Category: Musical Snobbery

Musical Tuesdays – Soundtracks

I bought a new TV.

This isn’t as much of a sybaritic indulgence as it may seem, as my old TV was on it’s last legs. And when I say ‘last legs’ I mean that if I wanted to watch something I had to subject myself to the following baroque procedure…

1: Turn on the TV.
2: Wait for around 12 minutes as the screen changes via almost imperceptible stages from black to bright white.
3: Enjoy 15 minutes of an image appearing on the screen for half a second, followed by a loud ‘crack!‘ sound, and the screen going to black for ten seconds before the cycle repeats.
4: Once the cracking has stopped and the picture stabilised, turn the TV off, because there’s no sound.
5: Turn the TV back on, which will hopefully restore sound.
6: Actually watch any TV.

While I’m not the most demanding guy when it comes to creature comforts, having to turn my TV on a good half hour before I want to watch something was getting kind of wearing, so I splashed out and bought a brand new unit. A 40 incher would you believe, which is mostly because I screwed up the maths and thought it was somewhat smaller than it actually turned out to be.

Such a large screen has taken a bit of getting used to – more than once I’ve caught it out of the corner of my eye of an evening and been momentarily shocked into thinking that Adam Hills was actually in my apartment. But now that it’s settled in and gathering a fine patina of dust, it’s all good.

As I was making such a large purchase I decided to spoil myself with an add on and bought the box set of Misfits as well. Misfits has been one of my favourite shows for ages, but I’d only ever seen the first two seasons. I knew of course that the subsequent seasons aren’t meant to be as good – in no small part due to the absence of Nathan – but decided to give them a go anyway. To date I’ve watched all of season three, and will shortly move on to season four.

So, what did I think?

Season three, in my considered opinion, was OK. It’s definitely not the same show. It suffers for the lack of Nathan and the new powers everyone ends up with are really rather naff. There’s nothing that can be described as a story arc across the season and the whole thing lurches around from episode to episode with a complete lack of point or drive.

There’s also lots and lots of death. In the first two seasons someone getting killed was a big deal – much of both seasons revolved around concealing the bodies of the characters’ inadvertent victims. But this season people are dropping like flies and no one really seems to care. I suspect it’s actually deliberate self-parody, but even if that’s the case it’s a big change from the serious drama of the first two.

That being said, there’s a lot of entertainment to be had. Newcomer Rudy is both a terrible, terrible human being and a riot. The elements of self parody, although jarring, are fun. I was also surprised at how moving I found the conclusion of the Simon/Alisha/Super-Hoodie story arc in the final ten minutes of the season – it was like a sudden return to the tone of the original show, and was really rather epic.

So, what has this to do with Musical Tuesdays? Well, soundtracks my friends! Soundtracks!

Here’s to my mind the best bit of music from Misfits…

Not bad eh? When I first heard it I wondered if it was by Murray Gold, but it’s actually by Vince Pope.

On the subject of Murray Gold, here’s one of his best pieces, from the soundtrack of Doctor Who.

For my money the best bit is 1:40 to 2:37, but frankly the whole thing is pretty wonderful.

Well that’s it for this week. I have Titans to build and lightbulbs to change!

Musical Tuesdays: Paranoia

Music can make you feel happy. Music can make you feel sad. Sometimes it can make you feel both. And on occasion it can make you feel like the walls are closing in.

Many years ago I was at a friend’s place who had recently splashed out on an extremely powerful subwoofer for his stereo system. To demonstrate it he asked for all of us coming over that day to bring a CD or two (this being back in the days when the CDs was the music storage medium of choice). I remembered this instruction at the last minute when heading out the door, and grabbed the first random CD I found to hand.

Also attending the christening of the subwoofer was an individual who had earlier on indulged in some, shall we say, less than legal substances. Once the power of the subwoofer had been adequately demonstrated by almost shattering the loungeroom windows, we put on the CD I’d bought with me, at which point our slightly worse for wear friend quickly became quite twitchy, and begged us to turn it off, because it was “making him paranoid”.

The song in question?

Yes. Seriously.

I had a rather twitchy experience myself recently when I stumbled over Phillip Glass’s soundtrack to the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi. The first time I heard the main theme I had to turn it off, because it sounded like the most lifeless, frightening and downright evil music I’d ever heard. It resembled the droning of Satanic monks on their endless rounds through benighted, lightless catacombs, deep under the earth, where the twisted bodies of the uneasy dead have long mouldered into dust. Or the tramp of a million workers trudging into a factory where the corpses of unwanted children are systematically rendered into ash.

After a few re-listens I can now tolerate it (no damn song is going to beat me!), but I can’t say I like it much. That said, plenty of people do, some even calling it “soothing”. I wonder if that says more about them or about me?

Finally (and with nothing to do with paranoia) I stumbled over Chvrches’ cover of Bela Lugosi’s Dead today. I really don’t know what to make of it. Getting a bunch of synthpoppers to cover a Bauhaus track is like hiring Andre the Giant to play a Munchkin. There’s nothing wrong with Andre the Giant, but he’s so at odds with the role that the end result won’t be anything like it should. Judge for yourself…

Or perhaps you might prefer this version?

Over and Out.

Number Crunching

Had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes,
She sat around and counted them all a million times,
— Cab Calloway (and many others) – Minnie the Moocher

It occurred to me this morning, just how long would that take?

The first thing to establish is just how many coins would a million dollars in nickles and dimes add up to? A dime is ten cents, so a million dollars worth of dimes would add up to 10,000,000 coins (which incidentally would weigh 22.68 tonnes). A nickle is five cents, so a million dollars worth of them would be 20,000,000 coins (weighing 100 tonnes). We don’t have any information on exactly how Minnie’s cash is divided, but we can average it out and assume that she has 15,000,000 coins to count (weighing about 61.34 tonnes – better hope that gold and steel house she got from the King of Sweden has reinforced floors).

We can make a not unreasonable assumption that it takes about a second to count a single coin. Furthermore over the course of counting 15,000,000 coins Minnie would probably get pretty good at it, so let’s assume that it takes her only half a second per coin. This means that to count the whole lot would take Minnie 7,500,000 seconds. This is 2,083.3333 hours, or 86.8 days – assuming that Minnie takes a whole bunch of stimulants and never sleeps. It’s actually more reasonable to assume that she spends only 8 hours a day counting coins, so she has time to enjoy racing those horses and riding around in her diamond car.

Taking that into account, counting all the coins once would take 260.41 days, or 0.71 years.

That doesn’t seem too bad – but remember, she counts them a million times. To achieve this Minnie would need to spent eight hours a day counting coins for 713,001.49 years.

Poor Min indeed.

Musical Monday – Final Thoughts of Latvia

I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards Nirvana.

My parents were in their 40s when they had my brother and I. They were children of the second world war rather than baby boomers and came from fairly conservative stock – as such they viewed the popular music of the latter half of the 20th century with disdain and did their best to inoculate this view into us. As a result my childhood was marked with a stubborn refusal to entertain the idea that that horrible “rock and roll” music that got played on the radio could be anything but degenerate trash, a view that persisted until I started to develop a personality of my own around the age of 11, a point at which I would reluctantly concede that Livin’ on a Prayer was quite catchy and maybe some other rock music might be OK in limited quantities.

In my teenaged years this prejudice evolved into a kind of carefully maintained contrarian elitism. If a new band came along I would be willing to give them a chance, but if the great mass of unwashed plebs (ie: everyone except myself and my close associates) were crazy about them they were clearly populist garbage not worth considering. Nirvana’s Nevermind arrived right in the middle of this phase and its sudden, massive popularity led to my declaring the band emblematic of the worst excesses of youth culture and an anathema to all right listening folk. I regarded Kurt Cobain as a talentless hack distracting attention away from more worthy musical acts such at the KLF and Dire Straits, and refused to even listen to his works.

By the time Kurt did himself in, the year after my high school graduation, my attitude had mellowed a bit, but not enough to have any sympathy for the hordes of my peers who fell into various states of hysterical grief. I thought it unfortunate in a general sense that he’d taken such a step, but really didn’t care either way. Kurt Cobain dead meant as little to me as Kurt Cobain alive, and I regarded the crowds of mourners with the kind of disdain we reserve today for Beliebers and Directioners.

Over the next decade my attitude towards the music of Nirvana softened while at the same time my attitude towards the ongoing apotheosis of the band hardened. Being told that Kurt Cobain was the voice of my generation, and Smells Like Teen Spirit was the anthem of my youth would drive me towards a state of apoplexy. I’d go out of my way to point out that there were plenty of us who couldn’t stand Nirvana and thought that Kurt was a dickhead – a dickhead who came out with a few decent tunes, sure, but still a dickhead rather than the tragic hero everyone was making him out to be. It was about this time that I discovered the Pixies, and I reframed my criticism of Cobain into classing him as a sad, Black Francis wannabe – someone who could ape some of the sound and style of Doolittle while missing the weirdness and bizarre sense of humour that gave the Pixies their edge.

In the years since I’ve mostly made my peace with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. As you get older you realise that what other people think about you and your ‘generation’ matter less than what you think about yourself and your place in the march of history. If someone looks at my birthdate and decides I must have spent my teenage years wearing plaid flannel and wishing I lived in Seattle, well good luck to them. Nirvana had some great songs and Kurt Cobain was a gifted, but troubled soul who didn’t get the help he needed. I don’t even mind Smells Like Teen Spirit any more, although it remains without any special meaning or significance to me. Which I guess is why I can enjoy madness like this so much, when many other people my age would regard it as absolute blasphemy đŸ™‚

The more you listen to this insane mashup, the better it works, although even on my first listen there were bits that I found absolutely sublime – the descending chords during “oh no, I know a dirty word” for instance, and the “hello” chant after each verse. The smoky images of moshing teenagers somehow really seem to suit the epic 80’s buildup at the start and the Europe guitarists at 0:55 seem to have internalised the old axiom that when playing rock your guitar is every bit as much a weapon as an AK-47 or M16.

Well I’m all pooped out after all that reminiscing, and still need to include another music video, so – apropos of nothing – here’s Laimutis Purvinis.

Musical Wednesday – Moulds, Spores and Fungi

When I was a kid, Egon Spengler was my hero. He was a weird, socially awkward nerd, but he was a genius, he got to run around hunting ghosts with a nuclear accelerator strapped to his back, he got all the best lines in the movie and he ended up getting the girl (at least until Ghostbusters II). Ghostbusters is still my favourite movie. So the passing of Harold Ramis, has hit me a bit hard.

Given this sad occurance, what song could I feature this week but the iconic movie theme itself?

The song was written by Ray Parker Junior, who had a lot of trouble trying to find a rhyme for “ghostbusters”. In the end he gave up and wrote an advertising jingle. An advertising jingle that became a number one US hit in August 1984, holding the position for three weeks. It was also nominated for an Oscar, but was beaten by Stevie Wonder.

Of course it all wasn’t all fun and containment grids. Huey Lewis sued Columbia Pictures over the song’s quite-obvious-once-it’s-pointed-out similarity to I Want a New Drug, which was released in January of the same year…

Columbia settled out of court on condition that Huey keep his mouth shut. He slipped up in 2001 though and told VH1 about it, resulting in Ray Parker Junior suing him. And round it goes…

Then of course there’s this work of genius…

Anyway. So long Harold. We’ll miss you.

Farewell Egon

Are We Not Men?

Very sad news this morning with the death of founding member of Devo, Bob Casale.

In place of a proper Musical Tuesday this week (still really busy at work which is leaving me with no energy to blog when I get home) here’s a controversial Devo track that embodies their core, mock concept of the superiority of de-evolution, 1978’s Mongoloid.

Great stuff. He will be sorely missed.

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami