Category: Musical Snobbery

Found in Space – Again

Another entry…

By the time a species achieves interstellar flight it has usually developed a sense of aesthetics so refined that exposure to poor design causes nausea, lethargy and (in extreme cases) death. As such the post-humans of Nova Eritrea had long divested their culture of all but the very highest in art and architecture, and had no inkling of the dangers contained in the ancient data device they found in a derelict spacewreck orbiting a nearby star… A year later fourteen billion Nova Eritreans were dead, taken by what the chroniclers would call “The Plague of the Lovely Lady Lumps”.

— Boing Boing 100-word fiction competition

What a lucky man he was!

This is your whale. This is your whale on drugs.

Hmmm, well I haven’t done much posting recently have I? I’ll put it down to getting back into the swing of work and spending much of my time uploading and annotating photos from my UK trip. I’ve almost finished the first day’s worth!

I’ve also got caught up in a writing challenge on Whitechapel. It’s the first time I’ve tried writing anything but mindless blog drivel and role playing material in ages, so we’ll see how it goes. The deadline is November 1st – with luck it’ll actually be readable by then.

Kraft has come to it’s senses and realised that “iSnack 2.0” is one of the worst marketing decisions in history. They’ve posted a bunch of more popular names to their website for the public to vote on and will be announcing the replacement name this week. I didn’t bother to vote – I’m just happy that clueless tech-speech abomination is being banished. Anyway, the only name I would have voted for is ‘Voldemite’ and that wasn’t on the list.

Before I go I’ll direct everyone’s attention to this song, which I discovered over the weekend – “Lucky Man” by Emerson Lake and Palmer. The song itself is (in my opinion) nothing special, a fairly dreary rock-folk dirge about a guy who goes off to war and gets shot. What makes it remarkable is the play out, the only explanation for which I can come up with is that they got a humpbacked whale in to do guest vocals and dosed it up on LSD.

Listen to the first 20 seconds or so to get the scope of the piece (it’s all like that), then jump to 3.20 to be astounded by the assorted wails, shrieks, groans and howls you get when you pump twenty litres of hallucinogens into a giant sea-going mammal!

That’s all I’ve got to say.

I can’t stop listening to this…

I can’t stop listening to this…

I’m not very good at singing songs but here’s a try…

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting…

Foolish Musical Ideas

If I had the tools I’d do it myself.

Back in ancient historical era known as the 80s, British House giants Cauty and Drummond (perhaps you remember them as the KLF – also known as the Justified Ancients of Mumu, and furthermore known as the JAMs) sat down to create a House remix of the Doctor Who theme.

After messing around with it for some hours and getting nowhere they realised that it’s in triplet time, and you can’t do House in triplet time. So they threw the House idea out the window and just mashed the theme up with perhaps the most famous triplet rock song ever – Garry “I want to touch your children” Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2.

The result was one of the most successful and annoying novelty tracks of all time – Doctorin’ the Tardis – which transformed them into millionaires almost overnight.

The reason I mention this is that in the shower yesterday morning I realised that Marilyn “Oo! I’m so Evil!” Manson’s Beautiful People is also in triplet time. Which means you could easily do a Doctor Who – Beautiful People mashup!

Go on! What are you waiting for?! 😀

Goli Maar!

It’s from a film called “Donga”. Make of that what you will.

This (Goli Maar by Tollywood superstar Chiranjeevi) is ridiculous, but somehow I can’t seem to keep away.

Listened to without the video clip it stands up fairly well – it’s even (with its pounding beat, repetitive lyrics and seemingly random sound effects) a bit reminiscent of Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

That’s all I’ve got to say 🙂

Rex Mortuus Est

The end of an era…

Many years ago – back in the 50s in fact – a promoter by the name of Lee Gordon arranged an Australian tour for Little Richard and a bunch of other American rock’n’rollers. He booked the artists, booked the venues, did the publicity and then had a ridiculously tough time selling the tickets.

Why? Because no one in Australia could believe that the people they listened to on their records could exist, in the flesh, on an Australian stage. They lived in the far off, almost other-planar land of America. The idea that they’d visit Australia was as ridiculous as saying that you’d booked Santa Claus or Superman to appear. It had to be either a bunch of impersonators or some kind of scam – so no one was willing to pay to be ripped off.

Back in the early nineties, when the Big Day Out festival was just getting started, the big guest was Marilyn Manson. This was at the height of his “Antichrist Superstar” period, when he was the biggest, larger than life, most controversial, most frightening personality in music. And he was going to appear at Bassendean Oval, the run of the mill, slightly run down football field that I went past every day on the way to and from school.

As I remarked to my friend Mike this was as if Batman or Spiderman was going to appear – Manson seemed just as much a fictional character as anything from the world of comic books. And yet he was going to strut his stuff in our very backyards. It was downright surreal.

The reason I mention this is the sudden death this morning of Michael Jackson.

Jackson has been around my entire life, always there in the pop cultural milieu. In the 80s he was huge – people laugh these days when he’s called “the king of pop”, but back then he truly was. He was a brilliant song-writer and composer with string after string of hits, most of which still stand up today.

Then he started to go weird. He descended into increasing bizarreness and his music became increasingly unlistenable. He became “Whacko Jacko” – at best a complete weirdo, at worst a dangerous pedophile. His latest excesses and eccentricities were a staple of the tabloids. And as a result – without my realising it – he migrated from the part of my brain that catalogues real people into the part that catalogues fictional people.

So to hear that he’s dead gives me the same sense of surreality that Marilyn Manson’s visitation did, and that those 1950s Sydneysiders had when they were offered tickets to see Little Richard. It doesn’t make sense. How can someone who was never really real die?

So let’s all raise our glasses of Jesus juice to a unique individual. Thanks for Billie Jean at least dude.

Pearl Jam and Powderfinger

Desperately trying to cling to my youth…

For those who were unaware, this year is the 20th anniversary of the Triple J Hottest 100. To celebrate they’re going back to the original format which wasn’t just the best 100 songs of the last year, but the best 100 songs of all time (they abandoned this after a few years since the same songs kept coming up in roughly the same order every time 🙂

So this year, in addition to the normal Hottest 100 back in January, those of us desperately trying to cling to our youth by listening to JJJ despite being well out of the target age bracket get to vote all over again, this time for our ten favourite songs ever. Voting opened today, and naturally I was right in there like a tiger.

(Like a TIGH-ger!)

So, what did I vote for? My final list is below in mystery YouTube link format, along with country of origin and year for each track. Of course these aren’t actually my absolute favourite ten songs, they’re a representative sample of the best songs of the last few decades, carefully selected on the basis of impact, personal significance and what sort of chance they actually have on getting in. So, without further ado…

There we go. What’s the betting that they all get pushed out by Pearl Jam and Powderfinger? 😀

Late 2010

I assume at some point some of those links will stop working. So I’ll be able to look back at this entry when I’m old and decrepit I’ve added an actual list of the songs below…

Anarchy for the UK – The Sex Pistols
I Wanna Be Sedated – The Ramones
London Calling – The Clash (Came in at number 73)
How Soon is Now? – The Smiths (Came in at number 71)
Wide Open Road – The Triffids
Sweet Child o’ Mine – Guns n’ Roses (Came in at number 49)
Debaser – The Pixies
Lock It – The Falling Joys
Temple of Love – The Sisters of Mercy
Girl from Mars – Ash

The Herd – 2020

Some more lyrics for y’all

Among doing other things today I tried to look up the lyrics to the Herd’s song 2020. As is often the case in this degenerate age, the versions of the lyrics I found were awful – seemingly transcribed by hearing impaired meth addicts. I was faced with no option but to transcribe them myself.

So here is a semi-decent version of 2020. Words and phrases I’m unsure of have been placed in brackets, and I’ve written out all numbers to make it clear how they’re pronounced. Enjoy!

(Oh, there’s a bit of adult language in there, so be warned)

The Herd – 2020

It’s not as if you didn’t get the warning,
You got the transcripts and recordings,
History has a way of signing us up in the morning,
If you’re a late starter make it easy to ignore it,
Later not recall it,

Yeah, you had unfettered access to the facts,
But the fact is your back is turned to the Atlas,
Looking like (jumping) in the grass,
Just to help you make your mind up,
Unknowingly the young sign up,

The enemy of our enemy is still our enemy,
So why were you (harming and resisting) insanity,
That’s how the Taliban began,
(But you’ve mostly) turn around,
And aim their weapons at Americans,

How’s it feel to be a widow-maker,
Taker of the father of the family,
Your tragedy is (playing),
That’s the stakes that scoff at the Saigon link,
Flash those pearlies, take us way past the brink,

And we you knew you were frauds,
Onwards we went to war,
Nothing could be said to promise you,
We’d already seen it before,

Someone could’a told you it’d end like this,
They did, you didn’t listen, you can take a trip,
Lookin’ back twenty-twenty, mistakes I got many,
And the truth is that I’d probably do it again,

No-one could have ever half sway your mind,
We’ve been there before but it’s not that time,
Lookin’ back twenty-twenty, mistakes I got many,
And the truth is that I’d probably do it again

There’s something familiar,
’bout that story you told me,
The way that you mouthed it,
It’s not what you sold me,

Well yes I’m one of many,
Yet you ignored the signs,
You made it personal,
Don’t spin me them lies,

Sir, you can’t relax,
’cause it occurred on your watch,
History will judge you,
’cause you’re all that we’ve got,

Is anyone listening?
Are you f**king insane?
Am I twisted, watching as it plays out again?

And the truth is we knew this,
People aren’t stupid,
You play the innocent because you think we let you do it,
If we think you’re too ruthless,
Show you where the point of the boot is,
It’s all about where the f**king proof is,

You’ll keep an eye on that new kid,
He’s liable to do sh*t,
If you don’t keep a check on it, beyond your electorate,
Peace in Iraq man, stay in Afghanistan,
Lookin’ for Osama, getting killed by the Taliban,

War on drugs, war on terror, nine-eleven,
We knew where Johnny stood, where’s Kevin?
Don’t get me wrong, alarm clocks from heaven,
Going off when the country woke up in o-seven,

But there’s no letting up, no we’re just getting up,
Off the canvas, that very fact demands that,
We stay as vigilant as can be,
Transparency, Another AWB,
But we’ll see,

Even as we applaud,
And we show them the door,
Thought we’d warn you that we’re wary,
Cause we’ve already seen it before,

Someone could’a told you it’d end like this,
They did, you didn’t listen, you can take a trip,
Lookin’ back twenty-twenty, mistakes I got many,
And the truth is that I’d probably do it again,

No-one could have ever half sway your mind,
We’ve been there before but it’s not that time,
Lookin’ back twenty-twenty mistakes I got many,
And the truth is that I’d probably do it again,

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