Music

My eldest (wow, I have an eldest now, not just an elder) is annoyed with me. She’s decided she doesn’t like “folk” music, so doesn’t want me to play Rubber Folk (UK), the brilliant album of covers of Rubber Soul. After two car rides of her quite wrongly berating the covers, we took a ride with several of her friends.

Eldest: “Dad, turn this off”
Friend: “Wait, it’s the Beatles, you don’t like the Beatles?”
Eldest: “Yes, but this isn’t the Beatles, its folk singers copying them”
(2 more songs pass)
Friend: “It’s really, really cool. I love it”
Other Friend: “Yeah, these guys are cool, man” (I’m not kidding, they really talk like this).
Eldest (outraged): “NO THEY’RE NOT.”

They are. There are a couple of less than perfect tracks; The Word, unlikely to be included in anyone’s top 40 Beatles songs, is worse on this album than on the original. But June Tabor’s haunting version of In My Life rivals the original, and Paul Brady’s reinterpretation of You Won’t See Me is, dare I say it, better. Other highlights are Show of Hands and Ralph McTell. The album hangs together well enough to make me long for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Folk Club Band, and Magical Mystery Folk.

Richard Thompson’s tongue-in-cheek covers album, 1,000 Years of Popular Music (UK), is even better.

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We’ve posted before here about the horridness of Christmas Music. Ian McDonald has the antidote.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

iTunes coughed up a thing and I think to myself: what is this? Mötley Crüe? Turns out to be Soul Asylum. Which, back in 1993, still sounded to me like, you know, they were related to the Replacements or something. Alt-rock, y’know. Then next another thing I don’t immediately recognize and I’m thinking: this sounds like Wham! But it turned out to be Aztec Camera – “Everybody is Number One”, from their Love album. Which, back in 1987 sounded to me, like, I dunno, alt-rock.

And then Belle finally went and signed us up for the iTunes store and downloaded the greatest song ever, which we’ve been missing for 6 years in Singapore. And do you know what the greatest song in the world is: that’s right, it’s Todd Rundgren, “Couldn’t I just tell you”. Greatest. Power pop. Ever. Plus it has the cool/fool rhyme. You really can’t go wrong with that.

I’m lying. In between Soul Asylum and Aztec Camera iTunes coughed up an MP3 of this Delta ad in ebonics (don’t know how that got in there), which was disorienting.

There are some just terrible videos of Rundgren singing his greatest song on YouTube. Here, for instance. But there’s an absolutely fabulous video of him singing “Hello it’s me” on some variety show. He’s got butterfly wings glued to his eyebrows as he sits at the white piano. Elton John would blush. But “Hello it’s me” just isn’t that good, frankly.

There’s a neat Nazz video as well. “Open My Eyes”. Very “The President’s Analyst”. Did you know that the bass player for the Nazz, Carson Van Osten, gave up bass-playing to be a cartoonist for Disney? You can see some of his work here, at a blog I read not infrequently.

Speaking of butterfly wings … (Oh, I’ll try to get to that tomorrow.)

I’ve been rereading my favorite William Empson book – see this Valve post – and noticed something new. There’s a really lively remembrance of Orwell, “Orwell at the BBC”. (Empson knew him there during the war. They alternated being Burmese desk editors even.) But this isn’t about that. Empson reports what may be the earliest case of ‘scratching‘, in the turntablistic sense. Or ‘hiccing’, as Empson renders it. This would be before ’43:

I chiefly remember two young disc jockeys who put on a very saucy turn with two gramophones and two copies of a record by Churchill; the familiar voice was made to leave out all the negatives, ending with ‘we will (hic) surrender.’

It’s not quite clear how elaborate the performance was – did they have a crossfader? why two copies of the same album? – but taking out the ‘nots’ in Churchill’s speech on a 40’s-era gramophone sounds rather scratchologically deft. Anyway, ’43 was earlier than Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, which wikipedia cites as among the earliest examples.

There are some good Orwell anecdotes in the piece. [click to continue…]

Awesome …..

(hat tip JD)

Click here for something cool.

in three minutes, the largest dot will travel around the circle once, the next largest dot will travel around the circle twice, the next largest dot three times, and so on.

the dots are arranged to trigger notes on a chromatic scale when they pass the line

[thanks]

I meant to respond a few weeks ago to Matthew Yglesias’s complaints about Pitchfork Media and never got around to it thanks to work obligations and the nine month old. But since it’s not a time sensitive topic, here goes. [click to continue…]

Taking advantage of my Silicon Valley location this year, I decided to go check out Yahoo! Hack Day (it’s actually a two-day event so I’ll be back for more today). I doubt that there are too many CT readers who would participate in something of this sort, but if you happen to be there today, do let me know.

Hundreds of people showed up for the opportunity to spend a day adding functionality to various Yahoo! products such as Flickr, Upcoming.org and now even Yahoo! Mail. The demos of these creations will be this afternoon (Saturday) where we’ll get to hear 90-second descriptions of the hacks. It sounds fun and exciting especially to someone like me who’s such a fan of some of Yahoo!’s products.

The event organization so far has been impressive with clear directions, plenty of parking, fast registration and some fun swag. Yesterday was filled with various presentations culminating in a pizza dinner and then a live concert. I finally met Lifehacker Gina Trapani in person and hung out for a while. This was fun since despite having written for Lifehacker in the past, we’ve never met in person.

The surprise of the evening was the Beck concert (see a recent interview in Wired as to why he was an especially appropriate selection for this event). The performance included puppet versions of all the artists projected onto the screen behind the stage. It was great. You can find photos of the concert on Flickr (mine, others’) and there’s also a Yahoo! video not of the concert, but of the Beck puppet’s visit to Sunnyvale. Google gets most of the attention for being a fun place to work, but Yahoo!’s campus seems quite fun as well, something I already noted when giving a talk there two years ago.

If I have any regrets (apart from not having played enough cricket) among the biggest must be indolently passing up the opportunity to wander down the Iffley Road to watch Jake Thackray play in a pub sometime in the mid-1980’s. I still can’t imagine what I was thinking; the cover price was something like 2 quid, and it didn’t even require staying out late (something I was slightyl less averse to in those days anyway). Now the chance is gone forever. But a while ago Jake In a Box (UK) arrived. All four EMI albums, plus reams of extras (Live Performance (UK) is, I’m told, on its way). I’ve been playing it ever since.
(NB: bob mcmanus should be sure to read on)

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I interviewed Michael Bérubé by phone over the weekend for a podcast now available from Inside Higher Ed. As you might expect, Bérubé is well-spoken. Alas, the gremlins were just as efficient in doing their work, for there is a certain amount of hiss from the phone line. Here’s hoping some people will try to listen past it. My colleague Elia Powers made heroic efforts to remove the noise. I’m told that this made Bérubé sound like a robot. Which, come to think of it, might have been pretty cool: A case can be made for doing all interviews with a Vocoder, à la Laurie Anderson.

As it is, though, we did get in a little bit of “Long Black Veil” as covered in 1985 by Baby Opaque, with Bérubé on drums and Ian MacKaye (in transit between Minor Threat and Fugazi) on vocals. For the full recording, go here.

Word is that suspects are being rounded up for an online symposium on What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? later in the semester. It’s understandable that the book should get the lion’s share of attention. It’s from a trade press. But the other one, Rhetorical Occasions, from the University of North Carolina Press, will be a lot more interesting to many CT readers.

You would be able to see why, had the good folks at UNCP provided the table of contents, instead of this.

Over the weekend, Political Theory Daily Review linked to a recent essay on the Gang of Four. (The band, that is. Not the group in power in China thirty years ago this month, and in jail thirty years ago next month.) The title indicated it would treat the band’s work as Marxist cultural theory. Not in terms of, mind you, but as. Good call: The Gang’s lyrics were always very explicit about reification, class consciousness, and whatnot. No ex post facto Zizekian-epigone hijinks necessary, thank you very much. Makes its own gravy! A critic who understood that from the start might go far.

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Loudon Wainwright III is 60 today. I just thought I’d remind the world, because I’m sure he won’t. Belle, you’d better send an e-card or something. He’s the performer I have seen live more than any other, and, as George Cole might say, I have all his albums.

And Al Stewart is 61!

I had a nice night. Before that, I chased two kids around for six hours (ages 2 and 5). That was ok. Then I went to pick up Indian take-out. Waiting, I … relaxed. A beer. Watch the Australian tourists talk to each other. I’m enjoying Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude. Belle loaded up iTunes with lots of new stuff but nothing seemed quite good enough for the evening. Then I noticed … four Stephen Malkmus tracks: “Baby C’Mon”, “The Hook”, “(Do Not Feed The) Oyster” and “Jenny and the Ess-Dog.” They’re Amazon freebies. Help yourselves.

And/or you can help me understand Kant on “What Is Enlightenment?” I made a long post at the Valve. Input from Kant scholars – and others – would be sincerely appreciated. I’m puzzled by the public/private flip-flop, the ‘argue all you want but obey’ maxim, and especially the weird seed metaphor. And a few other things.

Mary Wells came on the radio the other day singing “My Guy”, and when she sang the line

I’m sticking to my guy like a stamp to a letter

it set me thinking about the way that old technologies get referred to in popular song. There’s no end of trains, especially in country music, but even horses and ferries get a lot of attention. Old technology is homely and part of the shared cultural experience even of people who hardly use it. By contrast, digital technology hardly gets a mention, and when it does the results can be embarassing. Cheezeball.net refer to this cringeworthy effort from one Tim O’Brien:

My color screen won’t even function,
My hard drive it went soft, my application coughed,
and I’m a runnin’ out of memory for you.

Ugh!

Bob Harris played a Guy Clark song tonight called “Analog Girl”. It was pretty good, and managed to mention email and websites without making me want to curl up and die. But of course the whole point of the song is that its heroine is authentic because she eschews all contact with the digital world. Other non-embarassing mentions of computers, technology and the internet in popular song?