Too cool to goof

I've mentioned the documentary It Might Get Loud before. Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White in a room, with their guitars, talking to each other about their music. Couldn't be simpler, couldn't be deeper. It's so amazing that this is a deleted scene:

Stuck in neutral

I've just tried giving up caffeine and spent most of the last 2 weeks sleeping or just too dopey to get anything done. I thought that you were supposed to adapt long before 2 weeks. Bleah. I'm going to give up this insane plan and start mainlining go juice again.

Next project: Figure out how to use Winamp instead of iTunes, get my iPod synced, and then start getting some new music. It's all part of my master plan to get my life back, one step at a time.

Doing it for love

Christina Perri is amazing. Her official videos have many multiple millions of hits. Her life changed completely over three minutes, when her song "Jar of Hearts" was heard on "So You Think You Can Dance". She has a haunting quality and also very good luck. Her demo ended up in the hands of a choreographer who felt it. We all have the good fortune that Perri is not a one-hit wonder, since her subsequent releases have also had the magic.

One thing that her original songs have in common is being Big-S Serious. Could she be like that day to day? I was delighted to find this video of her jamming with a friend, covering "Georgia on my Mind". Her pure joy in making music shines out of this video. Unfortunately, she's blocked embedding, so click through the photo.

After that, listen to her other songs. Buy them. Buy the album. We admire dedicated starving artists, but I feel better knowing that artists who touch me have a decent living out of it, so they can keep making the art I love.

Friday Beat

Clearly, the Easybeats made it to Friday by getting a little stoned.

A woman needs to be told ...

Advance disclaimer: I am not LDS (Mormon). That said, ...

There are always a lot (megalot) of lipsynch videos of big hit songs on YouTube. Most of them point you over to buy the original song, the people that make them have a lot of fun, and everyone wins.

I've run into one remarkable group of One Direction "What Makes You Beautiful" lipsynchs that just makes me smile stupidly.

LDS church president recently Monson told his church that "a woman needs to be told she's beautiful" and the men of Mormonism took him seriously. There are countless videos from different LDS boys youth groups made as gifts to the girls in their congregation. (Ward? I should look that up. Okay, yes, "ward" = local congregation.) Technically, I suppose I could count them if I put some time aside, but pfui. Search for "one direction" or "makes you beautiful" along with "LDS", "ward", or "stake" and you'll see what I mean.

Here are a couple of fun examples:

It's a good thing I like this song a lot, because after rummaging around for two fun examples, I have an Dune-sandworm-sized earworm of it.

I could gripe some about pressure for traditional gender roles and all; the song could have more about non-appearance beauty. That's an important discussion—for another day. Today, I'm going to hum along with One Direction and the Mormon lads giving a loving message to the girls and women in their lives. (Give them bread, but give them roses, too.) Now I'm trying to think of a song that groups of young women could put on to tell young men that they're okay the way they are. Are there any reassuring songs for male persons?

Whose song is it?

I watch singing contests. I go for shows like The Voice and The Sing Off because I think they reward good singing more than histrionic runs. Singers who are out for votes sing songs that they expect the audience to be familiar with, which means a lot of standards and current pop hits.

(I hate runs more and more, particularly when I hear someone talking about them as if they are mandatory. I think that the singer has to earn the runs by solidly acquainting the listener with the melody first. I also think that their vocal performance has to support the story of the song, not just stunt. I'm a stick in the mud.)

Anyway, back to the contests. What that means is that I hear a lot of popular songs in a contest before I ever hear the original version. It's very interesting to pass through versions of a song in reverse order like that. Some covers are obviously bad. They have "cut-rate imitation" stamped on them. There is not one bit of magic that might have made the original rise to popularity. I put pretty much all the Adele and Katy Perry covers in that pile. Some covers are obviously meant to present a known song in a novel genre. I put many strange versions of "Baby baby baby oh" in that pile.

I think that country music has a different take on covers than Pop music. In Country, the songwriters are usually known. There are star writers as well as star performers. Songs relatively often have more than one popular and successful version, and people know that, and it's all good. Many songs are written before anyone knows who's going to sing it, so the song is written with its own feet to stand on. I can hear that in the contest shows, two versions of the same song that both sound completely authentic.

Some covers that I hear are so spot on the song, so compelling, that for me listening in reverse order makes the original sounds like the pale or odd imitation. An easy example is Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You". Full props to Dolly Parton's song and performance, but Whitney pwned.

I'd like to share two examples from Pentatonix, who won the last season of The Sing Off a capella singing contest. This first performance is of "Dog Days Are Over" from the contest and, to me, they completely took ownership of the song.

I should never have sought out the original of that, because it was such a let down. Pentatonix also has an amazing version of "Somebody That I Used To Know".

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The Gotye version is good, but it sounds like the imitation to me. I will probably never hear a version of either of those without measuring it against the Pentatonix version.

Mass Effect Motif

There is a lot to be said about the soundtrack of games. I've been playing the Mass Effect series a lot lately, doing many run-throughs to play with different versions of Shepard. There are three games in the series and your actions and interactions ripple forward from one to the next.

I ran into an article on the music of Mass Effect 3 by Kirk Hamilton on Kotaku that put something in focus that had been floating just under the surface of consciousness. The first game, Mass Effect, had menu screen theme music that just goes into your brain and stays there. For most people, it is "the Mass Effect theme".

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For Mass Effect 2, the composer decided to go in a darker direction, to fit the story. The Mass Effect 3 composer also adjusted the tone of the soundtrack to fit the story, but he used the Mass Effect theme when Shepard was having an emotional interaction. He also found a way to slip the theme in under radar to have a powerful, but sneaky, effect on players. I'll leave it to Kirk Hamilton to illustrate and explain.

The ME3 soundtrack overall is great, in my opinion. Click through the poster for a playlist of the whole thing.

Missing music

Due to all the disruption in my life, I ended up with no computer and all my data on a couple of thumb drives and a couple of external hard drives. I haven't been able to sync my iPod for a long time, so my scrobbling has gone to hell. I couldn't afford to buy much new music, which made me a sad panda indeed.

Well, look out world! I'm getting my ducks lined up again. Unfortunately, I still can't find my old blog archives. (I saved the HTML of every single post ever, somewhere.) They are probably on the external hard drive that (probably) got buried in storage. I've been listening to music on Pandora, but that doesn't scrobble and only wants to show me music just like music I already like anyway.

(That reminds me, I still owe the post on Pandora, don't I? And just as it's being passed by Slacker.)

My musical TO DO list is something like:

• Look for missing external HD.
• Find missing "Amber on Music" archive.
• Figure out how to put an iTunes library on an external HD. (That isn't practical for games, so they have eaten up the HD space on my new super laptop>)
• Sync my iPod.
• Get some new music.
• Sync again.
• Start throwing random groups from the news into Pandora to find new music. [*]
• Get more new music.
• Sync again
• And so on.

[*] Is there any musical reason to hate One Direction? I have no problem with shiny boy bands unless their music sucks. I certainly like this cover:

ASMR: buzz buzz buzz

ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) is a phenomenon where people get a pleasant buzzing or tingling sensation on the back of their neck (commonly) or some other body part, typically with extreme relaxation, in response to a particular kind of sensory input. Everyone who has it has their own set of triggers, but things like whispering, haircuts, and Bob Ross are very common. There is a giant collection of ASMR videos on YouTube if you want to get a better idea. Most people who have ASMR response don't realize that other people don't have it.

For me, certain kinds of songs have this effect, usually something with a drone or buzz threaded into it. I've had one of those in particular, Hedningarna's Hoglorfen, as an earworm today, which is a very strange thing.

Not the beginning I was hoping for

Myspace has completely deleted old blogs. I was smug, because I made backups of all my entries over there. Now I can't find them. The worst part is that I made multiple copies of the backups to avoid just this situation. I'll keep looking, but I think this is going to be one more lasting legacy of the recent turmoil & upheaval. I was hoping for more of a dramatic rise from the ashes for a new beginning than this trend of generally decreasing mess, though.

My mind keeps playing this song:

but we know how that breakup ends.



The soundtrack of my life needs a better musical director. (Also, I wish I could have seen the original production of this. My parents had that original-cast album and it was all as good as this.)

After the storm

I'm picking my way through debris looking for old familiar things. I have a notion to kick this blog off again, in some form, somewhere. I'll keep you all posted.

Meanwhile, here's a song that speaks some of my feelings, or at least the feelings I wish I had. I wish I were this tough.

More music watching

I have gotten hooked on reality-contest type shows. (These are not a new thing of course; think of Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.) I can't work up any interest in the Weight Loss Journey of Designers on Survivor Island. Yecch. Plenty of the shows, though, are the closest you can get to classic old variety programs anymore and a great way to discover new music. There are pages and pages to write about these shows, but today I just want to share one particular performance with you.

Streetcorner Symphony got second place in the past season of The Sing-Off, a contest of a capella groups. They were my favorite by far and I liked everything they did, but their version of "Fix You" is just magic. It sticks with me. (Members of the other groups join them at the end.)

And just because I love you all so much, here's another one:

Tangential note: If they ever completely don't need hand-held mikes anymore, will singers resort to holding wooden dummies? How will they ever learn what to do with their hands? I am so tired of watching hands and mikes instead of singers' faces. And you kids stay off my lawn!

Gaga for Go-Go

I've been busy, which is no excuse for not writing about music, because I've been listening to a lot of it while I work. Bad me.

Truth is, I was listening to something I really love and wanted to write about it, but I made the mistake of trying to find the perfect video and get all the historic background to lay on you. Someday, I'll write the complete book of go-go, but today I'll just give the short version.

In the 1970s, a new style of music became popular in Washington, DC. (Chocolate City, baby.) Chuck Brown developed the style by mixing Latin rhythms, funk, and call and response rapping. This music is called go-go because Brown's band plays fewer longer songs, with no breaks in between. They start playing and go go to the end of the show. Even if you have never heard go-go yourself, there's a good chance that the musicians you do listen to have been influenced by it. Or sampled it.

Here's a sample from Chuck Brown. Sorry that you don't get to have the full live experience.

This is from EU (Experience Unlimited). It's a more locally-authentic version of the song that Spike Lee used in School Daze.

Get your butt in motion!

Link rot isn't new

Link rot makes a blogger scream. (Maybe someday I'll record a link rot scream and post a link.) Just a few posts before this one, I've got a link to a video that's been reset to private. Videos disappear, even whole sites like imeem and Google Video disappear. Aieee!

Link rot isn't new, though.

Get a cinephile started on lost films; pack a lunch. It is estimated that more than half the silent films made have had all their copies lost. Some are just plain lost, some are known to have burnt in archive fires (early film stock was particularly flammable.) Likewise, a big chunk of the early talkies have been lost. Some films have been partly lost: some scenes, the soundtrack, the film stock but not the soundtrack, one eye of a 3D film, etc. Some films have been lost, but we have photographs taken during production. More recent films have had all the known copies deteriorate past use. Some films have even had all their copies just plain discarded because no one thought they were worth keeping. How would you feel if you were trying to write about a particular significant director whose early films had been lost? Aieee!

Television is even worse. Early productions were broadcast live, so there is no record unless someone made kinescopes (filmed the screen); the kinescopes are then subject to the same archiving problems as any other film. Many other early programs that were filmed or taped have had all their copies lost because no one thought of keeping them. The BBC is notorious for deliberately re-using tapes in the early 60s. Whovians (hardcore Doctor Who fans) are verklempt that so much of the early series has been lost and devote a lot of effort to recovering and assembling bits and pieces from soundtracks, fragments, and production photos that have survived. (Bless Australia, which kept copies of many tapes that the Beeb sent them for their local broadcasts.) Aieee!

No one much expects live performances from before sound recording and film were invented, but even relatively recent scripts and dance scripts have been lost, some from major and significant productions. Aieee!

Much of ancient literature and has been lost over time, of course, but historians are tormented by later works that refer to earlier works, even giving tantalizing extracts (true early links). The Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, the De Architectura by Vitruvius, and the Prose Edda of Snorre Sturlusson are well known examples of this kind of compilation. Libraries and collections burn up (down?). Fanatics burn books. Books are printed on paper that contains acid. Authors insist that their papers be destroyed when they die. One way or another, copy by copy, the work is lost. (And artworks only ever have one copy.) Even quite recent work has been completely lost except in the echoes of links. Aieee!

Online works are quite vulnerable to loss. Links to extant material become obsolete as service providers come and go, as content owners fail to pay their service bills, as sites are reorganized. Having many copies, easy in the virtual world, makes digital work more resilient against loss, but that is balance by the relative fragility of each copy compared to documents on paper or parchment. What will we all do when YouTube and Wikipedia go poof? Aieee!

I like to imagine (really fantasize) that some future historian will be interested in my blog, so I would end up being a minor Pliny the Elder of music. That's very unlikely, but my links will certainly rot. If I do make my own copies of the photo, video and audio recordings I use here, the links to those will rot and the copies themselves will get lost eventually. My own work is deservedly ephemeral, but consider how much of our current culture exists only online and how much is being lost month by month. Rotten links are the tantalizing fragments that will give future historians and fans so much to agonize over.

Dear hypothetical future readers: I'm sorry. I don't know what to do to overcome this; no one does. Remember us all kindly for what we do manage to preserve and forgive us for what we can't.

"Hiatus" sounds so much better than "collapse"

Wow. Two years. Damn, where did the time go? My life got sucked into a whirlpool and I've just gotten my head back above the water, and that's enough about that.

Now I just have to think of something clever and important to write. Snort. Yeah, right, ok, whatever.

My music collection is a mess. My iTunes library is still on my old laptop, which got commandeered by the young'uns and is now giving the death-rattle of a dying fan. The music files are on my new small wonderful portable external HD, so that's safe. I hate to go through the hard labor of getting a new library set up and I'm using a shared computer anyway, so I've been stalling. That means no syncing and no proper last.fm scrobbling. I've been badly broke, but whatever newer music I've bought is on my work PC where I use winamp.

I have been using the Pandora/last.fm mashup Pandora.FM a lot, though. (Check out my Pandora profile!) Pandora still troubles me because it wants to play me more of the same music I already like. I wish it had a "play someone else's station at random" button. I can't be the only person who likes to be challenged or to find new music.

What's next for Amber, aside from untangling my music? I think I can find a thing or two to say about Youtube, so-called reality TV and the loss of good old variety shows, the demise of imeem, Pandora, Second Life, and earbuds. Maybe I'll even be able to work up some entertaining rants. We'll see.

Outsider Love

I will now worship Jonathan Coulton. He writes smart wonderful songs AND he relases them with Creative Commons permission for anyone to create and publish videos of them. (And I think I still owe a blog on Creative Commons, don't I?) In his honor, I offer videos!

"I'm Your Moon"

A love song from Charon to Pluto
(CaptainValor, 2009)

"Chiron Beta Prime"

A Christmas letter from a family in unusual circumstances
(jocopro, 2006)

"Still Alive"

The end credits song of the game Portal. You do NOT want to do science with this computer.
(Gyoru, 2007)

"Baby Got Back"

Coulton covers a special love song
(Gl3nn, 2006)

Dispatch War Rocket Alpha to Bring Back Freddy

As usual, while I was looking for one thing, I found something else altogether. Then got distracted. "Oh, shiny!" I blame YouTube's recommender. It suggested that I watch a particular a capella version of "Bohemian Rhapsody". That was meh, but that had a related video that had a related video that (lather rinse repeat) brought me to the Queen official YouTube channel. Shiny!

Let me share the shiniest with you. Queen did the song for Flash Gordon. I loved that song, but I haven't heard it in years. I have never seen the video at all, so I was delighted to find it. It is a camp fest, with footage from that movie and footage from earlier versions. Now I get to make you listen to it, too.

Not content with this one Art Nouveau effort, Queen later recorded "Radio Gaga" and set the video in a very Flashesque world, with a lot of footage from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Unfortunately, the official channel has disabled embedding. (Since that's the only one they've blocked, I'm going to assume it's a rights problem and not greed or stupidity. But still, boo.) I did find one clean version of this video elsewhere.

Queen - Radio Ga-Ga
Uploaded by hushhush112. - Explore more music videos.

This reminds me of how much I love Freddy Mercury's voice. It's easy to forget how technically amazing his voice was until you hear another great singer like Annie Lennox (e.g.) tackling one of his songs and not quite getting it. Here is a version of a big Queen song with two good singers. One gets it; one doesn't.

Not Art Nouveau, but maybe only Freddy could pull that off.

She's My Little Earworm

Have fun with my earworm du jour:

Pocket Pandora

Wow, yikes. I increased the dose of a medication and lost nearly a week to daze. I thought occasionally "I need to write a blog today", but then time would slip away again. Next time I change a dose, I'm going to get a week of stuff written ahead and enlist someone to drop them into the blog day by day for me.

There was one cool and music-relevant thing from the week to share. My old Blackberry, an 8703e business powerhouse, died. I was right at my "get a new phone if you renew your contract" date (picture my faithful steed collapsing inches from the finish line), so I was able to replace it with the latest coolest the very next day. I am so loving my Blackberry Tour. It's smaller, faster, and does all sorts of amazing things. It even has a camera! (There were places in my office that banned cameras, so I avoided getting a phone with a camera. Now they ban phones, iPods, flash sticks, and just about everything but pencils so there's no advantage to a cameraless phone.) My only complaints about it so far are that it doesn't have Wi-Fi and that it doesn't have a magic battery that never needs charging.

The most wonderful feature is that there is a Pandora client for this generation of Blackberry. I mean, "w00t!" doesn't even cover it. Of course, regular readers know that this leaves me with my old dilemma again. (Amber on Music: Tyranny of the Scrobble) If I stream Pandora on my phone, the music won't be scrobbled to my Last.fm profile. On the PC, I use PandoraFM, but that doesn't work on the Blackberry and Last.fm has no Blackberry client for their streaming music. Wah.

(Of course, my scrobbling is all gewhackity these days because my library is on the shared drive that keeps getting stuck on my roommate's computer. This resource PITA is balanced by his contribution of new music to the household, though, so I cope. I also expect to get some wordage out of his intermittent efforts in streaming his own music out. But I digress ... )

The Pandora client is pretty slick. It is easy to use and has all the Pandora features for just plain listening to music, including Thumb Up/Down and "why was this chosen?" You can listen to any of your Pandora stations or start a new one from a single artist or song seed. It shows the album artwork even bigger than it does on my PC, which is nice. It lets you select music quality level to balance performance and data consumption. I really like that it adds itself to the top of every application menu, so you can get into it to skip a horrible song or pause it with practically no navigation.

It omits some features that I use a lot, though. I can't edit any of my existing stations, or even see their seeds. It lets me select my Quick Mix station, but doesn't let me add anything to it. That kind of spoils the point of Quick Mix, seems to me. I can, however, delete any station. I'm not sure why I would feel the need to delete on the road more than mixing up something new to meet my on-the-road needs.

There are a few drawbacks that bother me. The earbuds that came with the phone suck utterly. They hurt my ears, have crappy sound, and fall out. Boo to you Blackberry. I can replace those with something better, of course. I can't fix the other glitch, which is only a problem for total geeks like me: the "why this song?" blurbs are often slow to load and too long for the Blackberry-sized window. I can cope with that. It drives me up the wall that the music pauses briefly for every alert, which leads to a string of hiccups as SMS and email land. You choose a Blackberry because you expect to get a lot of SMS and email, so this is not a small problem for the crackberry-addicted.

I do step back and put this in perspective. It will only let me listen to radio stations I developed myself in advance and not let me develop any while I'm on the subway? Poor me. I'm complaining about something that is head and shoulders above just plain old pocket radios. It won't replace regular-broadcast radio in cases of emergency or civil insurrection, but it totally demolishes it for music. If I whine about this again, take away my phone and make me get by with an AM transistor radio for a week.

Hand Jive

The last few days, I've had migraine and couldn't write at all. I was too photosensitive and dopy to face a page of words. On top of that, sound hurt and my tinnitus was out of control. Often when my tinnitus is acting up badly, listening to music makes the buzzing, clanging, whistling, and squeaking more orderly. (The noise is still there, but more organized and less rackety. I think of it as combing messy hair out straight.) This week, though, there was no taming it.

My hearing loss and tinnitus always affect my ability to hear music. It particularly hits some singers whose voices happen to be in my most damaged frequencies. It really plays hob with nice stereo mixes, because my left ear is so much worse than my right. I wish the iPod would let me adjust the balance to compensate for that. No home sound system has a "adjust to missing frequencies" switch, though.

Because my loss is in the frequencies of speech, I often have trouble understanding all the lyrics of songs. I would love to have access to captioned videos. I once heard someone going off on how ridiculous the idea of music videos with captioning is. This is based on the simplistic ideas that "deaf" is an on/off switch. Hearing impairment is often partial, and people who can't hear at all can feel rhythms. Besides, lyrics are words that you don't necessarily have to hear any music to appreciate, and videos are all about imagery. That is all a long way to say "bunkum!".

Captioning isn't the only way that people with hearing impairments can get lyrics to songs. There are also American Sign Language (ASL) and Signed English translations. YouTube is replete with examples of popular songs with signing. There are different kinds of "signed songs". The best of them, in my opinion, are those which are performances in their own right.

Live Performance, "Fergalicious" (macboy17, 2007)

Live Interpretation, "I Had a Shoggoth" (filkertom, 2008)

Ordinarily the point of live interpretation is to just tell what the speaker is saying, but this one is fun because the interpreter part of the show. The interpreter had never heard this song at all before! If you think about it, there would have to be signs for "Cylon" and "Sith Lord", wouldn't there?

Music Video, "Pump It" (st0rmfx, 2008)

Bjorn Storm takes a completely different tack and made his own videos of the songs. I wish he could do more, but YouTube's new copyright wars are keeping him on the sideline for now. My son the Black Eyed Peas fan says this is his favorite BEP video.