster below indicates.

Nuthin’ says “hardcore” like a cheesy hand-drawn logo and bats.

Go visit their MySpace page, check out the song Raw Meat and enjoy the oh-so-dumb, oh-so-adolescent-sex-fantasy lyrics. That “affection/erection” rhyming couplet: pure gold!

“I have a fever and the only cure is MORE SKULLS!”

For those of you living near Accordion Cityt’s weather system, I hope that you had a chance to enjoy the sun and nearly-summer-like temperatures. The Missus and I went out on a picnic in High Park on Saturday and had a relaxing time reading, people- and dog-watching and drinking ice tea at the nearby Starbucks patio on Sunday.

I decided to dig through the music library and look for songs with the word “Sun” in the title and found Bobby Hebb’s Sunny. This version has an intro and outro by Bob Dylan, who explains that Hebb wrote the song as a way of finding comfort after being devastated by the deaths of John F. Kennedy and his brother, who died within a day of each other. Wikipedia quotes Hebb as saying:

All my intentions were just to think of happier times – basically looking for a brighter day – because times were at a low tide. After I wrote it, I thought “Sunny” just might be a different approach to what Johnny Bragg was talking about in “Just Walkin’ in the Rain”.

Sunny reminds me of weather like this — not only for its name and its optimism, but also because it’s one of two songs that I played at my last recital at organ school, which happened during a rather memorable late spring. The other song I played was the one that got me kicked out of the Yamaha School of Music, and that’s a story for a later date.

(This song will be available for a week, after which it’ll evaporate.)

After having attended a couple of Filipino-Canadian cultural events in Toronto, my good buddy George quipped that “deep inside every Filipino, there’s a lounge singer just dying to break out.” It’s true, and a lot of the credit goes to the late Don Ho.

Perhaps some of it has to do with Filipino jazz pianist Bobby “The Wild Man” Enriquez, who was Don Ho’s musical director in the late ’60’s. Maybe it’s just the Philippine predilection for anything Hawaiian — and who symbolizes Hawaii to outsiders more than Don Ho?

As a guy who was born on a Pacific island, an owner of a large number of Hawaiian-style shirts and who ties leis around his luggage handles to make them easy to spot at baggage claim, I can’t rightly let Don Ho’s passing go without a little tribute here on the blog.

I hope that someday I have an equipment setup like his: a Hammond organ with a big rattan chair (no puny organ bench for Don!), with a good stiff tropical drink — perhaps a Weng Weng — by my side.

I thought I’d honour his memory by posting one of his songs as the song of the week, but decided that the cliches — Tiny Bubbles, Little Grass Shack, Pearly Shells, Aloha Oe — wouldn’t do.

Instead, I will post something you might not have heard: a video of his cover of Peter Gabriel’s Shock the Monkey [15 MB QuickTime Movie], which appears on the album When Pigs Fly, a collection of songs covered by the most unlikely people (such as Ani DiFranco and Jackie Chan doing Unforgettable).

Rest in peace, Big Kahuna!

I was a DJ at the engineering pub at Crazy Go Nuts University in 1991. This meant that in the parallel universe where our lives are watched as if they were television shows (hopefully with the boring bits and nose-picking scenes edited out), Nirvana’s album Nevermind was an integral part of the soundtrack.

That was over fifteen years ago, and a lifetime away. A good number of us have young kids and have had to make the choice: put up with The Wiggles and the songs from the Thomas the Tank Engine series, or make like the “grups” from places like Brooklyn’s Park Slope, who have decided “that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house“?

(My own opinion is that if you’ve decided to have kids, you’re going to have to make all sorts of accommodations. which includes playings kids’ music some of the time.)

There have been a number of inventive approaches to this problem. Some alt-rock bands, such as They Might Be Giants, have written childrens’ albums with songs that also appeal to adults. Another solution is the Rockabye Baby series of albums, which provide lullabye renditions of the music by bands such as Radiohead, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Nirvana.

This week’s song of the week is for the parents of my generation with young kids:

• The Rockabye Baby version of Nirvana’s On a Plain [7.1 MB MP3]
• The original version, for reference [4.5 MB MP3]

As with all the other songs of the week on this blog, they’ll vanish after a week. Enjoy!

You may not remember the technology, but before the World Wide Web that we know and love today, there was Gopher, its spiritual predecessor. Gopher became available in the late spring of 1991 and was a system that let you read text files on other computers on the internet. Unlike the web, where you click on links to navigate, Gopher was meant strictly for text-only display; you navigated through a series of menus.

As a computer science student at Crazy Go Nuts University, I became aware of Gopher sometime in the fall of 1991 and used it to find computer science papers and tutorials. Along the way, I discovered that it was also a great source of non-course-related reading material. One of my favourite finds in “Gopherspace” was a thesis that someone had written, examining the meaning and symbolism in the lyrics of Don McLean’s American Pie. “You can get a degree for this?” I asked.

Apparently you can, and here’s present-day proof. By way of my friend Miss Fipi Lele, I’ve come across a master’s thesis that examines, of all things, the album Loveless by British “shoegazer” band My Bloody Valentine, which was released on my birthday in 1991. It’s an excellent album and considered a landmark created during a time of great change in popular music, with Public Enemy and De La Soul redefining hip-hop, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden redefining metal, the “Manchester” bands mixing dance and rock, the rise of techno and industrial music and Lollapalooza. Yes, it’s one of the best albums of the nineties in my opinion, but is it worth a master’s thesis?

Here’s a snippet from the first paragraph of chapter 1 of the thesis, titled The Origins of the Shoegazer:

From the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, I was a member of a rock

band that I considered the culmination of my musical creativity up to that point called

The House Project. It was not a rock band in the MTV or modern radio sense of the

term, rather the experience was more like four disgruntled musicians with bachelors

degrees in music pounding out their frustrations with a corrupt mainstream music

industry on their instruments—an industry that seemed to place more emphasis on image

than on artistic creativity and the music itself.

Wanker sense…tingling!

I don’t know about you, but any professor I had, even those in my arts electives, would’ve handed me back any paper that opened with that claptrap.

If you want an amusing read, here it is: My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” [366KB PDF], “A thesis submitted to the College of Music [at Florida State University] in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music”.