Musical Snobbery – Page 32

Listen and Learn

I’m talkin’ to you baby! I’m talkin’ to you sugar!

All you people listenin’ tonight! Yes I’m that preacher everybody’s talking about! I’m Doctor Williams givin’ out them red hot lessons, ten dollars, New York and New Jersey every week, all the way down the east coast! From Boston clean down to Atlanta Georgia last week! I told down the east coast!

Do somethin’ to help you, do somethin’ to help yourself!

Come get your mojo hey! Go down Atlantic City and be a winner! Go down to Atlantic City come back fat as a rat! Why should you be a loser when you can be a winner? Yes ma’am, yes sir!

Brooklyn New York! Brooklyn New York! Get ready! Doctor Williams will be in Brooklyn New York, tomorrow evening, Monday evening, 6 pm until 8 pm. I’m talkin’ to the hot red hot big money blessing straight! And you be there 6 o’clock tomorrow evening!

Bronx New York! Get on the telephone and call 50 of your friends! Tell all your friends who need some help! Doctor Williams is comin’ to the Bronx New York! Doctor Williams is comin’ to the Bronx New York!

Doctor Williams will be in the Bronx New York with a straight, straight hot! Hot hot hot hot! Red hot! Big money blessing! Can’t nobody can stop me! Not even the dead in hell can’t stop me!

I’ll get ready to leave tonight! I want you to know, I love you! I’m talkin’ to you baby! I’m talkin’ to you sugar! Listen, Doctor William’s car comin’ down man! I love you! I love you!

I have a special phone number, where you can call me, so that I can send you a special gift…

(Listen)

A Musical Cornucopia

Doing what every sane person did years ago

Caught up with Fabes and Juan over the weekend. We got the last of the boards flocked and had a quick scratch-up game of 40k. Fabes totally kicked my arse again – this time in two rounds – but that’s cool because I wasn’t actually trying to win. I was actually using the game to test some different strategies and gathered some very interesting data for further consideration…

(Fabes may think I’m just saying that after the fact to excuse my execrable performance, but I said as much to Juan before the game began, so there! :))

I’ve also started work on another project. While hanging around at Fabes’ place it occurred to me that I haven’t actually sat down and listened to a CD in ages. In years in fact. I listen to plenty of music, but it’s all via iTunes on my computer. I’ve got a couple of two metre tall IKEA racks full of CDs that I never touch, and I desperately need somewhere to store all the 40k models I’ve been buying. The solution is obvious – pack all the CDs up in a cupboard somewhere, and use the racks to hold my army. Brilliant!

So how is that a project you ask? It’s simple, I’ve got to go through and rip all the CDs before I put them away.

You see, I’ve never properly ripped most of them. When I first started listening to music on my computer I was cursed with a small hard drive, and a highly tempermental CD drive, which meant I could only afford to rip the songs I really liked at comparatively low quality to save space – and I usually had to rip them multiple times to get versions without annoying drop outs. In the end about 10% of my music collection actually ended up on my computer.

But now I have a huge hard drive and a CD/DVD drive that reliably rips tracks at close to the speed of light (or so it seems compared to my old machine). So I’m going to go through every single CD I own and get it ripped, imported and organised at high quality. It’ll be a marvellous cornucopia of music! And I’ll have somewhere to keep my Valhallans. Everybody wins!

Yeah, that’s really all I’ve got to say 🙂

(Watch this)

Foolish Story Ideas No. 1

Fffffffffffffffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidddddddddddddddddddddddddaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Anthropologist records complex, ancient, multi-instrumental and multi-vocal religious chants from obscure South East Asian tribe. Accidentally messes up playback, speeding chants up by factor of eight. Chants are transformed into insipid modern pop song, complete with good approximation of modern instrumentation and English lyrics.

Considerations…
How did insipid modern pop song end up thousands of years in the past?
How did insipid modern pop song thousands of years in the past end up slowed down by eight?
How did insipid modern pop song thousands of years in the past and slowed down by eight become religiously significant enough to be repeated and preserved for thousands of years?
What is effect of this revelation on culture and religion of tribe?

Discuss.

Out of the Mouths of Pigs

Didn’t we have more gravy in the 30’s?

You know, I swear that sooner or later I’m going to get back to writing actual posts, rather than just linking to amusing/stupid stuff I stumble across online. Sooner or later.

In the meantime I presume that everyone has seen Pig with the Face of a Boy’s magnificent retelling of the history of the Soviet Union via the metaphor (and music) of Tetris?

Well, the other day I decided to check out some of their other work and was extremely impressed. For instance, did you know that World War II was actually about securing Britain’s gravy supply? Or that Hitler was obsessed with junk food? And who knew midwifery was so deeply disturbing?

I think my favourite however is the one about busking.

I will have to give serious thought to buying their album.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of entertaining internet music, how about the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie’s War of 1812. That chorus is so catchy! And humiliating to Americans! ;D

Sax Crime

Random saxophone assaults

There’s so much going wrong in the world at the moment, but as long as a saxophone wielding maniac still has the freedom to randomly attack people with George Michael songs we’re probably doing OK.

The Weather is Trying to Kill Me

Pirates are all we can be!

Seriously. We’ve had two weeks of maximums in the mid 30’s and minimums in the low 20’s, and this week it’s ramped up to high 30’s with minimums in the mid 20’s. If it doesn’t cool down after that, I’ll be dead.

Until then, what could be cooler than a Scottish metal cover of a Eurovision song about pirates? In my opinion, nothing!

That is all.

Lemonade is the Mind Killer

Sweet lemonade, sweet lemonade, oo sweet lemonade,

I challenge anyone to listen to this all the way through and remain sane…

That is all.

(I survived it, but my sanity is a moving target at the best of times…)

DeVille’s

The singing made it even more hellish…

My social life has been stupidly busy lately. Well, stupidly busy for me which probably means it’s getting close to what a normal person would regard as the bare minimum of social activity to stop them passing into a coma. In any case I’ve been doing so much that I haven’t had the time to blog about any of it – a situation I plan to partially rectify by writing about my Thursday night, when I attended my good friend Katie’s birthday do at DeVille’s Pad.

DeVille’s Pad is a place I’ve been meaning to check out (in a vague and unfocused way) ever since it opened up in the old Polygon nightclub next to McIver railway station. It’s a bar/nightclub that attempts to combine a chic, somewhat kitsch 1950s tiki-bar style with a devil and hell theme – a synthesis that they actually manage to pull off quite well.

(The same people operate a smaller 1950s style tiki-bar near the cathedral, so they’ve had practise)

The interior is done up to look like someone transplanted a Vegas hotel from the 1950’s into a cave. The walls curve around into interesting organic shapes, there’s stalactites and wrought iron all over the place and a stage and a dance floor. Ah! Here’s a convenient panorama that gives some idea. The place is very cool, frankly I’m astonished they let me through the door.

Katie had invited about 25 of her friends, very few of whom I’d met before so I basically just found somewhere comfortable to sit back and enjoy the show. And a show there was, as (it turns out) Thusday nights are Karaoke at DeVille’s!

The performances had their high points and low points. There was one woman in particular who – “performed” is probably the best word as “sang” would be entirely inaccurate – a number of songs in an off key bawl that could have cut metal. The guy hosting the show on the other hand belted out several numbers – notably The Final Countdown – really well. The big surprise was a somewhat diminutive staff member who did an incredible version of Twist and Shout. She was then joined by a six foot tall, black-clad apparition of doom with hair like Cousin It for ACDC’s Thunderstruck, which varied between her astonishingly powerful rock vocal and his truly impressive death grunting.

Another staff member briefly abandoned the bar to do a great version of Sexual Healing, which is not a phrase I ever thought I’d have cause to type. Then a Scottish couple did Build Me Up Buttercup – well, sort of, he just shouted the lyrics in his thick Scottish accent, while she looked embarrassed. But it was quite entertaining. Later on they broke out into a spontaneous sword dance, minus any swords (at least I presume they didn’t have any swords, I couldn’t see their feet from where I was sitting).

All of the food has either a hell or 1950s theme. After some consideration I went for the Royale with Cheese burger. I have to say this was a bit disappointing – it was a perfectly adequate burger, but there was nothing to make it stand out against any other perfectly adequate burger you could get elsewhere rather cheaper (I guess I’ve just been spoiled by Grill’d).

I said my goodbyes about 10 and got the train home. A good night all up and I’ll certainly consider heading back when I need somewhere impressively unique for a meal.

Save the Wombats Lord, Kumbaya

What would we do baby, without us?

In an attempt to fill up the vast, rolling plains of airtime that have recently opened up with the onslaught of newly launched digital channels, the various TV networks have been pulling anything they can grab out of their archives, dusting it off, and throwing it on air willy nilly. As a result shows that haven’t seen the light of day in decades are now turning up randomly all over the TV schedule, often in back-to-back double episodes or in odd timeslots such as 5:00pm Monday to Wednesday, followed by 12:20pm Thursday, then 6:30am Saturday for the early risers. It’s historic TV madness!

One of these shows that has been dragged kicking and screaming off the shelf is that old standby Family Ties, the show that launched Michael J. Fox to stard0m and ensured that we’d never get to see Eric Stoltz drive a Delorean. Ah, the memories! The maddeningly catchy sha-la-la-la theme song! The curiously craggy face of Michael Gross! Ubu the dog with his frisbee! Good times…

But the thing that struck me most forcibly during a recent viewing was a scene that showed just how right L.P.Hartley was with his lunatic ramblings about shadowy umbrellas, hooded eyes and the past as a foreign country where they do things differently (and how!).

So, the titular family are sitting around in the kitchen when Alex (played by Marty McFly) gets a phone call from a girl. From the half of the conversation we hear it’s clear that this girl has managed to obtain tickets for some event. Once off the phone one of the parents (honestly I forget who, they’re pretty interchangeable) asks if said tickets are for Barry Manilow.

A joke of course – clueless parents totally out of touch with the music young people are into, assuming that Barry Manilow is somehow cool enough that their son would be clamouring for tickets. But no. No canned laughter rings out. The Manilow comment is passed over without comment, the actual joke is that the tickets Alex is so excited about are to a lecture by a famous economist.

The only logical conclusion is that in the early 80’s cool kids went to Barry Manilow concerts! Or at the very least TV scriptwriters thought that cool kids went to Barry Manilow concerts. Madness!!

Ancient TV aside, the old black dog has been stalking me quite efficiently recently, to the point that I’d very much like to spend my days curled up in a fetal position, weeping quietly under my bedsheets. Unfortunately it’s been too hot for that, so I’ve had to pull myself together and come into work instead. I’ve been doing my best to deal with it by subverting my angst into fantasies of extreme violence against everyone who has ever crossed me. This is startlingly effective but hardly qualifies as a long term treatment plan. I did manage to get my bike fixed however so I’ll try some needlessly aggressive bike riding instead and see how it goes.

That’s all for now folks!