Forty songs.
Forty two posts.
One year, nine days.
Fifty three weeks, three days.
Twenty three thousand, two hundred forty nine words.
Four thousand, two hundred twenty six unique words. 18%.
Two thousand, one hundred ninety six sentences.
Ninth to tenth grade reading level.
117 estimated minutes to read.
Twice as long as 2013.
13.1% "the"
8.2% "and"
6.2% "to"
5.3% "it"
4.6% "of"
Zipf's Law broken.
"Me" One hundred fifty one times.
"She" One hundred thirty five times.
"He" One hundred thirty two times.
---
"I" One thousand, eighty times.
"Wouldn't" Thirty one times.
"Buy" Forty eight times.
"This" Two hundred ninety times.
"Song" One hundred eighty one times.
---
I would buy three songs. I haven't.
Showing posts with label Top40. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Top40. Show all posts
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.40
Wanna Be Cool
Chance the Rapper/Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment (ft. Big Sean, Jeremih, and KYLE)
[A respite of one month is too long in my endless quest through the year's best music, sighted down the lens of Stephen Barry's musical tastes. I have only a few quibbles with my methodology from previous years. Clearly, I have only a fledgling ability to reckon with the actual sound of a piece, but I feel I have been doing these songs an injustice by focusing so heavily on the elements with which I can clearly identify and intellectualize. Words and pictures are just distracting; they're not the music in the artist's heart. This year, I want to start by listening to the song, usually for the first time, writing words that describe the music as I do. I'll follow each tone poem (an inappropriate usage of the phrase, but still an apt description) with a forget-the-music, write-the-words section. I'll include my friends' thoughts, any lyrical analysis, or dissection of the music video. I think that needs to be after the music. I'll cap each song analysis with a single word to sum up what I think. I like some of the things I did last year and the year before, but as with all intelligently-designed projects, I need to wrack the edges of this one just to find out if my preference for my method was just comfort in the comfortable. And, as always, I might just change my mind on this halfway through and try something else. Neither of us signed up for this, but here we go.]
Acapella
Scat
Bare
Youth
Dissipated
Joy
Fresh
Speech
Monologue
Full
Constructed
Rhythmic
Old-style
Changeable
Morphic
Intelligent
Lyrics.
This is a way more intellectual piece of music than Firework by the illimitable Katy Perry, but it has the same message. In fact, it has the same message as a lot of music. Be yourself. There's nothing to be ashamed of. I just happen to look past the saccharine message because something in the music forgets to be Royals by the pretentious Lorde. It's like the guys got together and all accidentally wrote verses about how awful they felt trying to fit in, then they just kind of assembled them and somebody in the next room was dropping a needle on random records for five seconds at a time and they all thought "That's it!" Maybe that's not what happened, but I like to think it was.
You know, I like how seriously rappers take their lyrics. Other genres tend toward mediocrity and comprehension (from Billy Joel to Justin Bieber; from Johnny Cash to Blake Shelton), but hip-hop and r&b are a constant battle to see who is the cleverest in the land.
They're the last popular poets, actually. Back in the day, Milton was on the shelf next to the Bible. Now, poets are the property of language fanatics and English teachers. Nobody's doing anything clever anymore, not anything that people will read. The last people pushing allusion and alliteration, hucking hyperbole and building with metaphors are the rappers. English used to be such a scrappy language. We wanted so badly to be like Italian and French that we fought wars in words just to be taken seriously. Chaucer was just imitating Boccaccio. Shakespeare was just stealing from Ovid, Xenophon, and Dante (and Chaucer). Milton wanted so badly to be Homer. Now, English is on top, and nobody using it is taking it seriously.
Janelle
The dissection has more of yourself in it than I was expecting. It's enchanting, and it makes me want to have a similar structure? But I talk about myself all the time. I have a million billion stories that I share every chance I get, but I get the feeling that everyone who matters has heard them all at least twice. I talk so much about myself that I feel at the very least self-important and at the worst megalomanic. I want to change the very way I respond after the very first post. We'll see if I do.
Stephen--Father of Forties
I picked up on the youth. This song is pounding with it. It's a remembrance of times past when things were worse, and an exhortation to those in the same place. Do you really think, though, that a song would have helped you in your youth? Or is it really more about seeing your adult self and realizing "Oh. I survive this, thank God," that gets you through?
Yes.
Chance the Rapper/Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment (ft. Big Sean, Jeremih, and KYLE)
[A respite of one month is too long in my endless quest through the year's best music, sighted down the lens of Stephen Barry's musical tastes. I have only a few quibbles with my methodology from previous years. Clearly, I have only a fledgling ability to reckon with the actual sound of a piece, but I feel I have been doing these songs an injustice by focusing so heavily on the elements with which I can clearly identify and intellectualize. Words and pictures are just distracting; they're not the music in the artist's heart. This year, I want to start by listening to the song, usually for the first time, writing words that describe the music as I do. I'll follow each tone poem (an inappropriate usage of the phrase, but still an apt description) with a forget-the-music, write-the-words section. I'll include my friends' thoughts, any lyrical analysis, or dissection of the music video. I think that needs to be after the music. I'll cap each song analysis with a single word to sum up what I think. I like some of the things I did last year and the year before, but as with all intelligently-designed projects, I need to wrack the edges of this one just to find out if my preference for my method was just comfort in the comfortable. And, as always, I might just change my mind on this halfway through and try something else. Neither of us signed up for this, but here we go.]
Acapella
Scat
Bare
Youth
Dissipated
Joy
Fresh
Speech
Monologue
Full
Constructed
Rhythmic
Old-style
Changeable
Morphic
Intelligent
Lyrics.
This is a way more intellectual piece of music than Firework by the illimitable Katy Perry, but it has the same message. In fact, it has the same message as a lot of music. Be yourself. There's nothing to be ashamed of. I just happen to look past the saccharine message because something in the music forgets to be Royals by the pretentious Lorde. It's like the guys got together and all accidentally wrote verses about how awful they felt trying to fit in, then they just kind of assembled them and somebody in the next room was dropping a needle on random records for five seconds at a time and they all thought "That's it!" Maybe that's not what happened, but I like to think it was.
You know, I like how seriously rappers take their lyrics. Other genres tend toward mediocrity and comprehension (from Billy Joel to Justin Bieber; from Johnny Cash to Blake Shelton), but hip-hop and r&b are a constant battle to see who is the cleverest in the land.
Only class I'm passing is English and MathThere's so much to commend in these few lines, but my favorite piece is the very simple rhyme split to the beginning of the next line. It's not uncommon in rap, but I like it anyway.
I don't know, maybe because they both got commas
Maybe because my older bro was on the honor roll
And the other one was always up in front of the honor
So I'm in the middle like the line in the divide signs
They're the last popular poets, actually. Back in the day, Milton was on the shelf next to the Bible. Now, poets are the property of language fanatics and English teachers. Nobody's doing anything clever anymore, not anything that people will read. The last people pushing allusion and alliteration, hucking hyperbole and building with metaphors are the rappers. English used to be such a scrappy language. We wanted so badly to be like Italian and French that we fought wars in words just to be taken seriously. Chaucer was just imitating Boccaccio. Shakespeare was just stealing from Ovid, Xenophon, and Dante (and Chaucer). Milton wanted so badly to be Homer. Now, English is on top, and nobody using it is taking it seriously.
Janelle
The dissection has more of yourself in it than I was expecting. It's enchanting, and it makes me want to have a similar structure? But I talk about myself all the time. I have a million billion stories that I share every chance I get, but I get the feeling that everyone who matters has heard them all at least twice. I talk so much about myself that I feel at the very least self-important and at the worst megalomanic. I want to change the very way I respond after the very first post. We'll see if I do.
Stephen--Father of Forties
I picked up on the youth. This song is pounding with it. It's a remembrance of times past when things were worse, and an exhortation to those in the same place. Do you really think, though, that a song would have helped you in your youth? Or is it really more about seeing your adult self and realizing "Oh. I survive this, thank God," that gets you through?
Yes.
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.1
Habits
Tove Lo.
I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't use. I don't hook up. I'm not familiar with the particular vices of this song, but I love listening to it. It hurts more now, though. I may not love the words, but it's more painful to think that maybe she does.
This is Delight's favorite song from the Top 40. She listened to it on loop for days. She liked a couple other Tove Lo songs Of course, her favorite was the un-remixed version, but we're looking for the Hippie Sabotage remix that Stephen liked better. It's good. I'm done playing.
Tove Lo.
I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't use. I don't hook up. I'm not familiar with the particular vices of this song, but I love listening to it. It hurts more now, though. I may not love the words, but it's more painful to think that maybe she does.
This is Delight's favorite song from the Top 40. She listened to it on loop for days. She liked a couple other Tove Lo songs Of course, her favorite was the un-remixed version, but we're looking for the Hippie Sabotage remix that Stephen liked better. It's good. I'm done playing.
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.2
All Eyes Are on You Now
Deas Vail. Adolescence practically requires each person to see the world as a vast Truman Show, an endless multitude of people all constantly judging your every movement. Each and every person you meet sees every mistake you've ever made and has incisive knowledge of your inner foibles. When you've got a zit on your jawline, everyone can see it and thinks its disgusting. When you forget someone's name, they hold on to that moment for years. When you open your chips and they spill out on your lap, everyone's laughing internally, cataloging your idiocy to tell all their friends later around wine and cheese. "Do you remember in sixth grade when Hannah called the teacher 'Mom?' That was truly her lowest moment!"
All eyes are on you now.
Except that's not true. Nobody notices; you're background material. People aren't constantly searching for your hidden problems. They're all so focussed on themselves that they don't have time for you. And thank God for that, because this song is a horrorscape if it's true. Actually: nobody cares, and it's wonderful.
Why do we all think such awful things about ourselves? This is the stuff of nightmares! This is as terrifying as the implications of the Hymn of Acxiom, but broader and less modern. It's the omniscience of the priest, the gossip chain of the village ladies, the seeming judgement of the schoolchildren in the other desks--the oldest fear since society formed. This is what you wake up to at three am and worry about at quiet moments. It's not true, but that doesn't stop our phobia from building to an all-consuming emotional "Show us what you're made of/What you are afraid of/All eyes are on you now."
I like the song. It makes me feel bigger and lighter, even though it has such a heavy message. It makes me feel like shoving my hands deeper in my pockets and walking faster, getting where I'm going so I can win whatever I'm doing. I know the music doesn't match the words, now that I've read them. I don't think it matters. There are songs you listen to because the music blows you away, songs you listen to because the words move you like a bird on the wing, and songs that have both. This song is not both, I think. I wouldn't buy it, but we all know how useless I've made that metric. It just tells you if I want it, not if I enjoy it or find it worthwhile or think it deserves to be the penultimate song of a list of Stephen's best from 2014.
One more. Delight's song.
Deas Vail. Adolescence practically requires each person to see the world as a vast Truman Show, an endless multitude of people all constantly judging your every movement. Each and every person you meet sees every mistake you've ever made and has incisive knowledge of your inner foibles. When you've got a zit on your jawline, everyone can see it and thinks its disgusting. When you forget someone's name, they hold on to that moment for years. When you open your chips and they spill out on your lap, everyone's laughing internally, cataloging your idiocy to tell all their friends later around wine and cheese. "Do you remember in sixth grade when Hannah called the teacher 'Mom?' That was truly her lowest moment!"
All eyes are on you now.
Except that's not true. Nobody notices; you're background material. People aren't constantly searching for your hidden problems. They're all so focussed on themselves that they don't have time for you. And thank God for that, because this song is a horrorscape if it's true. Actually: nobody cares, and it's wonderful.
Why do we all think such awful things about ourselves? This is the stuff of nightmares! This is as terrifying as the implications of the Hymn of Acxiom, but broader and less modern. It's the omniscience of the priest, the gossip chain of the village ladies, the seeming judgement of the schoolchildren in the other desks--the oldest fear since society formed. This is what you wake up to at three am and worry about at quiet moments. It's not true, but that doesn't stop our phobia from building to an all-consuming emotional "Show us what you're made of/What you are afraid of/All eyes are on you now."
I like the song. It makes me feel bigger and lighter, even though it has such a heavy message. It makes me feel like shoving my hands deeper in my pockets and walking faster, getting where I'm going so I can win whatever I'm doing. I know the music doesn't match the words, now that I've read them. I don't think it matters. There are songs you listen to because the music blows you away, songs you listen to because the words move you like a bird on the wing, and songs that have both. This song is not both, I think. I wouldn't buy it, but we all know how useless I've made that metric. It just tells you if I want it, not if I enjoy it or find it worthwhile or think it deserves to be the penultimate song of a list of Stephen's best from 2014.
One more. Delight's song.
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.3
Marlboro Lights.
Natalia Kills.
The Internet at home is so slow I could walk to down and take a course on lockpicking to break into the library and look up the information I need before Google would load. That might be an exaggeration. Still, as long as I'm here . . .
For my use, this song would be called Fireball, and no mistake. I'm tempted to stop writing there and just let sleeping dogs lie, but that's not why I'm here. Marlboro Lights is about a relationship that's ending or has just ended and the narrator knows why, knows it won't be anything but over, but clutches the pain to her breast and quaffs it like medicine. Her lover is gone, but somehow, she gets better because of it: "And I lie here on the bedroom floor/Where your feet walked out and your daggers fall/And I, I get a little bit better." It's hard to death if "A rooftop ledge/Could just fix everything," but she's fixated and it's fixing her.
I don't know if I'm projecting myself on this song like the thin light from an overhead projector on a hot classroom wall, fading in sunlight and aching for the final bell to ring and the referee to just call the match. Maybe I'm not, and it's just resonant in me like shook foil, terrible and fragile, a connection so tenuous that it shatters my illusions with a single strike and lays waste to my imagination of "okay." Maybe it's exactly my story and maybe I'm playing human and pretending I'm important, but either way I'm not okay, and my thoughts of Fireball whiskey doesn't make me feel a little bit better.
Would not buy.
Done thinking.
Natalia Kills.
The Internet at home is so slow I could walk to down and take a course on lockpicking to break into the library and look up the information I need before Google would load. That might be an exaggeration. Still, as long as I'm here . . .
For my use, this song would be called Fireball, and no mistake. I'm tempted to stop writing there and just let sleeping dogs lie, but that's not why I'm here. Marlboro Lights is about a relationship that's ending or has just ended and the narrator knows why, knows it won't be anything but over, but clutches the pain to her breast and quaffs it like medicine. Her lover is gone, but somehow, she gets better because of it: "And I lie here on the bedroom floor/Where your feet walked out and your daggers fall/And I, I get a little bit better." It's hard to death if "A rooftop ledge/Could just fix everything," but she's fixated and it's fixing her.
I don't know if I'm projecting myself on this song like the thin light from an overhead projector on a hot classroom wall, fading in sunlight and aching for the final bell to ring and the referee to just call the match. Maybe I'm not, and it's just resonant in me like shook foil, terrible and fragile, a connection so tenuous that it shatters my illusions with a single strike and lays waste to my imagination of "okay." Maybe it's exactly my story and maybe I'm playing human and pretending I'm important, but either way I'm not okay, and my thoughts of Fireball whiskey doesn't make me feel a little bit better.
Would not buy.
Done thinking.
Monday, November 9, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.4
Harbinger.
Anberlin. This song is absolutely full to the gills with things that people want to hear. We'll live forever. We'll be together. These are the myths that people love to tell themselves. Heaven is just this extreme level of wish fulfillment. Reincarnation promises eternal life. Collectivism promises togetherness. Success will make your legacy last an eternity. Love will keep you from drifting apart.
The song is a dream state, though. The musical intro drifts, disconnected and out of time, finally picking up urgency with the singer, but never losing the underbeat of the dream. We're told that people are paid to feel free, bribed to be content. We're told to fall asleep. We're told that life isn't all perfection: we need who we would bleed for, a sacrifice unnecessary in a true dream.
This song's words and sound echo the dissatisfaction I feel today, and perhaps have felt for a very long time. I was exhausted and the dog rolled up on me and whined at the edge of my bed at 6:30. I've been awake for two and a half hours doing nothing, fervidly wishing that I would crash, exhausted, back to sleep. I'm afraid I'll never sleep in again. And in my current angry mood, I'm pissed at everything: God, Feminism, Ben Carson, Moberly Middle School, and Watson. [Brief aside: I wrote that on Sunday morning, became disaffected by the blog itself, and then stayed up until the small hours doing Lord only knows what.] Maybe it's the perfect time for a disaffected song that reflects my generic brand of disgust, or maybe it's absolutely the incorrect time to be wallowing in self-constructed misanthropy, further echoing in on my psychosis in an increasingly torpid stupor in which even the intrusion of minutiae is unbearable.
Yet.
I would love for someone to find a private moment and pull me into a hug with a grip that communicates the immediacy and the passion of the truth of it: some relationships last forever. Because right now things are hard here, now.
I wouldn't buy this, for whatever that's worth now. I haven't bought any music for a year or more now. I didn't even buy any at McKay's, and it's ludicrously cheap there. I don't think "I would buy this" is a good metric any more. I'll find one for the next forty, but for now just understand that I wouldn't buy this song if it were offered to me for a dollar.
Anberlin. This song is absolutely full to the gills with things that people want to hear. We'll live forever. We'll be together. These are the myths that people love to tell themselves. Heaven is just this extreme level of wish fulfillment. Reincarnation promises eternal life. Collectivism promises togetherness. Success will make your legacy last an eternity. Love will keep you from drifting apart.
The song is a dream state, though. The musical intro drifts, disconnected and out of time, finally picking up urgency with the singer, but never losing the underbeat of the dream. We're told that people are paid to feel free, bribed to be content. We're told to fall asleep. We're told that life isn't all perfection: we need who we would bleed for, a sacrifice unnecessary in a true dream.
This song's words and sound echo the dissatisfaction I feel today, and perhaps have felt for a very long time. I was exhausted and the dog rolled up on me and whined at the edge of my bed at 6:30. I've been awake for two and a half hours doing nothing, fervidly wishing that I would crash, exhausted, back to sleep. I'm afraid I'll never sleep in again. And in my current angry mood, I'm pissed at everything: God, Feminism, Ben Carson, Moberly Middle School, and Watson. [Brief aside: I wrote that on Sunday morning, became disaffected by the blog itself, and then stayed up until the small hours doing Lord only knows what.] Maybe it's the perfect time for a disaffected song that reflects my generic brand of disgust, or maybe it's absolutely the incorrect time to be wallowing in self-constructed misanthropy, further echoing in on my psychosis in an increasingly torpid stupor in which even the intrusion of minutiae is unbearable.
Yet.
I would love for someone to find a private moment and pull me into a hug with a grip that communicates the immediacy and the passion of the truth of it: some relationships last forever. Because right now things are hard here, now.
I wouldn't buy this, for whatever that's worth now. I haven't bought any music for a year or more now. I didn't even buy any at McKay's, and it's ludicrously cheap there. I don't think "I would buy this" is a good metric any more. I'll find one for the next forty, but for now just understand that I wouldn't buy this song if it were offered to me for a dollar.
Friday, November 6, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.5
Heavenly Father.
Bon Iver. This song rivals many of my favorites for being utter gibberish. The religious references are tired and useless, the imagery is confusing, and the word's message is almost banal. "It's definitely lava," the singer sighs, and we're left wondering what exactly is lava? The relationship? His father? There's no context and the pronoun leaves me empty. I didn't understand the song the third time I read through it, and lyric genius is no help. This one was annotated by a drunk sloth. I had to struggle to find what meaning there was.
So I read the song backwards.
It's better. Listen, I don't know what the songwriter was thinking when he wrote these lyrics, but either it is gibberish and I'm sane or it's genius and I'm missing something. I want to assume the writer wasn't throwing refrigerator magnets at a whiteboard and writing down what stuck. Look carefully. "A safety, in the end, is all that he offers: Heavenly Father." It makes more sense than reversed. Now we know that the Heavenly Father is nothing more than a single point of safety for the singer. Let's go forward expecting him to seek that safety and slip from it, pointlessly, because it's not complex enough for his needs. He spends forever "up here" (heaven? I don't think so?) filling his time with fear. We learn that his loved one left him and that's why he's depressed. He let her go. "You turn around now and you count to 10, but you're free now, 'cause I'm a known coward in a coward wind." He's not going to chase. "Won't you settle down baby here your love has been! And I'm free now. I was never sure how much of you I could let in, but you're free now." He gives back the love and explains why he's letting go. He gives permission for the other person to leave. "And I don't need to go where a Bible went ever since I heard the howlin' wind." He feel a need to follow a Bible when he's such a coward. That coward wind has pushed him right out of the safety of the Heavenly Father.
Yet I know I'm trying too hard. The author wrote "Heard about a day where it dropped the know/to go another day as we learn to close," which makes no sense forward or backward. He wrote "Heavenly Father/is whose brought to his Autumn/and love is left in end." That's corroborated by two websites. I don't think it's a spelling error. I'm trying too hard and I wanted to find meaning but it's not there. It is gibberish.
I think it's "'Heavenly Father' is who's brought to his Autumn" and "I've been up here filling holes with fears," but that's clearly wrong. It's "whose" and "hulls." I hate lyrics transcribers today. Ignore me.
I think I demand too much of my music. It's like: Heavenly Father is perfectly serviceable. It even sets a beautiful picture in my mind. It's a moodscape and it does its job. But I constantly expect the words to mean something. Am I out of my mind? Did I get hit in a soft spot as a child and I'm left wanting desperately to make connections with the random jumble of words some man I've never met is singing so passionately and so hollowly? I feel like this song may have broken me, and I don't know what to say. I've never seen the movie the song was written for (Zach Braff), and maybe a lot of the references like "lava" and "wind" would make sense if I had, but I don't want to. I want a song that holds itself up. I want a song that helps me somehow after I've listened to it. And if that's unfair because I liked the video games Dear Esther and The Graveyard. Maybe I've just been programmed so well to look for meaning in lyrics and poetry by my academic upbringing that I'm missing something elemental and foundational in this work.
Or maybe the lyricist who wrote this piece was a drunk sloth. We may never know.
Bon Iver. This song rivals many of my favorites for being utter gibberish. The religious references are tired and useless, the imagery is confusing, and the word's message is almost banal. "It's definitely lava," the singer sighs, and we're left wondering what exactly is lava? The relationship? His father? There's no context and the pronoun leaves me empty. I didn't understand the song the third time I read through it, and lyric genius is no help. This one was annotated by a drunk sloth. I had to struggle to find what meaning there was.
So I read the song backwards.
It's better. Listen, I don't know what the songwriter was thinking when he wrote these lyrics, but either it is gibberish and I'm sane or it's genius and I'm missing something. I want to assume the writer wasn't throwing refrigerator magnets at a whiteboard and writing down what stuck. Look carefully. "A safety, in the end, is all that he offers: Heavenly Father." It makes more sense than reversed. Now we know that the Heavenly Father is nothing more than a single point of safety for the singer. Let's go forward expecting him to seek that safety and slip from it, pointlessly, because it's not complex enough for his needs. He spends forever "up here" (heaven? I don't think so?) filling his time with fear. We learn that his loved one left him and that's why he's depressed. He let her go. "You turn around now and you count to 10, but you're free now, 'cause I'm a known coward in a coward wind." He's not going to chase. "Won't you settle down baby here your love has been! And I'm free now. I was never sure how much of you I could let in, but you're free now." He gives back the love and explains why he's letting go. He gives permission for the other person to leave. "And I don't need to go where a Bible went ever since I heard the howlin' wind." He feel a need to follow a Bible when he's such a coward. That coward wind has pushed him right out of the safety of the Heavenly Father.
Yet I know I'm trying too hard. The author wrote "Heard about a day where it dropped the know/to go another day as we learn to close," which makes no sense forward or backward. He wrote "Heavenly Father/is whose brought to his Autumn/and love is left in end." That's corroborated by two websites. I don't think it's a spelling error. I'm trying too hard and I wanted to find meaning but it's not there. It is gibberish.
I think it's "'Heavenly Father' is who's brought to his Autumn" and "I've been up here filling holes with fears," but that's clearly wrong. It's "whose" and "hulls." I hate lyrics transcribers today. Ignore me.
I think I demand too much of my music. It's like: Heavenly Father is perfectly serviceable. It even sets a beautiful picture in my mind. It's a moodscape and it does its job. But I constantly expect the words to mean something. Am I out of my mind? Did I get hit in a soft spot as a child and I'm left wanting desperately to make connections with the random jumble of words some man I've never met is singing so passionately and so hollowly? I feel like this song may have broken me, and I don't know what to say. I've never seen the movie the song was written for (Zach Braff), and maybe a lot of the references like "lava" and "wind" would make sense if I had, but I don't want to. I want a song that holds itself up. I want a song that helps me somehow after I've listened to it. And if that's unfair because I liked the video games Dear Esther and The Graveyard. Maybe I've just been programmed so well to look for meaning in lyrics and poetry by my academic upbringing that I'm missing something elemental and foundational in this work.
Or maybe the lyricist who wrote this piece was a drunk sloth. We may never know.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.6
Haunt (Demo)
Bastille. In an epic stretch of five months, I have left this project utterly dormant. Now I shall return, since Stephen has graced me with a 40 for 2015 and I'm now officially a failure.
I'm a storyteller. I try to hook my students with well-told stories about my childhood so they'll write stories too. I talk about when my brother beat the dog to save a bird's nest and I felt my mind carom between two conclusions as I learned what was going on. I talk about my sister pushing me from the treehouse and thinking, even for that spit second, that she had killed me, after all. I talk about canoeing down a river with Russell and losing both paddles in a swift bit of the current and throwing myself out of the boat after it. I'm a storyteller by nature and I love feeling people's energy build and tense as the story breaks open in front of them. But: to date, the most universally captivating stories I can tell are those of my past relationships. Maybe it's because I'm so candid about how I was feeling and what I concluded from the terrible things I did and felt with the girlfriends I've had, but I don't think that's all of it. I think stories of past relationships get such strong reactions not because they're enjoyable or interesting, but because they're resonant, like stepping inside an enormous bell and having the outside struck, again and again, by someone else.
I think romantic relationships--and especially sexual relationships--cause scars or change so deep and fundamental to who we are and what we want as young people that my peers will always be transfixed by a well-told heartbreak. When somebody hears a story about love lost, their first and immediate reaction will always be to connect it to some story they've thought they locked away.
That's Haunt.
I would buy it, but I haven't. I'm not buying music. I need to change my metric, since I have Amazon Music and I'm likely to have Google Music and the whole world is changing. My students don't know what a CD is. My mother can't believe I don't know how to start an LP. I like Bastille. He's great.
Bastille. In an epic stretch of five months, I have left this project utterly dormant. Now I shall return, since Stephen has graced me with a 40 for 2015 and I'm now officially a failure.
I'm a storyteller. I try to hook my students with well-told stories about my childhood so they'll write stories too. I talk about when my brother beat the dog to save a bird's nest and I felt my mind carom between two conclusions as I learned what was going on. I talk about my sister pushing me from the treehouse and thinking, even for that spit second, that she had killed me, after all. I talk about canoeing down a river with Russell and losing both paddles in a swift bit of the current and throwing myself out of the boat after it. I'm a storyteller by nature and I love feeling people's energy build and tense as the story breaks open in front of them. But: to date, the most universally captivating stories I can tell are those of my past relationships. Maybe it's because I'm so candid about how I was feeling and what I concluded from the terrible things I did and felt with the girlfriends I've had, but I don't think that's all of it. I think stories of past relationships get such strong reactions not because they're enjoyable or interesting, but because they're resonant, like stepping inside an enormous bell and having the outside struck, again and again, by someone else.
I think romantic relationships--and especially sexual relationships--cause scars or change so deep and fundamental to who we are and what we want as young people that my peers will always be transfixed by a well-told heartbreak. When somebody hears a story about love lost, their first and immediate reaction will always be to connect it to some story they've thought they locked away.
That's Haunt.
As adults will grow and maturity showsThe song makes me feel melancholy and hollow, but the song itself doesn't make me think of losing anybody. The words do. The way I relate to music is so liminal, so interstitial that I never had a chance to relate Haunt so very strongly with an emotional loss in my life. Honestly, I have a better chance to relate to Chopin at this point than to Bastille. I've just heard him so little at critical moments. I love it, though. Something in it makes me want to scream the words, even though I don't know them. Something terrible makes me want the song to crash and cry.
All the terrifying rarity of truth,
As you turn to your mind,
And your thoughts they rewind
To old happenings and things that are done
I would buy it, but I haven't. I'm not buying music. I need to change my metric, since I have Amazon Music and I'm likely to have Google Music and the whole world is changing. My students don't know what a CD is. My mother can't believe I don't know how to start an LP. I like Bastille. He's great.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.7
Comfort Inn Ending (Freestyle)
Jhene Aiko. This is Ms. Aiko's third appearance on this top 40. That's legitimately impressive. I don't think even Lana has appeared more often. And the song is good enough, lyrically. I generally see the party songs and the thumpers done by about song 20. That's when the words of the songs really make Stephen feel some type of way. That's when we can actually jump into the lyrics and really feast on the meanings. Well, except for Grand Finale, obviously.
Freestyle: a music form that begs for structure. The rap battles I've heard (few) and improvisational poetry I've seen (more) all read like extended nightmares; one thought jumps to the next without fulfilling its purpose or explaining its presence. The rhymes are often very clever and the flow is unexpected. I know it takes a tremendous amount of skill. But the product is often a Gordian knot, begging for the clean steel sweep of Alexander's blade. Aiko is that blade.
I don't know if she wrote this freestyle before, or if she practiced parts of the lyrics. It's possible that she constructed the meanings and the relationships of lines before she started. Regardless, the freestyle has structure, even if it is only one.
Comfort Inn Ending: a song that only does one thing, but does it well. Aiko makes a claim from a realization. He's not the only one she can love. She's not the only one he was seeing. Each is not the only one with pain. Truth: their relationship is nothing. She explains what she knows to us as we listen. She really loved this guy, but the holes in the wallpaper got obvious really fast. Too many people showed up making claims on him/making claims on her. By the end, she's really jaded, trying to pass off their relationship as being worthless because she only wanted a shoulder to cry on when her brother died.
But. She makes that claim again, one final time: we're nothing. It's turned around, though. Mature.
I only have one confusion, really.
What are the genders, again, of the players in the drama? The narrator is voiced by a woman (Aiko). The lover was told not to trust hoes (a term mostly for women). Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian all had their way with the lover (these are all male names). The narrator left 'Quis, who I assume is the same Marquis from before (male?). Everything is ambiguous until the baby mama bursts in and resolves my questions: the lover has got to be male. I don't think lesbians have mistakes that make babies, unless medical science has failed me badly. Unless the narrator is two and they're switching without switching voices or singers, He has been toyed with romantically by men, fell in love with a woman, got a girl pregnant, and essentially had a very confusing couple of months. Maybe the video will clear things up.
Well.
Narrator: female. Check.
Lover: male. Check. (apparently white, with a black beard and a weird Jesus necklace)
Exes of the lover: (?) Anyway, there were two girls in a really nice Ferrari that Aiko drew on with black wax crayon to look like she was keying it. I'm not sure what was happening there, but they looked terrified. But there's still Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian who had their way with him. It's hard to understand.
Anyway, I have some feelings about when famous people use their breakups as creativity juice. I've done it, but I try really hard not to write about the breakup explicitly. I don't want people to know my personal business, and I really don't want my ex to see what I'm writing about them. That's awful trash behavior, in my opinion, to drag your raw, exposed heart out to shame someone publicly. I still love the way the song sounds, though. It makes me slow and angry and sad, simultaneously, and I just want to hear the story, mostly, and I guess I wouldn't buy this song because I have other things I want to do when I feel like this. Comfort Inn Ending doesn't fill a need for me.
Oh, yeah. Before I forget: update.
Jhene Aiko. This is Ms. Aiko's third appearance on this top 40. That's legitimately impressive. I don't think even Lana has appeared more often. And the song is good enough, lyrically. I generally see the party songs and the thumpers done by about song 20. That's when the words of the songs really make Stephen feel some type of way. That's when we can actually jump into the lyrics and really feast on the meanings. Well, except for Grand Finale, obviously.
Freestyle: a music form that begs for structure. The rap battles I've heard (few) and improvisational poetry I've seen (more) all read like extended nightmares; one thought jumps to the next without fulfilling its purpose or explaining its presence. The rhymes are often very clever and the flow is unexpected. I know it takes a tremendous amount of skill. But the product is often a Gordian knot, begging for the clean steel sweep of Alexander's blade. Aiko is that blade.
I don't know if she wrote this freestyle before, or if she practiced parts of the lyrics. It's possible that she constructed the meanings and the relationships of lines before she started. Regardless, the freestyle has structure, even if it is only one.
Comfort Inn Ending: a song that only does one thing, but does it well. Aiko makes a claim from a realization. He's not the only one she can love. She's not the only one he was seeing. Each is not the only one with pain. Truth: their relationship is nothing. She explains what she knows to us as we listen. She really loved this guy, but the holes in the wallpaper got obvious really fast. Too many people showed up making claims on him/making claims on her. By the end, she's really jaded, trying to pass off their relationship as being worthless because she only wanted a shoulder to cry on when her brother died.
But. She makes that claim again, one final time: we're nothing. It's turned around, though. Mature.
And I was not only one who was hurting/And you were not the only one with the burdens/But if we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing/Why would you call this love when you knew that it wasn't?She's an adult about it. She's not petty. She just wants to know why he thought it was okay to use her. If this is freestyle, I'll buy this song right now because Aiko deserves the money. This is constructed to have a natural progression of thought, to be simple enough to follow, to introduce its concepts slowly and resolve them once (not to drive a point into the ground by repetition).
I only have one confusion, really.
What are the genders, again, of the players in the drama? The narrator is voiced by a woman (Aiko). The lover was told not to trust hoes (a term mostly for women). Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian all had their way with the lover (these are all male names). The narrator left 'Quis, who I assume is the same Marquis from before (male?). Everything is ambiguous until the baby mama bursts in and resolves my questions: the lover has got to be male. I don't think lesbians have mistakes that make babies, unless medical science has failed me badly. Unless the narrator is two and they're switching without switching voices or singers, He has been toyed with romantically by men, fell in love with a woman, got a girl pregnant, and essentially had a very confusing couple of months. Maybe the video will clear things up.
Well.
Narrator: female. Check.
Lover: male. Check. (apparently white, with a black beard and a weird Jesus necklace)
Exes of the lover: (?) Anyway, there were two girls in a really nice Ferrari that Aiko drew on with black wax crayon to look like she was keying it. I'm not sure what was happening there, but they looked terrified. But there's still Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian who had their way with him. It's hard to understand.
Anyway, I have some feelings about when famous people use their breakups as creativity juice. I've done it, but I try really hard not to write about the breakup explicitly. I don't want people to know my personal business, and I really don't want my ex to see what I'm writing about them. That's awful trash behavior, in my opinion, to drag your raw, exposed heart out to shame someone publicly. I still love the way the song sounds, though. It makes me slow and angry and sad, simultaneously, and I just want to hear the story, mostly, and I guess I wouldn't buy this song because I have other things I want to do when I feel like this. Comfort Inn Ending doesn't fill a need for me.
Oh, yeah. Before I forget: update.
Monday, June 15, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.8
Kingdom
Common (feat Vince Staples)
This is a complete poem. It wanders in places, but the necessity of the form (massive stress on end rhymes and rhythm and a love of internal rhymes as extra) can excuse the places where the lyrics drop ideas, never to come back. My post is long, so I cut down on my links this time. Try the video or rap genius if you want more.
The first time I ever understood the old hackneyed phrase "the wrong side of the tracks" was years ago when my dad, brother, and I were going to Oshkosh. We stopped in Chicago and got lost trying to find a museum. One minute, we were on Lake Street, and the next we crossed a railroad and the buildings were all precarious, leaning on the people who spread themselves on the stoop. Dad just said "well, I guess we made a wrong turn," and turned around. Chicago is not the worst city in the United States, but I know it's bad. Kingdom? Chicago.
The lyrics might be from three or four different perspectives, but it might be the same narrator throughout. I can't actually tell. It starts with what rap genius calls a "hood sonnet," which is just a sonnet that doesn't follow pentameter. He starts with an iconic admission:
The first verse: is it a different narrator? I'm not sure, because the song isn't explicit. The young man is at a funeral, feeling messed up about his friend dying. Later, when he sees the killer sitting calmly on the porch, the narrator "can't afford not to hit him," and finds that the same keys that would normally set him free (I assume his feelings of family, religion, and grief) have pushed him into the murder.
Third verse: I'm not sure about the narrator. This one's dead. He might be the rapper or the boy in church or the thug on the porch. I don't know. What I do know is he had no support ("my money ain't straight, my fam ain't straight") and he did drugs to make ends meet. He blames God first for putting him in the situation and second for not lifting him out of it.
I thought there was a separate narrator for this one, and I guess I was right. I don't know if I overvalue rap that comes from personal experience, but I always try to give it a second look, just like Eminem's Survival. Vince plays with guns and watches his family use drugs. He tries to be tough and he knows how precarious life is.
So now you know the basic story. The song references the bible intelligently (revenge is mine, sayeth the lord, the last shall be first, the prodigal son, and the gates of heaven) and boy does it abuse the conceit of the keys: keys to a benz, a jail cell, to heaven.
Hype Williams does the video; a story about a young man who starts slow in his family's kitchen and builds to nice cars and strip clubs when: he gets busted. The use of color is strong, all reds and blues like the lights on a cop car. It's set in Chicago and deals with dirt, but otherwise it's not the story of the song. It doesn't add as much as others we've seen, but it certainly doesn't detract. Only one real complaint: at the juncture of the spoken-word poem and the actual song, there's a distracting brea-
k in the music. I think there just wasn't a way to blend the two songs smoothly, but it still feels like powdered cheese in a five-star restaurant.
I don't know how to feel about this song. It puts me in some type of way. I love the choir. I love the metaphors. I love the rhythmic delivery. I just don't know the pain, so I don't feel the aura, so I lose out. I don't think I would pass on buying it, though, just because I would need to play it for people when they need to hear it.
Common (feat Vince Staples)
This is a complete poem. It wanders in places, but the necessity of the form (massive stress on end rhymes and rhythm and a love of internal rhymes as extra) can excuse the places where the lyrics drop ideas, never to come back. My post is long, so I cut down on my links this time. Try the video or rap genius if you want more.
The first time I ever understood the old hackneyed phrase "the wrong side of the tracks" was years ago when my dad, brother, and I were going to Oshkosh. We stopped in Chicago and got lost trying to find a museum. One minute, we were on Lake Street, and the next we crossed a railroad and the buildings were all precarious, leaning on the people who spread themselves on the stoop. Dad just said "well, I guess we made a wrong turn," and turned around. Chicago is not the worst city in the United States, but I know it's bad. Kingdom? Chicago.
The lyrics might be from three or four different perspectives, but it might be the same narrator throughout. I can't actually tell. It starts with what rap genius calls a "hood sonnet," which is just a sonnet that doesn't follow pentameter. He starts with an iconic admission:
I do dirt.
We all tryna eat off the same plate/Dead presidents; we want the same faceThis emphasis serves double duty: there isn't enough money to go around, and everybody wants to be white. The hood sonnet ends when he asks for the first time if he could really make it to heaven.
The first verse: is it a different narrator? I'm not sure, because the song isn't explicit. The young man is at a funeral, feeling messed up about his friend dying. Later, when he sees the killer sitting calmly on the porch, the narrator "can't afford not to hit him," and finds that the same keys that would normally set him free (I assume his feelings of family, religion, and grief) have pushed him into the murder.
Third verse: I'm not sure about the narrator. This one's dead. He might be the rapper or the boy in church or the thug on the porch. I don't know. What I do know is he had no support ("my money ain't straight, my fam ain't straight") and he did drugs to make ends meet. He blames God first for putting him in the situation and second for not lifting him out of it.
You created me from dust, that's why I did dirt.I think he does take the responsibility for his actions, even though he's angry at God. He doesn't want his son to follow the same path (can this narrator possibly be the young man from the funeral?), and he still desperately wants to be worthy of heaven.
Standing at the gates 'cause I know you've forgiven what I've done/I'm your son: do I have the keys to get in?Vince Staples weighs in on the last verse: it's his life. "Peep the full interview here."
I thought there was a separate narrator for this one, and I guess I was right. I don't know if I overvalue rap that comes from personal experience, but I always try to give it a second look, just like Eminem's Survival. Vince plays with guns and watches his family use drugs. He tries to be tough and he knows how precarious life is.
So now you know the basic story. The song references the bible intelligently (revenge is mine, sayeth the lord, the last shall be first, the prodigal son, and the gates of heaven) and boy does it abuse the conceit of the keys: keys to a benz, a jail cell, to heaven.
Hype Williams does the video; a story about a young man who starts slow in his family's kitchen and builds to nice cars and strip clubs when: he gets busted. The use of color is strong, all reds and blues like the lights on a cop car. It's set in Chicago and deals with dirt, but otherwise it's not the story of the song. It doesn't add as much as others we've seen, but it certainly doesn't detract. Only one real complaint: at the juncture of the spoken-word poem and the actual song, there's a distracting brea-
k in the music. I think there just wasn't a way to blend the two songs smoothly, but it still feels like powdered cheese in a five-star restaurant.
I don't know how to feel about this song. It puts me in some type of way. I love the choir. I love the metaphors. I love the rhythmic delivery. I just don't know the pain, so I don't feel the aura, so I lose out. I don't think I would pass on buying it, though, just because I would need to play it for people when they need to hear it.
My Acolyte Journey: 2015.9
Luv(sic) Grand Finale
Stephen let me in on the secret of this song: it's dead. The creator was found with this on his phone; the last thing he'd ever make, stripped from his phone after passing.
Somewhere I had saved a folder of looping photographs. Today, I was trying to think of how to address Grand Finale, and I couldn't find my folder. I pulled out old hard drives and plugged in old usb sticks. Nothing. I swear I saved that folder, but it doesn't matter now. I had to search the Internet. After a few pages of gifs that looped but not beautifully, I found a few I recognized and followed the rabbit hole to Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck and their creation: cinemagraph.
Since the Grand Finale is so much unlike any of the other music we've heard in the Top 40, I react differently. I give you the cinemagraph or: pictures that put me in the same mood as Nujabes' last work.
I just hit play on Grand Finale and Delight smiled. "Oh no! That's his music, isn't it?" This isn't Stephen's music, but it sounds like his. I think that's the point.
For other things that make me unfailingly melancholy, see: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Dear Esther, and a triple-header of Ozymandias, The Watchmen, and Frank Dillon's The Colossal Pair. I think I've got every genre in there (song/picture/book/game/poem/comic/painting).
Stephen let me in on the secret of this song: it's dead. The creator was found with this on his phone; the last thing he'd ever make, stripped from his phone after passing.
Somewhere I had saved a folder of looping photographs. Today, I was trying to think of how to address Grand Finale, and I couldn't find my folder. I pulled out old hard drives and plugged in old usb sticks. Nothing. I swear I saved that folder, but it doesn't matter now. I had to search the Internet. After a few pages of gifs that looped but not beautifully, I found a few I recognized and followed the rabbit hole to Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck and their creation: cinemagraph.
Since the Grand Finale is so much unlike any of the other music we've heard in the Top 40, I react differently. I give you the cinemagraph or: pictures that put me in the same mood as Nujabes' last work.
I just hit play on Grand Finale and Delight smiled. "Oh no! That's his music, isn't it?" This isn't Stephen's music, but it sounds like his. I think that's the point.
For other things that make me unfailingly melancholy, see: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Dear Esther, and a triple-header of Ozymandias, The Watchmen, and Frank Dillon's The Colossal Pair. I think I've got every genre in there (song/picture/book/game/poem/comic/painting).
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
My Acolyte Journey 2014.10b
Bang Bang
Jessie J, with names to make the song famous: Ari G and Nicki M. Yes, the first post was a joke, and no, I will not apologize for re-using material. If a joke is funny once, it's funny at least four times.
I think by now we've all heard this song. It is certainly clever, but I just want to picture the man who would be seduced by this theoretical woman/narrator.
There's Joseph. He demands that people call him Lightning Juice, but people call him Joe. Last week, he came into the club I like and he's wearing one of those--what do you call the big fur hats? Like a sombrero, but neon fur? Anyway, his vest was hanging open and I could see his nipple tats and he's throwing negs at girls to see what would stick. I legitimately heard him say "I bet you'd be hot in Indiana" to a girl and then he licked his lips. I don't know what that means. Anyway, he drinks lots of cheap beer and pees in the hallway next to the picture of Scarface with pasted-on boobs. He's certifiable.
Lightning Juice turns to me after about two hours of this and he tells me this story about a woman who actually came onto him, once. I know. I don't believe it, either, but he paints this picture. Follow me, here. This is a woman who understands words and men. She's using innuendo the way most girls use a straw, and even the way she uses a straw turns Joe on. She's putting him off every other girl in the bar, saying they're hot, yeah, but I'll make your temperature rise. At this point, Joe is pinching himself and wondering when she'll point to the camera and laugh, but she keeps coming on strong. At a certain point, she's gotten Joe's hat off and his swagger wiped off and him out to her car. This is the feeling I get from Joe's breathless retelling of the story: she used him for sex. Not only did she initiate, but she "rode his uh like a Harley," Lighnting Juice's words, not mine, and then just . . . drove away. Good for her, I think. It's nice to see a young woman take command of her sexuality like that, to eschew societal norms of what's expected and to forge her own path. She has bad taste, but I'm not going to change that. Anybody who comes on as strong as she does seems to scrape the bottom of the barrel?
Anyway, Joe's telling me this story when all of a sudden, he goes apoplectic. True deer-in-the-headlights look. He begins to shake, his necklaces jingling together. He lifts a tremulous finger and hoarsely whispers: "She's back!" I follow his shaking hand and see a twelve-year old dressed up like a transvestite trying to blend in at a preschool in 2055.
"Really?" I say, incredulous.
She struts up to him, crossing her legs with each step, and then rolls over backward onto the countertop, her hair spilling over the bar. "I know you want it," she yells in a near-monotone. "I'll let you have it." I guess this passes as seductive in whatever land Lightning Juice is from. He's gone weak and white, and he's holding his hand to his nose to keep the gauge from whistling as he breathes heavily. They kiss, but not the way humans do, with tenderness and emotion. They kiss like moviestars: violently and suddenly, as if pulled together by strong magnets. Their lips move as if someone else's hands are performing the actions of kissing for them, but under a blanket in a hot room. It's not exactly repulsive. As she's dragging him off towards the parking lot, ostensibly to roll him up like a tube of toothpaste, she stops briefly to whisper to me: "See, anybody could be good to you, but you need a bad girl to blow your mind."
Lightning Juice is a nice enough guy, I just don't want to see his heart get broken.
Bang bang is a really cranked up song. Like, if the producers of songs were as stupid as the guy from Spinal Tap. The video is nothing special: a mash of three people and the visuals from a thousand music videos. I do think it's hilarious to see how the number of people with the singers is equal to their investment in the song. Jessie J wrote the beat and I assume most of the words. She's got a posse. Nicki wrote her own words (who else would push her special liquor? why do we care about Myx Moscato?) and she's got two chicks and a helicopter to help her dance. Ariana don't give a crap and she's just rolling around on a bed alone, probably shot three months afterward and in a different state. It's just as awkward as Drake in Anaconda. I wouldn't buy this song because I would be embarrassed to have it on my computer, but I will crank it up (to eleven) when it comes on the radio.
Jessie J, with names to make the song famous: Ari G and Nicki M. Yes, the first post was a joke, and no, I will not apologize for re-using material. If a joke is funny once, it's funny at least four times.
I think by now we've all heard this song. It is certainly clever, but I just want to picture the man who would be seduced by this theoretical woman/narrator.
There's Joseph. He demands that people call him Lightning Juice, but people call him Joe. Last week, he came into the club I like and he's wearing one of those--what do you call the big fur hats? Like a sombrero, but neon fur? Anyway, his vest was hanging open and I could see his nipple tats and he's throwing negs at girls to see what would stick. I legitimately heard him say "I bet you'd be hot in Indiana" to a girl and then he licked his lips. I don't know what that means. Anyway, he drinks lots of cheap beer and pees in the hallway next to the picture of Scarface with pasted-on boobs. He's certifiable.
Lightning Juice turns to me after about two hours of this and he tells me this story about a woman who actually came onto him, once. I know. I don't believe it, either, but he paints this picture. Follow me, here. This is a woman who understands words and men. She's using innuendo the way most girls use a straw, and even the way she uses a straw turns Joe on. She's putting him off every other girl in the bar, saying they're hot, yeah, but I'll make your temperature rise. At this point, Joe is pinching himself and wondering when she'll point to the camera and laugh, but she keeps coming on strong. At a certain point, she's gotten Joe's hat off and his swagger wiped off and him out to her car. This is the feeling I get from Joe's breathless retelling of the story: she used him for sex. Not only did she initiate, but she "rode his uh like a Harley," Lighnting Juice's words, not mine, and then just . . . drove away. Good for her, I think. It's nice to see a young woman take command of her sexuality like that, to eschew societal norms of what's expected and to forge her own path. She has bad taste, but I'm not going to change that. Anybody who comes on as strong as she does seems to scrape the bottom of the barrel?
Anyway, Joe's telling me this story when all of a sudden, he goes apoplectic. True deer-in-the-headlights look. He begins to shake, his necklaces jingling together. He lifts a tremulous finger and hoarsely whispers: "She's back!" I follow his shaking hand and see a twelve-year old dressed up like a transvestite trying to blend in at a preschool in 2055.
"Really?" I say, incredulous.
She struts up to him, crossing her legs with each step, and then rolls over backward onto the countertop, her hair spilling over the bar. "I know you want it," she yells in a near-monotone. "I'll let you have it." I guess this passes as seductive in whatever land Lightning Juice is from. He's gone weak and white, and he's holding his hand to his nose to keep the gauge from whistling as he breathes heavily. They kiss, but not the way humans do, with tenderness and emotion. They kiss like moviestars: violently and suddenly, as if pulled together by strong magnets. Their lips move as if someone else's hands are performing the actions of kissing for them, but under a blanket in a hot room. It's not exactly repulsive. As she's dragging him off towards the parking lot, ostensibly to roll him up like a tube of toothpaste, she stops briefly to whisper to me: "See, anybody could be good to you, but you need a bad girl to blow your mind."
Lightning Juice is a nice enough guy, I just don't want to see his heart get broken.
Bang bang is a really cranked up song. Like, if the producers of songs were as stupid as the guy from Spinal Tap. The video is nothing special: a mash of three people and the visuals from a thousand music videos. I do think it's hilarious to see how the number of people with the singers is equal to their investment in the song. Jessie J wrote the beat and I assume most of the words. She's got a posse. Nicki wrote her own words (who else would push her special liquor? why do we care about Myx Moscato?) and she's got two chicks and a helicopter to help her dance. Ariana don't give a crap and she's just rolling around on a bed alone, probably shot three months afterward and in a different state. It's just as awkward as Drake in Anaconda. I wouldn't buy this song because I would be embarrassed to have it on my computer, but I will crank it up (to eleven) when it comes on the radio.
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.10
Bang Bang
Cher, covered by Nancy Sinatra as produced by Sonny Bono (what happened there!?)
I don't think this song gets enough credit. The original Cher song isn't actually the heart of the song. I think Nancy really finds the exact way I want to hear the lyrics; it's just slow enough and utterly melancholy. I mean, the wawawa guitar is awful, admittedly. But I really like My Baby Shot Me Down for the mood it puts me in. Finally: this photograph, though.
I would buy this song if they remastered Nancy without the wawawa, because in the same way that neunundneunzigluftballons really benefitted from removing the overdriven 80s guitar and, like, all the hair, so would this song benefit from an update. Sadly, Nancy is dead, shot down by her brother when she was 5.
Cher, covered by Nancy Sinatra as produced by Sonny Bono (what happened there!?)
I don't think this song gets enough credit. The original Cher song isn't actually the heart of the song. I think Nancy really finds the exact way I want to hear the lyrics; it's just slow enough and utterly melancholy. I mean, the wawawa guitar is awful, admittedly. But I really like My Baby Shot Me Down for the mood it puts me in. Finally: this photograph, though.
Monday, June 8, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.11
Latch
Disclosure, featuring Sam Smith. I really liked this song when I first heard it. It's pumped up and interesting. I like the syncope and the thump. I like the way the music seems to pulse and recede, the same way I imagine a seashore in a dream. I like the vocals. I mean, I like Sam Smith, as far as I know him. The whole song is smooth and easy to listen to. Now I just have to decide whether to be all Tumblr about it.
Robby: Okay, this author is serious. "You enchant me even when you're not around:" that's spot on: I've been in the place where I can't do homework for lovesickness. Aww, and as soon as you come around, I'm going to grab and not let go. That's a great metaphor for desire. I feel the same way when emotion comes and grabs me.
Tumblr: Holy crap, possessive much?
Robby: Sorry, who invited you in?
Tumblr: If you weren't paying attention, I'll back it up for you. Right so, there's like this entire subset of humanity called women, and they're legit human beings, just like men, who don't rule everything. This song is all about taking control of a woman's body (see: congress) and breaking down her boundaries (see: date rape) and keeping her from leaving (see: abusive relationships).
Robby: What? I don't think that's what the metap--
Tubmlr: Metaphor? METAPHOR!? Wake up, sheeple! The patriarchy couches its misogyny in histrionics and obfuscation!
Robby: No, see because songs have a long tradition of being based on poetry. Any poetic conceit cannot be taken at face--
Tomblr: I bet you would take my face. Just when I put on my hijab, you take the last thing I have left!
Robby: --value.
Tumber: Oh, my gosh it's like I don't even have a voice anymore. You expect me to be rosy white and heteronormative with a balanced mental state and I'm not sure where I was going with this line of argument but I am not prepared to change, not now that I've been oppressed for merely expressing my beliefs that any dyslexic queer-curious fursona should be free to fall in love with a post-operative pansexual pre-gender assignment tree-person with athlete's foot. WHY DO YOU HAMPER MY LOVE!? YOU CISSEXUAL BUFFALO CHIP!!!!!!!!!!!lol!!!!
Robby: I guess, as long as it's between two consenting adults, you just grab hold of that feeling and you don't let go, no matter how hard the world tries to shake you off.
Twombly: Yeah! Trying to peel me away from my spirit animal and half-werewolf priapistic clone will only make my love stronger. I will CHAIN MYSELF TO HIM/US.
Robby: Have you heard of this new song? It's called Latch, by Disclosure. I think you'd like it.
Termeblear: OMG I LOVE THIS #JUSTGIRLWEREWOLFTHINGS
Anyway, a quick google search for these terms:
"Blurred Lines is sexist" 4160 results
"Robin Thicke is a misogynist" 20700 results
"Baby It's Cold Outside is creepy" 1900 results
"Latch is sexist" 0 results
Is it the video? Well, I'm here to tell you WHY there is no outrage: there's a single lesbian couple. "Hooray for no heteronormativity!" Listen, just because there's something tasty in the poop doesn't mean you should eat it. The message of this song is possession and control. If you were looking for seduction and allure, you won't find it here. This song is worse than Blurred Lines, no question. I'd still buy it though. It's bumpin'.
P.S. I'm more interested in the faces: at first, they flashed, and only on members of the faceless crowd. People you weren't looking at would suddenly light up with this anonymous mask for a frame and then it would disappear. I got to associate the mask with people I shouldn't care about. You'll notice that the mask never appears on the six people we're really focused on, until . . . the couple in the elevator and the couple in bed turn to the camera and the masks hold on their faces.
Never the girls in the nightclub.
What is the editor trying to say about the hetero couples that's different than the lesbians? Are the girls the only ones with an actual relationship? Are they the only real people? Are the cissexuals just faking it, wearing masks and looking for physical release, but the girls, having found each other quite by accident, have let down their masks and are looking for love?
Disclosure, featuring Sam Smith. I really liked this song when I first heard it. It's pumped up and interesting. I like the syncope and the thump. I like the way the music seems to pulse and recede, the same way I imagine a seashore in a dream. I like the vocals. I mean, I like Sam Smith, as far as I know him. The whole song is smooth and easy to listen to. Now I just have to decide whether to be all Tumblr about it.
Robby: Okay, this author is serious. "You enchant me even when you're not around:" that's spot on: I've been in the place where I can't do homework for lovesickness. Aww, and as soon as you come around, I'm going to grab and not let go. That's a great metaphor for desire. I feel the same way when emotion comes and grabs me.
Tumblr: Holy crap, possessive much?
Robby: Sorry, who invited you in?
Tumblr: If you weren't paying attention, I'll back it up for you. Right so, there's like this entire subset of humanity called women, and they're legit human beings, just like men, who don't rule everything. This song is all about taking control of a woman's body (see: congress) and breaking down her boundaries (see: date rape) and keeping her from leaving (see: abusive relationships).
Robby: What? I don't think that's what the metap--
Tubmlr: Metaphor? METAPHOR!? Wake up, sheeple! The patriarchy couches its misogyny in histrionics and obfuscation!
Robby: No, see because songs have a long tradition of being based on poetry. Any poetic conceit cannot be taken at face--
Tomblr: I bet you would take my face. Just when I put on my hijab, you take the last thing I have left!
Robby: --value.
Tumber: Oh, my gosh it's like I don't even have a voice anymore. You expect me to be rosy white and heteronormative with a balanced mental state and I'm not sure where I was going with this line of argument but I am not prepared to change, not now that I've been oppressed for merely expressing my beliefs that any dyslexic queer-curious fursona should be free to fall in love with a post-operative pansexual pre-gender assignment tree-person with athlete's foot. WHY DO YOU HAMPER MY LOVE!? YOU CISSEXUAL BUFFALO CHIP!!!!!!!!!!!lol!!!!
Robby: I guess, as long as it's between two consenting adults, you just grab hold of that feeling and you don't let go, no matter how hard the world tries to shake you off.
Twombly: Yeah! Trying to peel me away from my spirit animal and half-werewolf priapistic clone will only make my love stronger. I will CHAIN MYSELF TO HIM/US.
Robby: Have you heard of this new song? It's called Latch, by Disclosure. I think you'd like it.
Termeblear: OMG I LOVE THIS #JUSTGIRLWEREWOLFTHINGS
Anyway, a quick google search for these terms:
"Blurred Lines is sexist" 4160 results
"Robin Thicke is a misogynist" 20700 results
"Baby It's Cold Outside is creepy" 1900 results
"Latch is sexist" 0 results
There's no outrage. Tumblr is full of love for this song. Nobody cares about the violence of the metaphor or the message of the conceit. It's like the words don't exist. Why do we nitpick over "I know you want it" and we just let go of
Now I've got you in my space/I won't let go of you/Got you shackled in my embrace/I'm latching on to youWHAT EVEN IS LIFE
Is it the video? Well, I'm here to tell you WHY there is no outrage: there's a single lesbian couple. "Hooray for no heteronormativity!" Listen, just because there's something tasty in the poop doesn't mean you should eat it. The message of this song is possession and control. If you were looking for seduction and allure, you won't find it here. This song is worse than Blurred Lines, no question. I'd still buy it though. It's bumpin'.
P.S. I'm more interested in the faces: at first, they flashed, and only on members of the faceless crowd. People you weren't looking at would suddenly light up with this anonymous mask for a frame and then it would disappear. I got to associate the mask with people I shouldn't care about. You'll notice that the mask never appears on the six people we're really focused on, until . . . the couple in the elevator and the couple in bed turn to the camera and the masks hold on their faces.
Never the girls in the nightclub.
What is the editor trying to say about the hetero couples that's different than the lesbians? Are the girls the only ones with an actual relationship? Are they the only real people? Are the cissexuals just faking it, wearing masks and looking for physical release, but the girls, having found each other quite by accident, have let down their masks and are looking for love?
Friday, May 8, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.12
Lost Stars
Adam Levine (alternate group name: Maroon 1). Forty is an overwhelming number. Twenty songs in, I am technically "over the hump" and the songs all supposedly get better, but forty is just flat overwhelming. There is no 40-point listicle on Buzzfeed. I suppose longer lists do exist, but you should relate to my suffering, goldarn it.
Apparently, four people wrote this song. I can tell. It's the worst of design by committee and it suffers from something like the bike shed effect: no one felt competent to touch the heart of the song, so they just kept adding bangles to the edges. I mean, let's just list the metaphors I see, shall we?
Bonus: This most driest of articles written for Huffington Post Comedy (a contradiction in terms) that badly sums up a MAD article about Design by Committee.
Adam Levine (alternate group name: Maroon 1). Forty is an overwhelming number. Twenty songs in, I am technically "over the hump" and the songs all supposedly get better, but forty is just flat overwhelming. There is no 40-point listicle on Buzzfeed. I suppose longer lists do exist, but you should relate to my suffering, goldarn it.
Apparently, four people wrote this song. I can tell. It's the worst of design by committee and it suffers from something like the bike shed effect: no one felt competent to touch the heart of the song, so they just kept adding bangles to the edges. I mean, let's just list the metaphors I see, shall we?
- caught in a dream
- reaching out for someone/take my hand
- Cupid (apparently made a bad decision)
- drunk on tears
- a speck of dust
- lion snogging deer
- turn the page
- youth
- hunting season
- stars/darkness
Now let's examine the metaphors of John Lennon's Imagine, a mild opus of songwriting.
- imagination/dreaming
- heaven vs. hell/country vs. country/religion vs. religion
- togetherness/charity/brotherhood
I wonder what metaphors there are in Sounds of Silence?
- Darkness as friend/silence and night as solace/dreams
- Silent crowds of the unquestioning
- Humanity's self-destruction
- Neon God
- Signs of the end among the lower classes
Now, I'm not running a masterclass in lyrical consistency here, but tying any of the metaphors to each other would have improved the song. Let's focus for a minute on two that might tie: Cupid and hunting season. Expand that connection. Place the references adjacent and let me imagine the tiny god waiting patiently for exactly the right shot only to realize he's shot the wrong target. What about the speck of dust and the lost stars? Push it a bit farther: dust is worthless and tiny. We have too much of it: I feel overwhelmed. Stars are also tiny and worthless and abundant, but though I am floating dust, I cannot obscure your star.
Have you looked at coleslaw recently? It's chopped and mixed and smothered until it bears no resemblance to "cabbage." This song is coleslaw. It's the ideas of four people chopped up and thrown together in a roughly rhythmic mess and played against music. It bears no resemblance to "meaning." Adam Levine! What happened to you, man? You used to write songs that had heart-wrenching stories, and now you write about sleeping in. Gripping.
No.
Nope.
The video didn't save it, either. At one point, the cameraman seizes and the editor just . . . kept it in. The aesthetic seems to be "cardboard and toothpaste." It's the fanciest the set dressing could be without actually spending any money.
Look, the song sounds good, and Levine sings well. But there's nothing about this song that makes it worthy of this list. I guess if there has to be one that I would torpedo entirely from each list (Here's looking at you, Hold On, We're Going Home), this would be it. I even hated Iggy less. Maybe because I wanted blood and passion and received something insipid and safe.
I would not buy this. If this were the first Adam Levine song I had ever heard, I would not listen to any more. I would miss Sunday Morning, but I can live without that.
Wait: (curious now)
- pathetic fallacy
- weather as bedding
- weather as memory
- weather as fighting
- slow life/fast life/life as a road
- body as painting
Whew.
Bonus: This most driest of articles written for Huffington Post Comedy (a contradiction in terms) that badly sums up a MAD article about Design by Committee.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.13
Strong.
London Grammar. My apologies for the almost month-long delay between posts. I banged out 2013's post in . . . what was that, two months? This is shameful. And you know what else is shameful? Reading Strong, I couldn't help but have flashbacks to reading the lyrics to some of my own favorite songs. Nonce lyrics are alright, I guess, but when you abandon meaning you should also abandon the pretense to meaning. All I can gather from Strong is a two-person relationship ("I've excused you for a while") in which the singer seems strong but feels weak ("Yeah, I might seem so strong/I might speak so long/But I've never been so wrong") and the (interesting might be a bit generous) interesting parallel of lion roar/strength and child cry/weakness. But essentially, what I garner here is only emotional intimacy and openness. That's good, especially in relationships between friends and lovers, but I don't know you, London Grammar. For a first experience to be so intimate and otherwise meaningless, I'm not sure I've made the proper connection.
Sadly for me, the first time I listened to this song I was in the immediate glow of the much more insidious Hymn of Acxiom, and I may have underestimated it. But this time, I'm giving you as much advantage as I can. I've left the distraction of the dog and whatever enormous task the neighbor is doing with his interminable chainsaw. I've left the blinding sunlight and the wind chimes. I've waited a month for Teng to wear off. I'll give you a chance to see how you impress.
Eh.
The song is just as I remember (I could have sung along with the lyrics--there aren't that many words to the whole song). It's touching, but I don't feel any connection with London Grammar and I don't have a similar experience in my own life. The video doesn't help draw out the connection between words and meaning, either. It's beautiful, but not as gripping as some others I've seen in this top 40 alone.
A man who's driving a car that I swore had a body in the trunk pulls up in an abandoned industrial district of what looked like a major European city. He gazes meaningfully at a young girl asleep (dead?) in the backseat. I don't know. He opens the trunk and (I expected a lot of other things) pulls out a tarp and a couple bags of equipment. He wastes maybe a half hour dragging everything out and placing it all in neat rows on a tarp. When he supposedly finishes, he pulls his daughter (?) from the car and carries her (body) to a drainage oddly reminiscent of the Los Angeles river. She wakes up, which is a huge relief, and lights a fuse that sets off a hundred roman candles he has strapped to his body. It's surreal and beautiful and meaningless. And--maybe it's too obvious to say this now--but that's exactly how I feel about this song. It's strange and gripping. "So down caught" has such a ring to it. It's beautiful! Sight and sound rich enough to stare at and forget your surroundings. It's meaningless, and that's where I just cannot.
I will listen to this on the forty and I would crank it on the radio, but I wouldn't buy it. Perhaps more tellingly, I wouldn't put it above Hymn of Acxiom. I understand it suffers for the comparison, but that's exactly why it doesn't deserve such a place of honor.
London Grammar. My apologies for the almost month-long delay between posts. I banged out 2013's post in . . . what was that, two months? This is shameful. And you know what else is shameful? Reading Strong, I couldn't help but have flashbacks to reading the lyrics to some of my own favorite songs. Nonce lyrics are alright, I guess, but when you abandon meaning you should also abandon the pretense to meaning. All I can gather from Strong is a two-person relationship ("I've excused you for a while") in which the singer seems strong but feels weak ("Yeah, I might seem so strong/I might speak so long/But I've never been so wrong") and the (interesting might be a bit generous) interesting parallel of lion roar/strength and child cry/weakness. But essentially, what I garner here is only emotional intimacy and openness. That's good, especially in relationships between friends and lovers, but I don't know you, London Grammar. For a first experience to be so intimate and otherwise meaningless, I'm not sure I've made the proper connection.
Sadly for me, the first time I listened to this song I was in the immediate glow of the much more insidious Hymn of Acxiom, and I may have underestimated it. But this time, I'm giving you as much advantage as I can. I've left the distraction of the dog and whatever enormous task the neighbor is doing with his interminable chainsaw. I've left the blinding sunlight and the wind chimes. I've waited a month for Teng to wear off. I'll give you a chance to see how you impress.
Eh.
The song is just as I remember (I could have sung along with the lyrics--there aren't that many words to the whole song). It's touching, but I don't feel any connection with London Grammar and I don't have a similar experience in my own life. The video doesn't help draw out the connection between words and meaning, either. It's beautiful, but not as gripping as some others I've seen in this top 40 alone.
A man who's driving a car that I swore had a body in the trunk pulls up in an abandoned industrial district of what looked like a major European city. He gazes meaningfully at a young girl asleep (dead?) in the backseat. I don't know. He opens the trunk and (I expected a lot of other things) pulls out a tarp and a couple bags of equipment. He wastes maybe a half hour dragging everything out and placing it all in neat rows on a tarp. When he supposedly finishes, he pulls his daughter (?) from the car and carries her (body) to a drainage oddly reminiscent of the Los Angeles river. She wakes up, which is a huge relief, and lights a fuse that sets off a hundred roman candles he has strapped to his body. It's surreal and beautiful and meaningless. And--maybe it's too obvious to say this now--but that's exactly how I feel about this song. It's strange and gripping. "So down caught" has such a ring to it. It's beautiful! Sight and sound rich enough to stare at and forget your surroundings. It's meaningless, and that's where I just cannot.
I will listen to this on the forty and I would crank it on the radio, but I wouldn't buy it. Perhaps more tellingly, I wouldn't put it above Hymn of Acxiom. I understand it suffers for the comparison, but that's exactly why it doesn't deserve such a place of honor.
Sunday, March 29, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.14
The Hymn of Acxiom
Vienna Teng. I liked her before. She's a killer vocalist with a unique approach to songwriting. I love it. She's so mellow, though, that she'll never gain the fame of an Adele or Noah and the Whale or The Hush Sound (those are just songs I like, not good examples of mellow). I "found" her when Stephen gave me Inland Territory. I love that album.
But this song gained depth as I listened to it, as I did about seven times in a row, I think. It was twice while I did things and then twice where I tried to listen, then the video she recorded live, then I listened again a few times. Let me tell you: after a few times through this song, my initial euphoria broke into smaller pieces and in those cracks I could hear the synthesized matter of her faux voice leaking through. I still love the sound of the song and I could listen to it as large as life and loud, too, but . . . I need a choir to sing it, or else it's now mildly off-putting.
Without reading the lyrics, I knew the point. What. Now that I have read them, I'm terrified of Teng for the monstrosity of her genius. With the sound alone, she communicates the message of her piece. At first, the song feels utterly comforting. "Somebody hears you; you know that" is reassuring, certainly. How often have I posted on this blog to find no comments? Lonely. But that's okay, because "here, [I'm] known." There is so much to remind us that we'll leave the world alone and naked, but now you can "leave your life open; you don't have to hide." Oh, it's so nice to think that I'm important to somebody.
Turn: "now we possess you." Stop. Hold up. This crept up without me knowing or asking, and that's exactly the point. Insidious: her vocals finally break down my loving adoration and I become creeped out by the synthetic nature of them. Insidious: the lyrics have been building an unnatural cage and I didn't even know.
I rely on the technology I use to make my life easier and to anticipate my needs. I beg the websites I love to pick up my breadcrumbs and to hold onto them forever, slowly building a perfect world. It's terrifying that I don't seem to care.
I have read and watched a lot of articles and books and videos about the use of data by companies and the government. It's all terrifying. Did you know that the government put off reviewing the practices in the NSA for a decade? Did you know that it's such a non-issue for most people that I can't even find an article corroborating that fact? I just don't know the search terms I would even need. Did you know that Google can track influenza outbreaks by using algorithms to sort people's aggregate searches? Did you know that I can tell you exactly where I was on July 4, 2011? Did you know that Google knows I haven't closed this tab for six weeks? I've just been refreshing it every two days.
I love this song, though. Man, is it good. I would buy it, then forget that it's about something totally wack that I should be freaking out about every day, then just go about my life as normal.
Sidebar: I'm really proud of my research. This is the best link in the post.
Sidebar 2.0: I found this while trying to find out how far I had gone towards the moon. It's irrelevant but weird.
Sidebar 3.0: It took me two and a half hours to write this post. That's why I don't do this as often; they're becoming monstrous. I share good company: WaitButWhy and CGP Grey.
Vienna Teng. I liked her before. She's a killer vocalist with a unique approach to songwriting. I love it. She's so mellow, though, that she'll never gain the fame of an Adele or Noah and the Whale or The Hush Sound (those are just songs I like, not good examples of mellow). I "found" her when Stephen gave me Inland Territory. I love that album.
But this song gained depth as I listened to it, as I did about seven times in a row, I think. It was twice while I did things and then twice where I tried to listen, then the video she recorded live, then I listened again a few times. Let me tell you: after a few times through this song, my initial euphoria broke into smaller pieces and in those cracks I could hear the synthesized matter of her faux voice leaking through. I still love the sound of the song and I could listen to it as large as life and loud, too, but . . . I need a choir to sing it, or else it's now mildly off-putting.
Without reading the lyrics, I knew the point. What. Now that I have read them, I'm terrified of Teng for the monstrosity of her genius. With the sound alone, she communicates the message of her piece. At first, the song feels utterly comforting. "Somebody hears you; you know that" is reassuring, certainly. How often have I posted on this blog to find no comments? Lonely. But that's okay, because "here, [I'm] known." There is so much to remind us that we'll leave the world alone and naked, but now you can "leave your life open; you don't have to hide." Oh, it's so nice to think that I'm important to somebody.
Turn: "now we possess you." Stop. Hold up. This crept up without me knowing or asking, and that's exactly the point. Insidious: her vocals finally break down my loving adoration and I become creeped out by the synthetic nature of them. Insidious: the lyrics have been building an unnatural cage and I didn't even know.
Let our formulas find your soul. . . . (our machines will) to design you a perfect love. Now we possess you.I have a confession to make. I have had Google location data tracking me since the first iPhone I ever owned. I went to Austria. I uploaded photographs from New York and Norway. I recorded my commute to and from school and work every day for eight years. I never take the location data off my pictures before I upload them. I have five passwords, each with three variations, but my email and my bank's passwords aren't different enough. I actually got coupons on my phone because it knew I was in a particular store and offered them to me. In short, I am a terrible netizen.
I rely on the technology I use to make my life easier and to anticipate my needs. I beg the websites I love to pick up my breadcrumbs and to hold onto them forever, slowly building a perfect world. It's terrifying that I don't seem to care.
(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you're worth.Thanks, Teng. You've really outdone yourself.
I have read and watched a lot of articles and books and videos about the use of data by companies and the government. It's all terrifying. Did you know that the government put off reviewing the practices in the NSA for a decade? Did you know that it's such a non-issue for most people that I can't even find an article corroborating that fact? I just don't know the search terms I would even need. Did you know that Google can track influenza outbreaks by using algorithms to sort people's aggregate searches? Did you know that I can tell you exactly where I was on July 4, 2011? Did you know that Google knows I haven't closed this tab for six weeks? I've just been refreshing it every two days.
I love this song, though. Man, is it good. I would buy it, then forget that it's about something totally wack that I should be freaking out about every day, then just go about my life as normal.
Sidebar: I'm really proud of my research. This is the best link in the post.
Sidebar 2.0: I found this while trying to find out how far I had gone towards the moon. It's irrelevant but weird.
Sidebar 3.0: It took me two and a half hours to write this post. That's why I don't do this as often; they're becoming monstrous. I share good company: WaitButWhy and CGP Grey.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.16
Elastic Heart
Sia. I've actually engaged with this song before now, which is just fine. It just means that my month-long hiatus wasn't because I hate the song. On the contrary! I think it's decent. The first Sia I remember hearing was Chandelier, but I know I've heard a few others. Titanium, for one. I've liked them, I suppose, but they weren't explosive enough to kill me and make me pay attention. She's not an artist like Lana Del Rey, who draws me in and makes me search for articles about her.[Sorry for the break in posts and all. Life is rough. I originally broke the post up so that I wouldn't feel so pressured by it, but I guess I went the opposite direction for a while.]
So, let's look at Sia. I've heard from a billion places (read: three) that this song is about warring Sia-Self States trying to gain mastery over the external Sia. But I read the song lyrics and I think otherwise. Due largely to "Then another one bites the dust" being a repetition and "I might have thought that we were one" obviously referring to an external person, I don't buy it. I look at this song and I see loneliness and depression. I see what a close friend experienced when the guy who was into her/she was into turned out to have been dating a girl in another city the whole time. To her at the time, it was a moment of clarity and dread: I lost another relationship. I really thought that we could make it work, but I just can't hold on to anyone. That's what I read here. I mean, look how obvious the second, separate party is.
And another one bites the dustThe bold words appear talk about external forces. There's nothing explicit here, and the video is pretty obviously Sia-Self States (SSS).
Oh why can I not conquer love
And I might have thought that we were one
Wanted to fight this war without weapons
And I wanted it, I wanted it bad
But there were so many red flags
Now another one bites the dust
Yeah let's be clear, I'll trust no one
So let's talk meaning. I can't understand Sia. Ever. When she sings, her words turn into mealy vowels and only choice sharp consonants. The song, therefore, benefits from the Weeknd, because I can actually understand the words without reading the lyrics. Seriously once I thought the line was: "I've got thick skin, and an eclectic heart." I just can't hear the words out of Sia.
Because I can't understand her, the video is the extreme meaning dominator for me. No matter what I read in the lyrics, I still think Maddie vs Shia is the true meaning. I think that two halves, battling for dominance in a contrived cage is the message Sia was hoping to deliver. I think that the inequality of the halves true abilities but their perception as equal is important. I think that Maddie as a powerhouse and innovator has a lot to say about the way Sia sees herself and her aggressive/dominant masculine side. I think there's nothing intentionally sexual at all about this video. I think most people are idiots.
Exhibit one: people think this video is sexual. I give you a direct quote from an article that someone was paid to spew out:
One Facebook user wrote: 'I understand that everyone thinks this is a piece of art, but I find it a little too sexual because why is a full grown man in a cage with a 12 year old and both wearing nude suits and making funny faces at each other.Foolish children. If you're willing to NSFW it up, allow me to learn you a thing or two. David is not sexual. Olympia is. Leibovitz is not sexual. Mestes is. I could go on. Sex is not desire, and desire is not dirty. Nothing in the Elastic Heart video has to do with sex other than your confusing lust for a twelve-year old and a washed-out crackpot. If I stretch for it, I see him crawl over her as she lies down: a sexual posture that the dancers slide from within two seconds. There are some genuine emotions, yes. They are male and female, yes. They are wearing nondescript nude tights, yes. But the camera does not linger on their skin. Heck, it doesn't even flatter. The dance is not tight or provocative. The story is not of desire. No. A thousand times, no. This video is not sexual. If you think a grown man making funny faces at a twelve year old is sexual, I invite you to meet literally any twelve year old on the planet and somehow not make funny faces. It's practically a reflex.
I think this song is great, and I like it. But I've had enough of it for a long time. Delight plays the radio when I'm in the car and I've had too much Elastic Shake it Black Off Widow Heart. I'm done.
Sidebar: this is legitimately the best, most realistic, most passionate expression I've seen on an actor in months. Who knew Shia LaBeouf could act? Nobody. Sidebarbarside: Who knew Shia LaBeouf was dirty? Well . . . she is twelve. Which is awful.
Monday, February 2, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.17
Feel the Love
Rudimental. This song is sung in the middle of a passionate moment. That's the start and end of the lyrics: a word picture of someone's brain when everything is hype. This isn't the sort of song where the words are important.
The music video looks like Pittsburgh or Chicago or Saint Louis or Philadelphia--some sprawling city slowly ruining itself by misuse and disuse. It's certainly far enough north for people and horses to be used to snow, so I know it's not Atlanta or New Orleans. However, the video is full of people riding horses. I'm constantly reminded of the West, where horses are still useful for more than just pets. So I'm guessing Denver.
I'm wrong. I should have known; Denver isn't flat enough. I wanted to believe.
Now let's talk about the main premise of the video: black people riding horses. I worked at a summer camp in the Midwest and in the North. The camp in Missouri had very few African American campers until the Central States conference showed up to rent the camp for a week or two. Then that's all it had: black kids. It was strange and wonderful, but I would have preferred what we had in Massachusetts. There, we had a mix of kids representative of the demographics of the church in the area, because there wasn't a separation of white and black congregations. But at both camps, there weren't many black riders. If you look at the rotating photo reel on the top of the Winnekeag site, there's a picture of a riding class. Based on the demographics of the camp, I would expect 1/2 to 2/3 ethnic minorities on those horses.
So let's unpack the causes, shall we? I don't think it has anything to do with money, although privileged people will think that, especially if they're aware of their privilege. The problem with that hypothesis is that I have students who have horses in Moberly, Missouri, a town so poor that they nearly sunk themselves on a sucrose factory. If these kids can be on free and reduced lunch and simultaneously own a horse, money isn't the issue. I'm guessing that education and exposure have nothing to do with it. Unlike the heinous claims on Yahoo! Answers, I don't think any human of average intelligence has thought that milk "came from the store, instead of the farm." Kids know about horses because of films, if nothing else, where they are portrayed as machines to produce awesome chase scenes. And if you think a lack of exposure is what causes the disinterest, you don't know the first thing about shock. Horses are incredible on first exposure. I thought so when I was seven; I signed up for horsemanship every year (until I realized I really don't like horses, as a person). I was about ready to give up on debunking this Yahoo! Answer, until I scrolled down and saw the reason I had been ready to make myself.
Thanks, Dreamer.
I really like this song. I wouldn't buy it. I know without thinking about it because it's not substantial enough. I would bump to it in the club and I would pump it when I wanted to get crazy, but I wouldn't buy it because it's a rental car: fun, fast, and ultimately not for me.
Rudimental. This song is sung in the middle of a passionate moment. That's the start and end of the lyrics: a word picture of someone's brain when everything is hype. This isn't the sort of song where the words are important.
The music video looks like Pittsburgh or Chicago or Saint Louis or Philadelphia--some sprawling city slowly ruining itself by misuse and disuse. It's certainly far enough north for people and horses to be used to snow, so I know it's not Atlanta or New Orleans. However, the video is full of people riding horses. I'm constantly reminded of the West, where horses are still useful for more than just pets. So I'm guessing Denver.
I'm wrong. I should have known; Denver isn't flat enough. I wanted to believe.
Now let's talk about the main premise of the video: black people riding horses. I worked at a summer camp in the Midwest and in the North. The camp in Missouri had very few African American campers until the Central States conference showed up to rent the camp for a week or two. Then that's all it had: black kids. It was strange and wonderful, but I would have preferred what we had in Massachusetts. There, we had a mix of kids representative of the demographics of the church in the area, because there wasn't a separation of white and black congregations. But at both camps, there weren't many black riders. If you look at the rotating photo reel on the top of the Winnekeag site, there's a picture of a riding class. Based on the demographics of the camp, I would expect 1/2 to 2/3 ethnic minorities on those horses.
So let's unpack the causes, shall we? I don't think it has anything to do with money, although privileged people will think that, especially if they're aware of their privilege. The problem with that hypothesis is that I have students who have horses in Moberly, Missouri, a town so poor that they nearly sunk themselves on a sucrose factory. If these kids can be on free and reduced lunch and simultaneously own a horse, money isn't the issue. I'm guessing that education and exposure have nothing to do with it. Unlike the heinous claims on Yahoo! Answers, I don't think any human of average intelligence has thought that milk "came from the store, instead of the farm." Kids know about horses because of films, if nothing else, where they are portrayed as machines to produce awesome chase scenes. And if you think a lack of exposure is what causes the disinterest, you don't know the first thing about shock. Horses are incredible on first exposure. I thought so when I was seven; I signed up for horsemanship every year (until I realized I really don't like horses, as a person). I was about ready to give up on debunking this Yahoo! Answer, until I scrolled down and saw the reason I had been ready to make myself.
Someone mentioned economics. I think that can play a role, however that's not the entire story.
I think a part of the issue is stereotyping. Some people think of horseback riding as something "rich white people do". It's so sad. I am neither rich nor white. I have been mocked for, supposedly, trying to act white just because I ride horses. I've also been told, "You ride horses? Black people don't ride horses!". The sad thing is, both of those came from other black people. If people fear they are going to be mocked or fear they won't fit in, they are less likely to participate.
Horses are not for white people. They aren't for blacks, Asians, or Hispanics either. Horses are for people who love horses.
But, I think the main issue the lack of diversity itself. Which makes this a circular issue. Anyone can observe that the horse world is not diverse- at all. It is true that there is a clear white majority. One can go further and get into politics and history, but the bottom line is it's not diverse. The lack of diversity can be offputting to some people. If they don't feel welcome, they will not get involved. If they do not get involved, the issue of a lack of diversity continues and the cycle starts over.
Thanks, Dreamer.
I really like this song. I wouldn't buy it. I know without thinking about it because it's not substantial enough. I would bump to it in the club and I would pump it when I wanted to get crazy, but I wouldn't buy it because it's a rental car: fun, fast, and ultimately not for me.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
My Acolyte Journey: 2014.18
Be My Forever
Christina Perri. I'm looking for a word, and it isn't mantra, but it's like that. I want to have the word for (insistent) repetition to prove something to myself, as if by saying it I can make it true (if even for that one moment), so I'll extend that time again and again and again and again and . . .
That's how I feel Be My Forever takes care of this relationship. The phrase "be my forever" appears 16 times in the text. Maybe if the singer gives the command enough times, it has to have some effect (hopefully permanent). This, however, is a terrible plan.
Let me expostulate, using my own experience as a basic premise. I dated L for almost no time at all, in the grand scheme of things, but I was fully convinced we were perfect for each other. Our long-distance relationship was super spice and we never ran out of things to say or talk about or be interested in. Hindsight: I was a fool if I thought it would last forever. She had issues she wasn't ready or willing to abandon, and I wasn't able to honor that. I had and have a lot of growing left to do, but I still said stupid things and I wrote her name on my skin with permanent marker and we promised each other a multitude of ignorant long-term things.
This singer says "can I call you mine" because she's not even dating this guy (and I guess ownership is sexy). So just because of the euphoric high of first-blush relationship, she demands eternity.
[I flip my hair back over my shoulder and when I do, I see him there in the desk up and up in the top row of the auditorium. He's not looking at me today. Crap. Well, I can't change, now. I'm on time and in sweats. Sandra tells me that he'll look if he wants to, whatever I wear, but I would feel a lot better about myself if I just wore something better. Okay, so I just want to be invisible today. That's my strategy for getting noticed.]
[Get out of your head, Nadia. I pull the long hair back over my ear and walk straight through the rows up and up in the top of the class and throw my books down next to him. He smiles. Oh, God.]
I didn't get much written because this isn't Stairway to Heaven, so it's fairly short. I don't think it needs to be longer, though. It's the right length to make me want to listen to it again soon.
This made me feel: satisfied? I have to be honest, surrounded by knockouts like Come with me Now and Elastic Heart, this song didn't stand out in my original listen-through of the top40. It's just too wonderful and not enough gut shot. And yet I love it. If I went back in time, I would play it at my wedding.
A word to regulars: the measure of whether I would buy a thing is tempered by a few things. First: I only buy albums, not songs. To stretch out and buy a single song means it is great or wonderful. Examples of this include Mika's Origin of Love and Toto's Africa, which I bought one day when I just needed to listen to it. Second: I haven't bought any music in a really long time, not even the latest OkGO album, which I already know to be incredible and right up my alley, because I guess I am a failure and a fool? But it's possible that I already consume so much media (that's what I'm listening to a lot lately?) that music just isn't so gut-wrenchingly important.
Christina Perri. I'm looking for a word, and it isn't mantra, but it's like that. I want to have the word for (insistent) repetition to prove something to myself, as if by saying it I can make it true (if even for that one moment), so I'll extend that time again and again and again and again and . . .
That's how I feel Be My Forever takes care of this relationship. The phrase "be my forever" appears 16 times in the text. Maybe if the singer gives the command enough times, it has to have some effect (hopefully permanent). This, however, is a terrible plan.
Let me expostulate, using my own experience as a basic premise. I dated L for almost no time at all, in the grand scheme of things, but I was fully convinced we were perfect for each other. Our long-distance relationship was super spice and we never ran out of things to say or talk about or be interested in. Hindsight: I was a fool if I thought it would last forever. She had issues she wasn't ready or willing to abandon, and I wasn't able to honor that. I had and have a lot of growing left to do, but I still said stupid things and I wrote her name on my skin with permanent marker and we promised each other a multitude of ignorant long-term things.
This singer says "can I call you mine" because she's not even dating this guy (and I guess ownership is sexy). So just because of the euphoric high of first-blush relationship, she demands eternity.
And oh we got love, yeah/Darling just swear you'll stand right by my sideI guess he stands in abeyance, because he says forever right back. Again, I'll open up my past to (hopefully) expose this buffoonery. When I was in high school (Lord save us), I liked M. A lot. We were in the same grade, and every once in a while, we would work together on projects or sit together at lunch. But math--we sat in a pod together, in facing desks. Our knees might brush under the desk. That briefest touch was more than enough to match anything I have ever felt since. It was desire so pure and without direction that I felt ready to actually seize and die, my heart pounding an arrhythmic song of percussion only. I was not in love. I was not ready to say or even think the word "forever." I was not right for her. I would have destroyed the uncertain dinghy of my confidence on the rocks of her past long before I made my way past the breakers. But that is exactly what this song is advocating.
[I flip my hair back over my shoulder and when I do, I see him there in the desk up and up in the top row of the auditorium. He's not looking at me today. Crap. Well, I can't change, now. I'm on time and in sweats. Sandra tells me that he'll look if he wants to, whatever I wear, but I would feel a lot better about myself if I just wore something better. Okay, so I just want to be invisible today. That's my strategy for getting noticed.]
[Get out of your head, Nadia. I pull the long hair back over my ear and walk straight through the rows up and up in the top of the class and throw my books down next to him. He smiles. Oh, God.]
I didn't get much written because this isn't Stairway to Heaven, so it's fairly short. I don't think it needs to be longer, though. It's the right length to make me want to listen to it again soon.
This made me feel: satisfied? I have to be honest, surrounded by knockouts like Come with me Now and Elastic Heart, this song didn't stand out in my original listen-through of the top40. It's just too wonderful and not enough gut shot. And yet I love it. If I went back in time, I would play it at my wedding.
A word to regulars: the measure of whether I would buy a thing is tempered by a few things. First: I only buy albums, not songs. To stretch out and buy a single song means it is great or wonderful. Examples of this include Mika's Origin of Love and Toto's Africa, which I bought one day when I just needed to listen to it. Second: I haven't bought any music in a really long time, not even the latest OkGO album, which I already know to be incredible and right up my alley, because I guess I am a failure and a fool? But it's possible that I already consume so much media (that's what I'm listening to a lot lately?) that music just isn't so gut-wrenchingly important.
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