Sink Your Teeth Into True Blood’s Music
[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 20, 2010 by admin in Music
Monday, September 20th, 2010Music supervisor Gary Calamar’s brilliant music choices have left a bigger mark on me than all the vampire teeth, eroticism and wacked-out storylines have. Fortunately there’s an easy way to review and collect all the songs.
  True Blood’s Music Will Have You Licking Your Lips Too |
I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t had TV for years, and am ironically more interested in watching TV commercials than the shows that they interrupt, but occasionally, when a few friends recommend something rabidly enough, I break down and watch it on line if I can, or borrow, rent, or torrent it if I can’t. Which is how I ended up watching all three seasons of True Blood
Great Singers Who Can’t Sing
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on September 15, 2010 by admin in Music
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010How a video of a seven year-old started an hour-long debate about great singers who can’t sing. Who would YOU put on that list?
 Why Does Tom Waits always end up on lists like this? |
If you want to get a friendly but heated argument started, just start naming singers that can’t sing. I did this by accident the other day when a friend played me the clip of then 7-year-old Connie Talbot singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on “Britain’s Got Talent” (also below). There are a few points where she wobbles and eviscerates any concept of accurate pitch, but immediately follows with gut-wrenching feeling and a dynamic vibrato for her age. Overall, she “puts it across” with incredible impact, and you’d have to be pretty damn jaded (or maybe just hate kids) to not get at least a little bit of a teary eye. So the debate started when I said pretty much what I just said here, but elaborated by saying something like “but there are plenty of singers who can’t sing that we love to listen to, people like Tom Waits, or Frank Sinatra, or Fiona Apple“. That was an unfortunate choice for a short list, because if you want to get jumped by an angry mob that’s foaming at the mouth wanting to kick your ribs in with steel-toed boots, just be sure to pick at artists that have a rabid cult following that’s based more on an emotional connection to the artist than a well-considered analysis of their singing skills and gifts. Like Tom Waits. Or Barbra Streisand. Before I go on to share the expanded list that resulted from the ensuing debate, I should provide some background on how my opinions are guided. I grew up in a music store with well-tuned concert-pitch instruments around all the time, so on the one hand have an impeccable sense of pitch. On the other hand, I also love music from all over the world with all its non-western tunings and scales, and the first instrument I played with passion was the electric guitar, an instrument that can be horrifying in its lack of proper intonation. And as a singer, I have great pitch, but resort to odd styling and diction to mask my feeble or non-existent vibrato. Imagine a weird amalgam of Bing Crosby and Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs. So understand that this is mostly about taste, and is meant to be more about analysis and opinion than “criticism”. Feel free to chime in with your own picks, I’d like to do a followup with video clips as examples. Oh. One more thing. Bob Dylan sucks. Read the rest of this entry »
The iPad As A Musical Instrument?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 7, 2010 by admin in Music
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010Well, maybe not quite yet, but here’s a roundup of some tools that are available that point to a cool future for multitouch musical instrument controllers.
Way back in November of 2008, we took a look at the state of innovative tactile controllers for music. At the time, the coolest cutting edge tools were mostly research projects, certainly not something you’d pick up at the local music store. Well, this is finally beginning to change. For professional work, and for about two grand, there’s the JazzMutant Lemur, which is probably beyond what a lot of musician/songwriters or dabblers need. And if you have the brains and can get your hands on the hardware, there’s the Töken multitouch screen running Emulator (video below). But the iPad – in spite of being an annoyingly closed platform – is coming into its own as a somewhat interesting tool as more sophisticated apps become available. And the overall cost of working with an iPad can’t be beat. After the initial purchase of the iPad
Understanding Rap Music
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 22, 2010 by admin in Music
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010You can learn about a lot of things by researching them on the web. Rap music isn’t one of them. But GoogleRaps is here to help.
 Google Rap Maps. Is there anything Google can’t do? |
When someone asks me, “do you like rap music?”, I’m never quite sure what to say. Do I try to clarify their question by saying “You mean those audio recordings of rhyming rhythmic monologues about killing, misogyny, drug deals, narcissism, sexual organs, racism, and egoistic persecution complexes?” To which the answer would be “Um…no.” Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of people think of when they think of rap, so if you say “Sure, I like rap” then you risk being pigeonholed as someone who hates women and thinks shooting people is a noble way to resolve a dispute. And if you’re white, you’ll be subject to the additional assumption that not only do you approve of these behaviors, but you do so by co-opting the values of an oppressed subculture. My actual answer to the original question is probably something like “Yeah, I like rap music. GOOD rap music”, going on to explain what a useless term “rap” is. Using information from the internet does nothing to clarify the issues at hand. Wikipedia has a dry description of rapping that suggests that “rap” may be etymologically derived from “repartee” and then goes on to talk about things like the early influence of The Memphis Jug Band, but the term “rap” redirects to “hip hop”. Which in my opinion muddles the definition beyond belief, since the page itself defines rap as being merely one of the four “key stylistic elements” of hip hop. Yeah. Whatever. There are also a lot of sites that attempt (and mostly fail) at meta-ironic humor based on “whitefying” the meaning of rap lyrics, like SnacksAndShit.com or Underground Hip Hop For Dummies . One example: Lyrics from Krizz Kaliko’s Get Cha Life Right – ” I ain’t trying to be Bill Gates, I’m trying to be the nigga Bill Gates hates.” Translation – “Here’s one goal which is impossible and another goal which is not that hard and wildly unambitious”. There’s a much more elaborate form of this in a special Intellectualize Rap forum on SomethingAwful.com, but the problem here is that if you had a deep enough knowledge of the songs being referenced, you probably wouldn’t find any of the Demotivator-style images funny. For the best laugh, you could try linkbait-tripe-posing-as-actual-content like EzineArticles.com’s Understanding Rap Music, which informs you straightaway – in self-unaware deadpan hilarity – that “Many rap songs are fast-paced. It can be tough to tell exactly what is being said“. Thank you, underpaid content-farm hack Val McQueen, for the insight. And then there’s the “Yahoo Answers” of rap lyrics, UnderstandRap.com, which takes easily-decipherable lyric snippets and deciphers them for you. Probably the only resource we found that was both informative and funny was Rapgenius’ ne feature The Rap Map, which offers extensively annotated Google Maps of rap. With a little tongue in cheek. Know of any good resources for useful or amusing rap facts? Read the rest of this entry »
Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?
As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »