There’s only so much one can say about Remembrance Day. The ceremony is pretty much the same from year to year–this year I attended the one in front of the Legislature here in Victoria. I’ve written a lot about this day in the past: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
This year I was thinking back to the Remembrance Day assemblies in elementary and high school. One year, I have a clear memory of a video being shown, featuring a song, I think, by Bryan Adams. I even remember some of the lyrics:
The guns will be silent - on Remembrance Day
There’ll be no more fighting - on Remembrance Day
This wasn’t the video, but here’s the song. It’s hardly In Flanders Fields, but it’s what I was thinking about today.
Andy linked to this delightful alternative time line for the last forty years of popular music. It imagines what might have happened if the Beatles stayed together:
February 11th, 1978. Eventually is released simultaneously in the American and British markets. Some critics find significance in the fact that the first single off the album, “Blow Away,” is not a Lennon/McCartney collaboration but instead a George Harrison song; others find themselves underwhelmed and suggest that the Lennon/McCartney “Free As A Bird” should have been the first single instead. (”Free As A Bird” is released as the second single six weeks later.) Harrison, for his part, says that “Blow Away” was “a lot less of a rocker” before Lennon suggested an increase in tempo and “letting Ringo go nuts.” No music videos are produced for the album: Lennon says “no, that would be too much bother. We want to have fun with this. Work’s for our own stuff.”
I’m sure these have been done before, but there are a number of creative projects that extend naturally from this kind of ‘what if’ exercise. A book-length version, maybe, or writing songs that the still-together Beatles might have written.
Lately I’ve been listening to the original version of Cream’s “Crossroads” a lot. I first heard that song in 1988 or so, as it was on one of the first CDs my family ever bought. It was on an Eric Clapton four CD box set by the same name. As you might imagine, I listened to those CDs a ton in my teenage years.
As an aside: the version of “Crossroads” I’m talking about is a live recording. As the band finishes, you hear applause and then somebody says “Eric Clapton [something] on vocals”. I’ve always wondered who says that? Bassist Jack Bruce, maybe?
“Crossroads” is track three on disc two (unquestionably the best of the four CDs). It’s followed by a mid-tempo Cream tune called “Badge”, which starts with a nice rolling baseline and some crunchy chords.
Every time I hear the end of “Crossroads”, I expect to hear the start of “Badge”. This is true even though I probably haven’t heard that particular combination of songs for ten or fifteen years. I’ve probably heard “Crossroads” followed by other songs at least 50 or 100 times since then. And yet I still have that aural expectation embedded in my brain. The pattern doesn’t seem to get broken. Odd, eh?
Another example is that my family’s LP of “Sticky Fingers” had a scratch on it, so I always expect to hear a little glitch or skip in the second chorus of the Stones’ “Brown Sugar”. I’m sure everybody has such formative listening patterns. What are yours?
Also, will the iTunes and MP3 generation–people under the age of, say, fourteen–be free from the Next Song Syndrome? They may never have bought a CD, so they may not acquire the same sort of listening patterns.
Over the summer, I read a great article in The New Yorker about TicketMaster, Live Nation and the history of rock concert promotions. It was unavailable online until somebody kindly added it to this Reddit discussion thread in which I was involved. You can view a PDF of the article here, or I’ve also uploaded it here.
It’s a pretty fascinating article, and reveals some surprising (to me, at least) facts about the concert business. One is that TicketMaster and Live Nation have struggled, financially, and lose huge chunks of revenue due to scalping. Another is that, of course, many concert tickets are radically under-priced. From the article:
The phenomenon of below-market value tickets has inspired a cottage industry of economists seeking to explain seemingly illogical pricing in the rock-concert business. Alan Krueger…an economist…is one. “There is still an element of rock concerts that is more like a party than a commodities market,” Kruger told me. A ticket to a rock show, he said, bears elements of a “gift exchange,” in which intangible benefits accrue for the seller. Cheap tickets increase the possibility of a sellout, which augments merchandise and concession sales. Sellouts make the concert experience better for the musicians and audience alike. And, one might add, a cheap ticket is the price the music industry pays to preserve the illusion that the sixties never ended. “In some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity–if I’m doing my job right,” Springsteen once said, of his performances. At least, he helps people hold on to their savings.
That’s kind of a provocative idea, isn’t it? While we (myself included) complain about the high cost of concert tickets, they’re actually priced well below market value. This applies much more for the Springsteens and the Madonnas than local bands, obviously, but the former is where TicketMaster and Live Nation make all their money.
I don’t in any way mean to be an apologist for TicketMaster. Their business model is built on controlling the marketplace and delivering shockingly little added value to their customers. It’s only getting easier for venues to handle their own ticket sales. So, it’s my hope that TicketMaster may die off with the generation of rock and rollers they depended upon for their revenue.
Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:
I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?
Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.
She writes (or co-writes) all her songs, plays guitar, answers to no Svengali, and doesn’t rely on a high-priced corps of studio musicians and producers. She records for an independent label and speaks to a devoted audience in an eccentric, sui generis voice that mixes high-Nashville earnestness with the Esperanto of the foodcourt and the chatroom.
It was that voice that resonated at Madison Square Garden. The concert was a high-tech extravaganza, with video montages and backup dancers, costume changes and an onstage rainstorm. But the music cut through the spectacle. Swift’s vocals have occasionally been wobbly, but at the Garden she sang with punch and confidence. What really shone, though, were the songs themselves—the rigorous architecture of hits like “You Belong with Me,” “Should Have Said No,” and “Love Story,” whose melodies arc inexorably towards the payoff of huge sing-along choruses.
Thanks to iLike, I occasionally encounter Swift’s very video-bloggy clips in my news reader. They may be carefully crafted marketing pieces, but they come off as ad hoc and quite genuine. The latest one, for example, shows the singer’s flopping-on-the-bed, girlish excitement about her Country Music Award nominations.
I recently mentioned my ongoing efforts to discover new music. I continue to have the musicaltaste of a female college freshman at Brown, but what’re you going to do?
I thought I’d share five songs that I’ve recently come to really dig. I make no hipsteresque claims to newness, obscurity or coolness. If you’re any kind of music fan, I expect you’ve heard most or all of these. These songs are just new to me, and I like them
1. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” by Vampire Weekend - A jangly Afropop tune by four white kids from New York. The song mentions Peter Gabriel, and he’s actually done a cover version. Honourable mention: “Oxford Comma” by the same band. I, too, don’t care for the Oxford comma.
2. “People Got a Lotta Nerve” by Neko Case - How can you not like a song which includes the lyric “you know, they call them killer whales”. Ms. Case’s voice is in excellent form, and you can always count on her to write a catchy song in about two and half minutes. Honourable Mention: Ms. Case’s “This Tornado Loves You”, live on Letterman.
3. “Cartoons and Forever Plans” by Maria Taylor - A simple, hummable song and straight forward lyrics about love never dying. The backup singer sounds decidedly like Michael Stipe. The video seems to be cynically trading on the current popularity of crafting, but I’m in a forgiving mood. Honourable mention: hmm…how about that charming Lisa Hannigan song I mentioned on this site a couple of months back.
4. “This God Damn House” - The Low Anthem - Band geeks, certainly, but I saw them at SXSW and really liked them. They’re not quite to the video stage yet, I guess, as this is a live recording. If you watch to the end, you’ll see the lead singer whistle through a couple of cell phones. Honourable mention: “Scavenger Bird”, which is a terrific song by the same band. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a playable copy of it online.
5. “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” by Sophie Milman - A lovely jazz cover of the song from “Fiddler”. I’m not a huge fan of vocal jazz, but I quite dig Ms. Milman. Maybe it’s that she was borne in Russia, raised in Israel and now lives in Canada. Honourable mention: “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”, a cover of the Paul Simon song, off of her latest album.
As I get older, I find I have to work harder to discover new music that I like. When you combine this with the balkanization of the music industry and the rise in popularity of music genres I don’t particularly like (rap, hip hop and so forth), it can be downright tricky to come across new bands.
New tools like iTunes and Pandora help, certainly, but I still find that I have to work at the process.
D.J. Palladino is working harder than I am at it. He’s written a long article (found via Waxy) about his indie rock education. In particular, I like how he correlates today’s music to the rock and roll he grew up with:
Much of my pleasure came from the surprising connection this new music had to the stuff I loved when I was a kid. Most of my friends are stuck in the 1960s, their formative years, but who can blame them? The long feedback howling in songs like “Omaha” by Moby Grape were screams against our parents’ bland lives; they gave us hope that music could reorder the world. When that music died, many of my generation failed to find the same spirit even in the simplistic delights of punk rebellion. All I can say is my musical tastes are much like my working habits, which might charitably be considered ADHD.
I was pleased to recognize the names of about half the bands he references in the article. My favourites among those he lists aren’t particularly obscure: Rilo Kiley, New Pornographers, M. Ward and The Shins.
If this is entirely new territory to you, there’s a handy infographic primer at the end of the piece that’s worth a look.
I thought I’d observed this trend in recent movies. The best way I could figure to illustrate it was with a little video. I think it’s self-explanatory:
What do you think?
As an interesting side note, I first attempted to upload this video to YouTube. I didn’t use any movie or actor-specific terms in the title, description or tags, though I did identify the video category as ‘Movies’. The video was immediately blocked because my video “may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners: Content owner: FOX Type: Audiovisual content.” Presumably they have some fancy image recognition software running to identify the video’s content.
I’m pretty sure my usage here falls under fair use in the US, but I’m not going to bother disputing YouTube’s automated system.
While I expect he’s made a great deal of money off of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, it’s unfortunate that that’s what most people think of when they hear McFerrin’s name. I don’t know much about jazz, but every time I hear him he strikes me as this remarkably capable and original vocalist.
