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Music

This is probably rather unkind of me

It might well be wrong too – after all, my musical experience got me to Grade 8, which I failed twice, then gave up. And yet:

As the other half of Florence + the Machine, Isabella Summers plays stadiums and works with the likes of Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson. Now the film world can’t get enough of the musical sensation

The Florence bit, hell of a pair of lungs there and who doesn’t like a redhead? But I’ve always thought the songs themselves were the weak bit.

Perhaps this is just personal taste but they annoy me in the same way that jazz noodling does (say, from sorta the Dudley Moore Trio-style stuff onwards, although there’s some part of their stuff I do like). Might be musically very accomplished, in fact is, but there’s no “there” there. Possibly great atmospherics but no structure to them.

I tend to think that a song should be, well, a song. Bit like a story – we want a beginning, middle, end, a structure. Possibly this is also why I dislike so much “literary” writing because so much of that is done for the effect of the words themselves and so little on that being a story bit.

OK, fair play, this is just a grumpy old man view but it is mine. I have indeed heard Florence and the Machine on radio and so on. And my reaction has long been great lungs there, could do better with the songs. Shrug.

The Weird Al Pilgrimage

Hmm:

Weird Al graduated from high school at 16 and went to study architecture at California Polytechnic State University.
….
If the child is father of the man, Weird Al’s tastes as a teenager revealed the genetic code of his career. He adored British artists such as Elton John and Monty Python, spent Sunday nights listening to novelty hits on The Dr Demento Show and devoured the humor of Mad magazine.

Now this story might have benefited from some compression and time transformation but it might even have happened exactly so.

I once drove from New Orleans to Chicago, overnight (well, more than just the night). And we drove through the Dr. Demento show of something like “100 best songs ever recorded”. Number 1, at the top of the show, was Weird Al as above (although a failing memory tries to insist that it was just Al and the accordion, no other musicians).

Early 80s, winter 1982 maybe?

Couple of decades later I’m living in SLO and try to investigate a bit. Because the story is that the track – Al’s breakthrough one – was recorded in a bathroom at Cal Poly. But which one? Sadly no one seemed to know – or no one I knew, despite my knowing a few professorial types and the types of professorial types who would know something like that.

Pity, because it would be a rather fun place of pilgrimage.

So, to the question – does anyone know?

And if you play it backwards, the car comes back

With the advent of self driving cars it’s into a matter of time before there’s a country and western song about a guy who’s truck leaves him

BinC

Perhaps Blues, rather than C&W but “Woke up this mornin’, my Tesla done left me” might work. Heck, Gospel, “Take Me To The Rivian”.

Etc, etc, if only we still had Lewis Grizzard for those country titles……or even that other form of music, western.

I’ve always wondered about this

Bono has revealed the death threats he has faced during his career after crossing swords with the IRA, Dublin mobsters and the American far right.

In his soon-to-be released memoir U2’s lead singer recounts how the fear of violence has stalked the band with figures including Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, stoking anger against their pro-peace stance.

There’s a verse to Van Diemen’s Land which appears on the sleeve notes but not the track.

This song is about John Boyle O’Reilly, the leader of an 1864 Irish uprising after the Great Famine. He was banished to Australia for rebelling against the government.

That last verse?

Still the gunman rules and the widows pay
A scarlet coat now a black beret
They thought that that blood and sacrifice
Could out of death bring forth a life

Yeah, that’d piss Gerry off.

I’ve wondered, ever since I bought the album on release, whether there was a certain pressure over that last verse. Still don’t know of course…..

Snigger

That’s Jimmy Cliff screwed then:

Jamaica’s broadcasting regulator has banned music and TV broadcasts deemed to glorify or promote criminal activity, violence, drug use, scamming and weapons.

The government has said the ban is meant to cut back on material that “could give the wrong impression that criminality is an accepted feature of Jamaican culture and society”.

Oh, so family matters, does it?

Background, culture, expectations?

Obviously you didn’t become a gangster like your character Ivan in the film, but there was some common ground. You were both country boys dreaming of a music career.
Yes, when I came to Kingston I lived in areas that were gangster-infested, and to be quite honest, the only thing that stopped me from joining those gangs full-time was I didn’t know where I would bury my head if my family heard that I was in Kingston firing a gun. I would pray for the Earth to open and take me in.

Jimmy Cliff.

What’s the point of being a musician any more?

Three women who were fans of the indie rock group accused Butler of making unwanted sexual advances and demands between 2016 and 2020 in interactions that they deemed inappropriate because of gaps in age and unequal power dynamics.

If the only groupies you can touch are those the same age as you?

Two of the women said the alleged abuse had an emotional toll in part due to the transactional nature of their sexual interactions with Butler.

Whut?

“I felt incredibly low,” the woman told Pitchfork. “The toll of having to keep everything secret, constantly pushing my needs aside in order to appease him, lack of boundaries, and the guilt of being the other woman was getting too hard to ignore.”

Fun point about castrati

Not that Plant was, but the point still stands. The female vocalists they use here. Couple to get the range (Plant has a v unusual range for any one voice). But Plant’s voice has vastly more power to it than any of these. Which was the point of castrati – to get male power in the higher range.

BTW, when’s someone going to see Mermans in Kinshasa? That’s not bad harp playing at all.

Hmmmm

Not that everyone was quick to spot the way the wind was blowing. As Stanley reveals, while America had 600 radio stations by the mid-1920s, all of them disseminating the latest hits from New York and Los Angeles, Britain handed a broadcasting monopoly to just one — the BBC. That was disastrous for British popular music, not least because the people running the BBC seemed to hate the stuff.

An internal BBC memo in 1933 described crooning as “a particularly odious form of singing” — this at a time when Bing Crosby was crooning ten hit songs a year.

Monopolies, eh?

So the race is on!

Mr. Jones, you’re the closest we have here to this:

The soft drumbeat of living bacteria has been recorded for the first time in a breakthrough which could help doctors to know whether or not antibiotics are working.

Scientists at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands, theorised that if microscopic germs produce sounds, it would be a simple way of checking that they were alive – similar to listening for a pulse or heartbeat.

But bacteria are so tiny that recording any noises using traditional methods is impossible.

Instead, experts constructed a small drum made from graphene, a material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms, which is extremely good at conducting tiny amounts of sound and electricity.

When they placed E.coli on the graphene surface, and linked it to a speaker, the team was amazed to hear the gentle thrum of a living bacterium.

The task is to capture that sound and or rhythm. So that we can set a beatbox to it (kids still using those?) and create our undoubted No1 Global Hit – The Sound Of Life!

Or given that it’s E/ Coli, the sound of death maybe?

The 27 Club

I’ve said this before but here it is again:

When it comes to egregious rock’n’roll clichés, one of the absolute worst is the concept of “the 27 Club” — the ghoulishly spurious idea that famous musicians are uniquely disposed to die three years before they hit 30. Amy Winehouse drinking herself to death in Camden; Kurt Cobain shooting himself in the head; Jim Morrison perishing in a Parisian bathtub: these “club members” have become part of an airbrushed rock mythology that doesn’t zoom in too close on the vomit and emaciation, preferring instead to celebrate a life lived at the limits, a commitment to chasing sensation and “enlightenment”, the call of a tragic destiny.

The 27 club is simply because it takes about a decade for unrestrained hedonism to kill you.

About, -ish, -ish. 17 to 20 year olds hit the big time, have vast, uncontrollable, gobs of money with which to do whatever. Takes about a decade for this to kill them.

That’s it.

We could even run a control test. Check the average death rate of those who inherit vast trust funds – without parental control – at the same sort of age. What’s their death rate by 30?

Gee, ya think?

Sudden death of Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins ‘may be drug-related’
Tributes pour in for drummer found dead in his Colombian hotel room as police claim narcotics may have been involved

Leave aside the Colombia bit. Rock musician found dead at 50 while on tour.

Everyone’s first thought – which like most first thoughts may or may not be correct – is “Well, which drug got ‘im?”

Just change the wording here a bit

While there are variations internationally, which suggest rhythmic music contemporary tunes are preferred near the Equator, there was a clear pattern of personality traits being matched to particular genres and the artists working within them.

Not that we would say this of course but wouldn’t it be fun if they’d said, instead of “rhythmic music contemporary tunes” that “they like them jungle drums, they do”