Why in these terrible times do we need a TV singing competition? Why do we need football? Why do we need to watch a bunch of guys in pajamas try to hit a ball with a stick? Reality singing is the most noble gladiatorial competition of our culture, with people fighting to the death not with rubber balls, but with song. Why does that upset you so much? We need competitive singing now more than ever.
From I HAVE BEEN TO X FACTOR.
Emma and Charlie write:
Every day we hit “random” on Wikipedia. We then have ninty minutes to write and record a song about whatever article pops up.
Imagine if Björk, Thom Yorke, Steve Reich, and an I Ching had a baby.1 And then that baby grew up listening to the radio. Then, oops! Pamplemousse! So, that baby marries(?) a similar, and appropriately compatible baby who knew a little GarageBand. Then they made a BandCamp site, but, you know, ironically.
That’s this.
Thing is, Charlie Williams and Emma Hooper are not clowns. They’re quite good when they spend more than ninety minutes thinking about music. It’s too bad that this is what they’re getting internet-famous for.
Go with me. ↩
I like this part of the Chicago Tribune’s article:
Consumers fill their sleekly designed, increasingly compact music players with thousands of songs that are continually recycled. The tracks are listened to over marginally adequate ear buds on an inferior format (MP3 files contain less sonic information than a CD or vinyl album), often to complement other activities.
Don’t get me wrong. I do love my iDevices. A lot.
But there’s no doubt that the iPod-ification of the music-consuming population has led to less real listening.
My advice: wallpaper your life with podcasts. Listen to music.
There’s nothing not great about this story except that Bob Dylan should be there too.
You can get Hilary Hahn’s new recording of Ives’s Violin Sonata No. 4, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting” for free on WQXR’s website.
Hurry, though. There’s not much time left in his birthday, and there’s no telling how long WQXR will leave the download active.
Michael Winslow (the guy from Police Academy) performs Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.
I literally have no idea how he is capable of making these sounds. It’s beyond my comprehension. A YouTube comment (of all things) sums it up best:
He’s not that grea — WHERE’S THE ELECTRIC GUITAR[?!?!?]
My general stance on things from the 1980s is this: Everything is better now than it was then. I believe in iteration and, save a few masterpieces from every era, there’s nothing that couldn’t stand being updated. And Footloose, the famous Kevin Bacon kick-starter, is one of those things that could stand some re-polishing.
If we could go back at the ’80s with a Brillo pad and scrub away every gated/reverbed snare drum from those recordings, I would lend my arms for the task. Gated snare drums were the rounded-corners of 1999 — they caught on in a big way before anyone asked “Why?”. You had to have gated snares in the ’80s. You probably had to pay more for not-gated snares because the engineer would need to re-route the signal chain. Although the sound defines a generation of pop music, we look back at time and wonder what we were thinking.
I was excited to hear that the Footloose soundtrack was being updated for the 2011 re-make. I assumed that the new version would be sans-gated snares. I was hoping that the movie studio would grok the shadow of the original film into which they stepped and hire great singers to really make those songs sizzle. Those songs are hard.
Well they didn’t, and the singing is simply horrible. My favorite track from the ’80s version is Almost Paradise, which was sung by the lead singer for Loverboy, falls completely flat containing wrong notes, inappropriate breaths, and horrific tuning. It’s sung by a guy who opened for Taylor Swift, and a girl from Nickelodeon, which likely says something about the market target for the film. (Hint: I’m not in the target demo.) It’s enough for me to safely resolve not to go see the film.
In the ’80s we had good intentions. Phil Collins thought that synthesizers and gated snares sounded good, so he put them all over his records. Then he went ahead and sang a great vocal too. I guess what we do in the 2010s is barely try, or care, and everyone gets the same haircut. So, at least for now, everyone please step away from the Whitney Houston, Queen, and Prince tracks and let this whole Glee thing, where everyone is fifteen and sings like a high-schooler, blow over.
Tom Service has a great idea:
Sure, you can spend obsessive hours thinking about how Boulez created the elaborate pitch structures in his 1955 masterpiece, Le Marteau Sans Maître. But you’re better off instead simply relishing the sultry atmosphere the music creates, the web of connections and allusions that Boulez conjures between René Char’s text and his writing for the seven-piece ensemble, including the exotic textures of guitar and xylorimba.
Posted on Rdio’s blog today:
Some of the best things in life are free, and starting today, Rdio is one of them. New Rdio users in the US can take advantage of many of our popular features for free, including streaming full songs without hearing a single ad — a meter at the top of your profile will show you how much free music you have each month.1
I can see the meter move after only playing a single track. So I think the meter is for about an hour, maybe two of playtime. Even so, the web app is nice, the audio quality is reasonable, the desktop and iPhone apps are very nice. And there’s no ads. Feel free to add me.
Emphasis mine. ↩
Mike Teager gets it right on teaching music appreciation:
[I]f you don’t put in the work to help someone understand the intricacies of a five-minute pop song, how do you expect him/her to willingly thrust him/herself into a 45-minute symphony? Or three-hour opera?
On Stockhausen’s Helikopter Quartett, Colin Holter writes:
But consider, for a moment, the music that might be made if every composer had the resources to (for example) complement the players in a string quartet with four helicopters. They don’t necessarily even have to be helicopters: Autogyros, hydrofoils, hovercrafts — these are all reasonable possibilities. I kid, of course; really it’s about funding and institutional tolerance for zaniness — if both were unlimited, who can say where contemporary music would be five years from now?
Zaniness?
I don’t believe that any composer’s true limitations are due to of a lack of funding for helicopters. Maybe, just maybe there’s a bit of space between Dr. Pogo-Stick Quartet and Mr. Stockhausen. You could start to close that gap by trying more of that “zaniness”.
4 hours of X-Factor yields approx. 8 minutes of legit musical enjoyment for myself and my wife. Whereas 2 hours of The Sing-Off yields 1 hour and 55 minutes. Given one man and his wife’s purely qualitative assessment, I can conclude that America literally watches 3 hours and 52 minutes of horrific singing wrapped in a Pepsi ad.
America loves the X-Factor, which seems to be actively trying to lobotomize its 12.5 million viewers through vocal techniques, while only 5.3 million people decided to tune into a show where the judges talk about things like tempo, blend, tuning, and balance. You know, music stuff.
It’s not just the judges that make The Sing-Off great; the singing on The Sing-Off is superb.1 The audience needn’t wade through an endless series of hacks and jokers set in place to lower the audience’s standards so that the next marginally sane person to take the stage deserves some consideration. Nope, none of that. The Sing-Off judges booted a 5-man group that was extremely polished but failed to connect with the audience. Although this might be like comparing which of the Jersey Shore guys is the least moronic, The Sing-Off is the smartest music show on national TV.
These competition shows always get me fired up. Mostly because I see them as a shortcut for people who don’t want to sacrifice and put in the hard work that is necessary to achieve the musical success that they believe they want. But I still watch them because I enjoy listening to new talent and seeing it grow (or not grow) throughout the arc of the show. It’s a family event in our house. I have to wonder about the people who lack as quick of a trigger-finger on the fast-forward button as I have.2 Most of what we watched this week was a metaphoric dumpster-fire and I fear that it lowers the public’s standards of taste and talent to a dangerously low level.
This is both delightfully awkward and cunningly sarcastic. I love it.
(h/t Alex Ross)
Well, color me jealous. The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer starring my favorite actor, John Malkovich, will be performed at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, MI on October 1. If I was within less than a day’s drive I would definitely be at this performance.
Here’s a bit of the press release:
As part of a theatrical opera of sorts, Malkovich, a 40-piece chamber orchestra, and two sopranos tell the real-life story of Jack Unterweger, a convicted murderer and acclaimed prison poet. Pardoned by the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim in 1990 at the behest of the Viennese literati, Unterweger’s public “rehabilitation” was anything but — within two years, he had been arrested and convicted for the brutal murder of 11 prostitutes in three countries. This gripping performance features arias and music by Gluck, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Boccherini, and Haydn as the counterpoint to Malkovich’s chilling monologue, which shifts between reality and delusion.
See? Awesome.
The University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, which is affiliated with the University of Michigan has presented some of my most memorable concerts ever. I saw a stunning performance by Murray Perahia, Pierre Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Bluebeard’s Castle, and Brad Mehldau’s trio. (I would have seen even more, but I was on a student’s budget at the time.)
This is a fantastic chance to see something special. Mezzanine and Balcony seats are as affordable as $10. I know that I have a lot of friends still in the greater central Michigan area. Please go to this and then come on my podcast to talk about it.
Congratulations to all of them. Special congratulations for Mr. Núñez, with whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with years ago.
