Music
drorzel | February 15, 2007One of those only-on-the-Internet, adventrues-in-D-list-celebrity videos: A YouTube clip of a hair metal cover band joined onstage by one of the teachers from "Saved by the Bell" and Dallas Cowboys snap-dropper Tony Romo, singing "Somewhere in the Night" by Journey. Romo really gets into it, and Mr. Belding drops the F-bomb a few times, and, well, it's not for the faint of heart.
It's like somebody accelerated the Eighties to a good fraction of the speed of light, slammed them into a wall, and now we're looking at the spandex-and-hairspray clad particle tracks.
drorzel | February 11, 2007Here's something a little lighter than the last couple of entries, seeing as it's a weekend and all: Pop-music blogger Jason Hare has a regular Friday feature called "Chart Attack!" in which he posts the Top Ten songs from a past week ending on the same date, and goes through the songs. This week's entry, from February 11, 1989 is right in my wheelhouse, or ought to be:
10. Walking Away - Information Society
9. She Wants To Dance With Me - Rick Astley
8. I Wanna Have Some Fun - Samantha Fox
7. The Lover In Me - Sheena Easton
6. All This Time - Tiffany
5. When The Children Cry - White…
drorzel | January 26, 2007As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits's Orphans collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his "lounge singer from another planet" treatment. Most notable among these is probably "Sea of Love," which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the Honeydrippers, but has been covered by approximately a billion people. Waits's take is weird and creepy, but actually kind of interesting.
A little more recently, I bought the Alabama 3 album La Peste, which includes a cover of "Hotel California." A pretty bad cover, actually-- I junked it almost…
drorzel | January 12, 2007I did an iTunes run recently, and picked up Tom Waits's three-disc collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, along with a couple of other albums (TV On the Radio and the Decemberists among them). As is my usual practice, I put these records into the "Party Shuffle" on iTunes, so I get a chance to hear most of the songs a few times, and I've been listening to them for the past couple of weeks while I work on the computer.
The overall reaction is pretty much "Enh." I continue to not really get the Decemberists or TV on the Radio-- they have a couple of good songs each, but I'm not…
drorzel | January 5, 2007I'm A Boy
I'm A Ghost
I'm A Loner Dottie, A Rebel...
I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day
I'm A Midnight Mover
I'm a Rocker
I'm A Terrible Person
I'm A Wheel
I'm Actual
I'm Against It
I'm Allowed
I'm Always In Love
I'm Amazed
I'm Comin' On Back To You
I'm Easy
I'm Free
I'm Free
I'm Goin' Down
I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart
I'm Gonna Crawl
I'm Gonna Love You Just A Little More, Baby
I'm Hanging Up My Heart For You
I'm Holding Out
I'm In Love
I'm In The Battlefield For My Lord
I'm In The Mood
I'm Just A Bill
I'm Lost Without You
I'm Not Feeling It Anymore
I'm Not Okay…
drorzel | December 28, 2006It's that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend?
The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a "best of 2006" list, as it keeps records of when I added various songs to the collection, and also what I rated them. This isn't a foolproof method-- I bought some old albums and greatest hits packages, so the really basic algorithm would claim that "I Can't Hardly Wait" was among the best songs of 2006-- but it's better than relying solely on my memory.
I tend to rate songs on…
drorzel | December 27, 2006We're back in town, and I'll schedule some science stuff for later today, but first I want to take a moment to note the passing of the hardest working man in show business. Much as we'd like to see him shake the cape off and run back to the mike one more time, James Brown is dead.
It's difficult to overstate Brown's importance for modern music, though every media outlet in the country is going to give it a shot this week. He's probably more important than Elvis, though it'd be a near thing. He more or less invented the sound that became the basis of modern soul, hip-hop, and rap, and whether…
drorzel | December 22, 2006We're off to do our annual holiday trek all over New England. We will have sporadic Internet access, but don't expect any blogging before next Wednesday. Not that anybody's going to be reading blogs over the weekend, anyway...
If you'd like some seasonal music, below the fold is a list of the 21 songs from the holiday playlist that earn a four or five star rating. Two of them aren't strictly Christmas songs, but "Jingle Bells" doesn't have anything to do with Jesus, either, and that doesn't stop people from playing it all the goddamn time.
Have a good weekend.
"Valley Winter Song," Fountains…
drorzel | December 22, 2006The problem with the holiday season is that it just flies by so fast-- it seems like you've barely finished clearing away the Thanksgiving dishes, and then you find that you've already missed Mellowmas.
Haven't heard of that one? Well, it's a new holiday invented by jefitoblog and Jason Hare, explained by jefito thusly:
For the next twelve days, Jason and I will be having the mellowest listening party you ever did hear, and we're going to do it yuletide style, bringing you the finest seasonal cuts from artists such as Air Supply, Glenn Medeiros, REO Speedwagon, and more. Just when you think…
drorzel | December 16, 2006Along with tacky an inescapable Christmas music, December brings lists, as every publication that deals with music at all puts out their own compilation of songs or albums of the year. The definitive Uncertain Principles Songs of 2006 list will be coming up, but if you're just dying to see ordered lists of pop music, here are some year-end lists to tide you over:
Arcane Gazebo's top songs of 2006
The Onion AV Club's albums of the year
Top albums according to KEXP DJs
And not a year-in-review list, but a list nonetheless: libertarians steal my idea (see the original perfect album list, linked…
drorzel | December 15, 2006So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I've had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because, well, the lab is not the place to debut new music.
The results were pretty mixed, but not as bad as I feared it might get. The list, with commentary on each song, is reproduced below the fold.
Les Brown And His Band Of Renown - I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm (Psapp's Lady Remix). I have…
drorzel | December 8, 2006As previously established, I don't much care for Christmas music. Last year, I compiled the few holiday songs I owned, and came up with a whopping ten, and that required stretching things a bit. Based on comment thread recommendations, I expanded that to 22 songs (mostly by adding Sufjan Stevens tracks), but it's still not good, and I don't really like all the songs on the list.
With the AV Club debating Christmas music, though, and every PA in the country blaring dire holiday songs, it seems like a good time to revist the crucial question from last year's post:
Are there Christmas songs that…
drorzel | December 8, 2006The AV Club (I promise I'm not actually turning this blog into theonionavclubwatch.com, but I do like their stuff) had a discussion of Christmas music a little while ago, which collides with last night's campus holiday party in interesting ways. Let's just say that there are few things in this world as horrible as a not-all-that-good cover band doing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree"... It does, however, suggest a blog topic for the day.
This is going to take two parts-- ao "Classic Edition" post of something I wrote on the old blog, and one new post about an experiment I'm going to try…
drorzel | December 5, 2006It's more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling "Year's Best" lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I'll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.
The previous posts have been for the geeks, but here's one for the non-physicists:
In your opinion, what is the best pop song of 2006?
I have my own opinions (I just switched the shuffle play on iTunes over to the four-and-five-…
drorzel | December 3, 2006Kate and I saw the new Bond flick last night (short review: nice re-launch of the franchise, Daniel Craig does a great job with the role), and as the final credits started to roll, they played that signature James Bond riff-- the "dum di-di dum, da-da-da" bass line, the "da-da di dahh, di dah-daaaah" brass thing. You know the song I mean-- it or something like it is in pretty much all of the movies.
It made me wonder about the guy who wrote it, though. Does he think of it as the crowning work of his career, or is it a cheap bit of hackwork that he banged out over a bottle of muscatel in 1967…
drorzel | December 1, 2006Friday's a good day for silly pop music lists, so here's a couple adapted from a "meme" via Jamie Bowden:
Go to http://popculturemadness.com and find the Greatest USA Hits of the year you turned 18.
I refuse to spend a bunch of time dinking around with typefaces, and I'm not going to list all 75 of the songs they provide for each year, but if you'd like some insight into my formative pop culture experiences, here's the top 20 from the year I turned 18:
1. Love Shack - B-52's
2. Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc
3. Bust A Move - Young MC
4. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler
5. Like A Prayer -…
drorzel | October 31, 2006A couple of weeks ago, when I bought the new Hold Steady album, I also picked up Sam's Town by the Killers. I bought it in spite of some pretty harsh reviews, but in the end, I think that The Onion's AV Club got it right:
The Killers have created a batch of easily digestible pop songs that would be disposable if they weren't so catchy; in other words, they've more or less done their job. Sure, it would be nice if the hooks were sharper, and if songs other than "When You Were Young" could approach "Mr. Brightside"-like enormity, but overall, Sam's Town stays the course the way a sophomore-…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Ben over at the World's Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre-- you can't be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands-- Devo, They Might Be Giants, Weezer-- before ending up with Wilco. Which I also don't really understand, unless it's because Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is about as much fun as vector calculus.
If you want to suggest a "house band" for this mob, the obvious direction to go would for people like They Might Be Giants,…
drorzel | October 10, 2006Henry Farrell thinks he sees a parallel between music critics and the Mafia:
I think that there's a similar problem in the relationship between music artists and music consumers, in which critics play a key brokerage role, just as the Mafia does in a rather different sphere of commercial relations. Critics serve to guarantee to the public that certain artists, certain music, is 'good' (there are a whole bunch of sociological questions about what constitutes 'good' in this sense that I don't want to get into). But they also want to preserve their own role as critical intermediaries and…
drorzel | October 9, 2006Thinking a little more about the soundtrack post from a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that I don't seem to have the same strong associations with more recent songs that I do with some older stuff. It's not that I'm buying less music, I don't think, but rather that iTunes and the lack of good radio has changed the way I listen to music.
In particular, I miss good radio, and I wonder if it would be possible to get iTunes to simulate the sort of thing I'm after (explained below the fold).
In my opinion, a really good radio station playlist breaks down sort of like this:
50%…