Music

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Are You Really Stupid, Or Do You Just Have Poor Taste?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 5, 2009 by admin in Music

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Correlating Facebook Data With SAT Scores

If you’ve ever been mystified (as I have) by the popularity of Beyonce or Lil Wayne, there’s a fairly good chance that you’re just intelligent. Or at least that you would do well on the SAT. Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith has gotten considerable attention for his tongue-in-cheek but slightly scientific analysis of how intelligence affects tastes in music and books. He plotted aggregated Facebook data against average SAT scores from various schools, and came up with graphs for both Books That Make You Dumb and Music That Makes You Dumb. Personally, I think you can be stupid and still like Beethoven (who was most popular with students that scored around 1400), but it is somehow telling that “I don’t read” and “Dan Brown” correlated with students who scored around 1000. I also have to admit I was a little surprised to not see The Decemberists over on the 1400 side given their popularity with ad-industry types and Stephen Colbert; and these are indeed troubled times when the Bible hangs down with the 900 scores while “Lolita” tops the smarty-pants reading lists, with an SAT/popularity score around 1300.

Nothing To Worry About

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 23, 2009 by admin in Music

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Uplifting video for the song “Nothing To Worry About” from Peter Bjorn & John’s upcoming release Living Thing

If you’re having a rough day, play the video at left, and I guarantee you’ll have Nothing To Worry About. You may have already seen the disturbingly uplifting video for the song from Peter Bjorn & John’s upcoming release Living Thing, but you may not have realized that the crazy Japanese rockabilly breakdancers featured in the video do this every Sunday in Yoyogi Park next to Harajuku Station in Tokyo. More on the history of the shenanigans of the Takenoko-zoku (bamboo shoot kids) can be found here, and if you haven’t listened to Peter Bjorn & John before, you might start with their 2006 release Writer’s Block, in which they prove that you can capture the Decemberists‘ fan-base without being a bunch of pretentious smartypants. Read the rest of this entry »

U2 Still Hasn’t Found What I’m Looking For

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 21, 2009 by admin in Music

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I’m really not too fond of pop culture criticism; I think mom was right when she said “If you don’t have anything nice to say…”, so let me preface what I’m about to say with a little disclaimer: My inability to discern the differences between any two U2 albums is probably a result of my [...]

I’m really not too fond of pop culture criticism; I think mom was right when she said “If you don’t have anything nice to say...”, so let me preface what I’m about to say with a little disclaimer: My inability to discern the differences between any two U2 albums is probably a result of my own shortcomings. That being said, I haven’t been too thrilled with the band U2 since precisely the time that this became the case, or worse yet, since the moment I also became unable to tell if it was maybe a Coldplay song and not U2 at all. And I really lost my love for them when they sued Negativland, whose song is featured here in that audio-only YouTube clip (Warning: Lots of swearing by Casey Kasem). Well now, to give the added impression that they’re as out of touch with reality as a Beltway insider bailing out banks, they’re launching their latest release by making it free on MySpace until March 3rd. Shouldn’t they have maybe used Eons.com? Having taken a very quick listen, I’ll give them one thing; it sure as heck sounds like a U2 album. Keep up the good work lads. See you in Vegas in a few years. I mean that in the most positive possible way; Vegas is pretty cool, from what my grandma tells me.

Mellodrama: The Mellotron Documentary

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 12, 2009 by admin in Music

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Whether you’re old enough to have listened to the Beatles and the Moody Blues when they were new, or if you’re into the Beastie Boys, or any of thousands of current artists in rap and pop, the music you listen to owes a lot to an instrument you may have never heard of: the Mellotron. [...]

Whether you’re old enough to have listened to the Beatles and the Moody Blues when they were new, or if you’re into the Beastie Boys, or any of thousands of current artists in rap and pop, the music you listen to owes a lot to an instrument you may have never heard of: the Mellotron. The Mellotron was “the original sampler”, using actual sounds on recording tape which were manipulated mechanically to alter pitch with a keyboard. Sounds barbaric by todays digital sampling standards, but part of the beauty of the Mellotron was the fact that the sound it made was NOT accurate; it tended to have a haunting quality all its own. Sunday is the world premiere of Dianna Dilworth’s Mellodrama: The Mellotron Documentary at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. The trailer is featured here, and I hope this film gets decent distribution. It looks very well done if the trailer is any indication.

TV on the Radio – Dear Science

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 8, 2009 by admin in Music

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

I take back everything bad I ever said about TV on the Radio, which was very little anyway. My first exposure to them was their 2006 release Return to Cookie Mountain. I kept trying to like it, but could never get past the feeling that I was listening to a lost mid-seventies Peter Gabriel solo [...]

I take back everything bad I ever said about TV on the Radio, which was very little anyway. My first exposure to them was their 2006 release Return to Cookie Mountain. I kept trying to like it, but could never get past the feeling that I was listening to a lost mid-seventies Peter Gabriel solo album, and the slightly off-key falsetto vocals throughout the recording would make me cringe a bit at times. I always imagined they would be fantastic live, but never really fell in love with the material. Their 2008 release Dear Science has changed all that. In spite of the fact that the first two tunes almost always leave me on the verge of tears, I’ve been playing it daily for about a week now. The vocals have all seemed to find their place, the production is polished but not to the point of being annoyingly slick, and the lyrics…man. I wish I had written the words to “Halfway Home”, for instance. Well-metered moody pop ambiguity at it’s best. And then they follow up with the almost sunny but somehow bittersweet “Crying”. Sorry, I’d say more, but I’m getting all weepy again. L.A. Record has an interesting interview with bassist Gerard Smith in which he touches on some interesting points about being a “person of color” while being perceived as “black” while playing “white music”. Just open your ears and stay color blind; this is an amazing release. The clip featured here is the video for “Golden Age”.

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