Archive
there’s no video here…
…just audio.
I just really wanted this song on my blog.
Thank-You Anie for introducing me to this band.
Random Admission
The more piano involved in a song, the catchier I’ll think it is. Also the more I’ll dance like one of the boys in “That Thin You Do”.
Five Things: Blast from the Past – Songs
Here’s an old blog from two years ago.
At this point, I’d been wrestling with the possibilty of single-fatherhood, was hating my living situation, had seriously let down my brother, and had intentionally isolated myself from the woman who would later let me come to my senses and spend the last 19 months with her.
Wonder how much I have changed and how much it’s just that my environment/viewpoint has changed….
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Posted: Leap Day, 2/29I’ve just been rocking out a lot lately, so I thought I’d share some. Here below are my favorite lines from the first five songs in my playlist.Rest My Chemistry by Interpol“And I’ve made stairways/ such scenes for things to regret/ oh, those days in the sun/ they bring a tear to my eye/”While My Guitar Gently Weeps by The Beatles“With every mistake we must surely be learning/ still my guitar gently weeps/”Martyr for My Love for You by The White Stripes“And I bet we could build a home/ but I know the right things for me to do is to leave you alone/”Tear You Apart by She Wants Revenge“It’s only a crush, it’ll go away/ it’s just like the others, it’ll go away/ or maybe this is danger and he just don’t know/ you pray it all away but it continues to grow/”I Saw Her Standing There by The Beatles“Well she/ looked at me/ and I could see/ that before too long/ I’d fall in love with her/” While often times my fews on the viability of love and it’s further institutions can easily be contrued as “cynical” or “anti-”, I think the songs above illustrate that even when we tell ourselves we are stepping back and resolving our own demons, we cannot help but encounter unknown possibilities. Maybe there is truth to the old maxim “it’ll come along as soon as you stop looking for it”. Or perhaps it’s just obsession. Certainly we all know people who are addicted to one behaviour or another. I’d hate to think of someone as “my new drug”, but in hind-sight, I think we can all easily call to mind at least one person from our pasts who would fit that describtion. Sometimes a fling is just a fling, but sometimes a fling is a fucking harsh life lesson. In fact, I will venture the following hypothestis; it is easier to stand tall and firm in the snarling face of adversity than in the comforting warmth of awful embrace.
When it’s all said and done, I wonder who will think of me as their “Best Mistake”.
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By the way, the rest of the songs follow a vague narrative arc. I don’t think this applies to any one person so much as the natural cycle of my own love-life.
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Then again, it could all be “true love” and I haven’t realized it yet…..
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-2-14)
Uh oh, my Musical-Taste may actually be borrowed from 2003. Crap.
HIMYM Fandom
If you don’t already know that I think “How I Met Your Mother” is the greatest show on the air, it probably means one of four things is true:
1.) You just started reading my blog, hopefully after being linked here from another wonderful blog
2.) You don’t own a TV, so anytime I talk about TV, you just skip through to the next entry
3.) You hate awesomeness, so anytime I talk about HIMYM you punch yourself until you lose consciousness and your flailing arm navigates you away from the page
4.) You live in Canada and won’t see the show until a few year from now (After all, Robin said the 80’s didn’t happen in Canada until 1993)
That said, one of my favorite HIMYM fan-blogs is “Be Awesome Instead”. This guy has such total devotion that he tracks down and hosts every song ever played during the show (not so tough with cell phones that will tell you want the song is just by hearing a same, but a sign of dedication nonetheless).
Reading the most recent entries on BAI, I came across this little ditty, and I have to say, I was immediately laughing, and excited to post the video here (and a bit thirsty after hearing all the bar references).
Without further ado, here’s “A Daughter’s Lament”, the tale of Ted Moseby’s daughter:
Blast from the Past: Gnarls
Really, who doesn’t love Gnarls Barkley?
Admittedly, this video is a little weird, that’s why I’m posting it on a Saturday.
Gotta say, I still really dig the message. I’m sure that whether I admit it or not, I’m probably still doing the same thing.
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From 8/26/08:
Just watched this video for Gnarls Barkley (aka the best shit you can’t classify)
The concept is a little slow to get going but the truth makes up for any lackluster starts.
Check it out here
The Endorsement
I’ve been loving this album all of this week and last week.
History
I freely admit, I’ve been a Wu-Tang fan since the summer before my junior year of high school when a teammate passed me Wu-Tang Forever to listen to on the bus-ride to school. After that, I was hooked and bought every Wu-Tang CD I could, blowing literally 1/2 my Burger King earnings on CD. To this date, Supreme Clientele is still one of my favorite albums (and the only one I actually have on vinyl, a souvenir of my first trip to NYC in 2000).
Conversely, I didn’t really get into the Beatles until about 2007. It was a mix of The Grey Album, the Eleanor Rigby clip in “Accepted”, and my eternal love of “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones that got me into looking up old British Invasion songs, and thusly Beatles songs. Right away I was a fan of “I Saw Her Standing There”, and added it to my front of my playlist, (a good addition to all the Kinks & White Stripes songs I’d been working with).
Current
Then about 2 weeks ago, @Agent_M posted a link to “Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers”, and two great things in my life were mashed up in the most delicious ways.
Right up front, you have to know that this cannot be compared to The Grey Album, mostly because you cannot compare this album collective of Wu-Tang songs from different eras to the The Black Album’s continuity and polish. However, you can compare this album to ANY hip-hop album coming out anytime lately and see if the new can stack up.
The instrumentation on “Got Your Money” is great, the mixes are clean, and “Uzi” is such a mish-mash that it reminds me of the video for Triumph (2000), and I feel like I’ve instantly combined my 27 and 17 year-old selves. Every other songs is so mixed-up in the most wonderful of ways. Instead of trying to make everything fit smoothly, the songs, such as “Run” create a new identity complete different from the originals.
And really, who doesn’t love the skit of ODB singing “Love Me Do”? There’s a pretty simple formula:
The other day @Agent_M told me that this NOT the greatest thing he’d ever linked, but I left it as “agree to disagree”. Thanks, dude.
Future
Much like The Grey Album, however, I wouldn’t expect this to be available for much longer before EMI drops a cease-and-desist on it’s distribution, especially after the write-ups in New York Times and GQ. Get it while you can.
From the Times:
Q. Where did the inspiration for “Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers” come from?A. This project came about unintentionally, really. I’d done a Large Professor remix album and an MF Doom one, and then I was starting on a Wu-Tang one. One of the tracks that’s on there, “R.E.C. Room,” I made a couple of years ago. I had this easy-listening record of this orchestra playing cover versions of lots of different ’60s stuff. It had this instrumental version of “Girl,” and the whole thing was just stunning. But I didn’t want to just take a little bit of it. I took the whole song, and sped it up to the right tempo, so it has the complete arrangement and feel of the original Beatles song. Then I made the “C.R.E.A.M.” remix. And then I was like, O.K., I’ve got two tracks now that have Beatles samples with Wu-Tang a cappellas. A few days later I found Ol’ Dirty Bastard talking on YouTube about how he was influenced by the Beatles. And I just thought: This is it.
Q.Could you walk us through the samples on one of the more complicated tracks?
A.“Uzi (Pinky Ring)” has got a lot of samples on it. There’s “Glass Onion,” then it went to an Arif Mardin version of “Glass Onion,” then when Ghostface comes in it goes to “Getting Better,” then RZA comes in and it’s a Ramsey Lewis version of “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.” Then Inspectah Deck comes in and it’s a cover version of “Hey, Jude.” Then Method Man comes in and that’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” And then GZA’s at the end, and that’s “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road.” I’ve seen on blogs, somebody say something like, I’ve only heard two Beatles samples that I recognized in here. And to me that’s quite a good thing – you have to listen extra hard to hear them. I was purposeful not to take “Love Me Do” and put Wu-Tang with it.
Q.While you were working on this, did anyone make the comparison between what you’re doing and Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album”?A.Well, it’s obvious that those comparisons are going to get mentioned. I’ve got a copy of that. When it came out, a friend of mine gave it to me, and I thought it was cool. I didn’t listen to it loads of times, to be honest, and I don’t know it particularly well. I did listen to it in the final stages, because I knew that there were a couple of samples he had used, that I had also used. On “Encore” he use the same sample of “Glass Onion” that I use on “Uzi.” But that’s really it.
Whoa! OMFG! (and otherise: click here, check this out, etc)
Vivienne Long's "yoshimi" cover is so smooth and haunting and soulful it's beyond belief. I thought the Flaming Lips took down ideas from my head and made an awesome song out of all the mess, but Long REALLY came up with something here and the justification/redemption moral of the song is entirely different. If the Lips' version was michael Crichton, Long's is Hemmingway or Fitzgerald; an audio Kirusawa.
"oh yoshimi/ they don't believe me/ that you won't let those robots eat me…."
No matter the combination, me + her > against the world is a winning and universal theme. Thank-you.
Confession: I Really Like Cover Songs
Not bad ones, mind you. But reinterpretations, etc. Yep.
Seven Nation Army – by The Flaming Lips
Naive – by Lily Allen
Yoshimi – by Vivienne Thomas
Hallelujah – by Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright
tons more I can’t think of right now, actually, because making this list caused me to load up tracks I haven’t heard in a long time and I’m too distracted to continue as yet.
Re-Run, but you’ll love it
If you subscribed to my old blogs on Myspace, this will be a rerun for you, but I think given the changes in my life since the post below debuted in February, it was oddly prescient of me.
Also, one of my favorite formats for my blogs are my “Five Things” series. (Five is a number that’s easy enough to achieve but not so easy that you don’t have to really analyze the topic.)
Everything from here on was originally posted on 2/28/08.
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Five Things: Quotes from my playlist
I’ve just been rocking out a lot lately, so I thought I’d share some. Here below are my favorite lines from the first five songs in my playlist.
Rest My Chemistry by Interpol
“And I’ve made stairways/ such scenes for things to regret/ oh, those days in the sun/ they bring a tear to my eye/”
While My Guitar Gently Weeps by The Beatles
“With every mistake we must surely be learning/ still my guitar gently weeps/”
Martyr for My Love for You by The White Stripes
“And I bet we could build a home/ but I know the right things for me to do is to leave you alone/”
Tear You Apart by She Wants Revenge
“It’s only a crush, it’ll go away/ it’s just like the others, it’ll go away/ or maybe this is danger and he just don’t know/ you pray it all away but it continues to grow/”
I Saw Her Standing There by The Beatles
“Well she/ looked at me/ and I could see/ that before too long/ I’d fall in love with her/”
While often times my views on the viability of love and it’s further institutions can easily be construed as “cynical” or “anti-“, I think the songs above illustrate that even when we tell ourselves we are stepping back and resolving our own demons, we cannot help but encounter unknown possibilities. Maybe there is truth to the old maxim “it’ll come along as soon as you stop looking for it”. Or perhaps it’s just obsession. Certainly we all know people who are addicted to one behaviour or another. I’d hate to think of someone as “my new drug”, but in hind-sight, I think we can all easily call to mind at least one person from our pasts who would fit that description. Sometimes a fling is just a fling, but sometimes a fling is a fucking harsh life lesson. In fact, I will venture the following hypothestis; it is easier to stand tall and firm in the snarling face of adversity than in the comforting warmth of awful embrace.
When it’s all said and done, I wonder who will think of me as their “Best Mistake”.
Revelant Wit 