Tweendom approaches

Spent 20 minutes today arguing with CJ over which is better, the Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling” or Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Good Time” (feat. Owl City.)  Caleb favors Jepsen, arguing that songs are made of “music, singing, and words,” and that “I Gotta Feeling” wins on words but loses on music and singing.  His judgment of “I Gotta Feeling” as a piece of music is that “the music doesn’t match the singing and 3/4 of the music is copied and the 1/4 of the music that isn’t copied is boring.”

I asked CJ what “Good Time” is about and he said “it’s about people who overestimate their life and think bad things never happen in it.”

 

Every Noise At Once

Glenn McDonald is the guy who wrote the amazing, obsessive, beautiful music blog The War Against Silence, now mostly dormant.  I admire him for writing tens of thousands of words about Alanis Morissette, whom he, and I, and maybe nobody else, still consider an important cultural figure.  He’s also a pretty hardcore data analyst.  I’ve often fallen down the rabbit hole of his analysis of the Pazz and Jop ballots.

Now he works for Echo Nest, the Greater Boston music startup that sponsored the Music Hack Day I participated in a couple of years ago.  And his latest project, Every Noise At Once, is a map of all music.  Seriously!  A map of all music!  By which I mean: an embedding of the set of genres tracked by EN into the Euclidean plane, and, for each genre, an embedding of bands tagged in that genre.

Play with it here.

The Lonely Passion of Joey Heatherton

Hey, somebody has posted an acoustic cover of “The Lonely Passion of Joey Heatherton,” the greatest song (against much competition) by 90s Boston indie-rock heroes Prickly:

 

 

You can hear Prickly’s original (in cassette quality, sorry) at my earlier Prickly post.

More transitivity

I don’t really know anything about Amanda Palmer, but if there’s a picture of her hugging Robyn Hitchcock and Eugene Mirman, I guess that means I must like her?

Happy Birthday, Robyn Hitchcock

The great man turns 60 today.

“(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp,” The Soft Boys, 1978.

“Chinese Bones,” Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, 1988.  (Peter Buck plays guitar on this.)

“The Yip Song,” Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, 1993.

RH plays the 1985 Egyptians track “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” live acoustic, 2000.

“Viva Sea-Tac!” Robyn Hitchcock, 2003.

Salience, purchasing behavior, Franklin Bruno

I like Franklin Bruno a lot, and I even know him a little bit, so naturally I was interested in obtaining the new Human Hearts album, Another.   I could have paid for a download of this album at any point in the last several months, but I didn’t.  I could have checked to see if I could listen to it free on Spotify, which I have open on my laptop most of the time, but I didn’t do that either.  (Just checked now — it’s not there.)  But the other day, when I walked into the record store on my block and saw it on the new releases shelf, I bought it.  That’s one thing about physical stores — they give you a reason to buy the thing now, not at some other time, while the continuous and eternal availability of the record online meant that there was no moment at which my desire to hear the new Human Hearts album outweighed my desire to click on whatever else I was clicking on.

I presume there are theorists of this kind of thing.

Anyway, here are some favorite Franklin Bruno tracks.

“Love’s Got a Ghetto”

“Going to Marrakesh,” by the Extra Glenns, which is Bruno together with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

I wanted to link to “Coupon,” which is much noisier and messier than the two above, but I can’t find a publicly available sound file, so you’ll just have to imagine it!

Cultural non-transitivity

I love Eugene Mirman.

I love “I Gotta Feeling.”

Eugene Mirman hates “I Gotta Feeling.”

 

 

 

 

Lobster Will Tear Us Apart

I never really thought of the B-52s as a band that had much to do with Joy Division, but listen to the last two minutes of this live recording (I think?) of “Rock Lobster,” and watch Fred Schneider dance, and tell me this isn’t what Joy Division would have been like if Joy Division sang about fish.

How do you like the new theme, by the way?

 

Song of the night: “All The Time,” by the Cloud Nothings

Heard this in Barriques today and have been repeating it since, perfect soundtrack for a too-late night writing notes for grad algebra.  Apparently Cloud Nothings is, or at least was, a one-man band from Cleveland.  It sounds very much like he set out to cover the Lemonheads’ “Bit Part” but then realized there was more he could do with the chords he was playing.

 

 

John Darnielle on death metal

People are constantly asking me, “Why don’t you make a death metal record?” You could only actually want to hear that if you didn’t like death metal. Death metal is a lifelong discipline. Hanging out with Erik Rutan, I really got a sense of how much it takes to play that style of music. You can’t be a jazz pianist and think, “What the fuck, I’ll play some death metal!” It’s not like that. Death metal is a lifetime commitment. You decide that you want to play a style of music that speaks to your spirit and you dedicate yourself to that pursuit. I was joking when I said “2015.” I would have to change my life to play that kind of music. I would have to become a real guitarist first, then learn the death metal style. I play folk guitar. I play chunky rhythm chords and I can sit in with anybody and do that. But to do what those guys do? It’s hard and very earnest work. Not to mention that the people who think they want to hear me play death metal are generally not death metal fans. By the time I got halfway through the first song, they’d all be like, “You know, I do not like this kind of music.”