SIRIA: WHAT I LISTENED TO IN JUNE
Alright, this month I listened to an overwhelming amount of music. I was less discriminating than ever. My motto seemed to be if it’s music, throw it at me. Alternative, Country, Dance/Electro, Grunge, New Wave, Power Pop, Punk, Rap/Hip Hop, Soul, etc. Genre? Didn’t matter. Obscure or well known? Didn’t matter. If it was music I wanted to hear it. I didn’t end up in a fetal position with the sweats and shakes, but I might’ve overloaded on it just a bit as by the end of the month all I wanted to hear was Alex Chilton. Unfortunately, I can’t list everything I listened to so you’re getting a list of songs that got stuck in my head. However, soon enough you’ll all know the reason why I subjected myself to the music of hundreds and hundreds of music artists this month.
Marvelous Toy – “The City is a Washing Machine”
I love this song by local artist Marvelous Toy (yet another music discovery from a few years back, who I can thank Jon Hershfield for. You can check Marvelous Toy out on IsGoodMusic.com). The lyrics make me think of so many of my musician/artist friends, some of which my old roommate and I used to poke fun of mainly because of the reasons expressed by these lyrics in particular
“I know how my life began and I know how it will end I will be searching for a word that rhymes with dying as I lay dying”
“I’m always writing songs sometimes you think I’m listening, but I haven’t heard a word you’ve said. I’m silently building chords and melodies.”
Cloud Control – “Ghost Story”
The Shakers – “Villain”
I’m so proud of local band The Shakers and how far they’ve come as a band when it comes to their live performances in such a short time. This is their first music video which they recently debuted:
My Music Reality Show Idea
Tuned! Or Scored or F-Majored or whatever.
I have grown weary of television over the last few years. I’ve grown to despise the predictable, trite, formulaic crap the networks churn out. And I think I’ve never really been able to forgive television people for cancelling Firefly, so there’s a lot of television-directed anger swimming around in my amygdala. But, oddly, I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Like, a LOT of cooking shows. Hell’s Kitchen, Top Chef, Chefs vs. City, The Best Thing I Ever Ate, Kitchen Nightmares, Top Chef: Masters… All these shows fascinate me. But the one I’ve been watching most of lately is called Chopped.
If you’re unfamiliar with this show, the premise is this: they get four chefs every week (something I’ve been wondering lately: what is the difference between an executive chef and a Master Chef? I can only imagine that they hold a secret tournament every year where executive chefs fight to the death with lime zesters and halibut de-scalers, and the one left standing is elevated to Master Chef status. Mario Batali must be a BADASS with a zester). They give them baskets containing odd ingredients, and they have to make food including those ingredients. For example, one round they might open their baskets to reveal polenta, starfruit, crab eyeballs, and the rare man-eating blood-saffron, and each one is given thirty minutes to incorporate those items into something delicious. There are three rounds–appetizer, entree, and dessert–and one chef is eliminated (“chopped,” if you hadn’t already guessed) after each round, leaving one victor with ten thousand dollars and all his or her limbs intact.
So I was watching this show, and I started thinking how great it would be to adapt it into a musical contest. I mean, let’s be as brutally metaphorical as possible: music-based reality shows are the oozing pus leaking out of the weeping sore infecting the malignant tumor of the wrinkled rectum of the television medium. There’s more to music than emotionally unstable attention whores singing pentatonic melismas to karaoke arrangements of “I Will Survive,” right?
RIGHT? (more…)
Part IV – Jon Brion (Part 1 of 2)
The War for Independence
Chapter 4: Jon Brion
Over the last, oh, I don’t know, twenty years or so, a trend has emerged whereby rock and roll songwriters get to do film and TV scores. The first big example that comes to mind is Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman, who first became hugely successful scoring Tim Burton’s movies. Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo became similarly attached to Wes Anderson, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead recently scored There Will Be Blood, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers of The Police have both done some scoring, and hell, even Toto and Queen had some success with Dune and Flash Gordon, respectively. But the one who made the transition with probably the least amount of mainstream success is Jon Brion (one might be able to make a case for Mike Viola, or somebody else, but I’m making a case for Jon Brion, so there).
All IV-I, I-IV All
It’s time for a lesson in music theory. Don’t worry, we’ll start slow. Today we’ll be discussing the plagal cadence in rock and roll.
A plagal cadence is just a cadence from the IV (subdominant) chord to the I (tonic) chord. It’s my favorite kind of cadence, and it’s probably best known as the “amen” at the end of every Anglican hymn. If you have a guitar or a piano lying around, you can make your own plagal cadence at home. First, play a D major chord. That’s your tonic. Then play a G major chord—the subdominant chord in D major. Now play a D major chord again. Doesn’t that feel good? Ohhhh yeeeaaah, that’s the raw groin-tingling power of the I and IV chords.
Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite songs that rely heavily on the I and IV chords. There’s no hierarchy to this list, and my point is mainly to illustrate how many diverse things different bands can do with the same two chords. If you don’t have all these albums, most of these songs are youtube- or myspace-able. Or I guess you could just go out and buy some goddamn CDs.
The P.G. Wodehouse of Rock and Roll?
I’m not sure why I even read music reviews anymore. I think there’s a secret website somewhere containing about five phrases you’re supposed to draw from if you’re writing a music review, and the phrase I’d put first on my list of “If I See This Again Somebody’s Gonna Get Castrated” is this one:
“…nothing particularly new here…”
It’s this phrase (and permutations thereof), more than any other, that suggests to me that somebody is probably almost willfully missing the point of something. It’s one of those snarky blogger-phrases that just reek of presumed superiority (number two on my list is “self-indulgent,” because if you’re Making Something, who the fuck else are you going to indulge?). Digression aside, let me explain something, and maybe I’ll boldface it to make sure everybody gets it: There is nothing substantially new in popular music. There may be elements that are new to the genre, but that’s about as much as you can hope for. And that’s fine! I like it that way! The point is not necessarily to be innovative. The point is to be fun to listen to.
I mean, does anybody honestly think for a moment that before (for instance) Nirvana, nobody in the history of creative musical endeavor had ever thought of alternating quiet sections with loud ones? Ever? Maybe nobody had done it quite that way in that style of music before. I’d allow that. But that device had been around for hundreds of years before Kurt Cobain got to it, I assure you.
And let me just add that I emphatically do not want to meet anybody who sets out on some grand quest specifically to become a revolutionary. The one example that springs to mind of somebody who actively set out to revolutionize music is Richard Wagner. And although he was incredibly rare in that he actually accomplished what he set out to do, he was by all accounts a terrible prick.
What all this is leading up to, really, is a discussion about the band Secret Powers. Secret Powers is a band fronted by Ryan “Shmedly” Maynes, who was in the band Arlo (who I know I’ve mentioned before), although I first knew him from the Electrolites, his first post-Arlo band. Anyway, Shmed moved to Montana a few years ago (to my hometown of Missoula, by bizarre coincidence) and got Secret Powers off the ground with former members of other bands there.
The reason I brought up the “nothing new” issue is because I read a review of the Secret Powers album, Explorers of the Polar Eclipse—it was a glowing review, actually—that used that nauseatingly bloggy phrase to describe the album. It’s true that Shmed’s songwriting and production borrow elements from his favorite bands (among them the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Jellyfish, and ELO). But it’s done in such an obviously gleeful and celebratory way, and with such masterful craftsmanship, that to even mention it is to miss the point of this band. More than anything else, and all influences aside, the songs on Polar Eclipse are seamless exaltations of the pop form. It’s everything that’s good about a genre, all at once, done up in layers upon layers of keyboards, guitars, and multi-part vocal harmonies, performed by people who clearly love what they’re doing. To dismiss something like this as “nothing new,” even if it’s meant as part of a compliment, is to misapprehend the whole point of this style of music. It’s not supposed to solve mysteries of the human condition, or deconstruct forms, or plumb the depths of emotion. It’s supposed to make you enjoy being alive for three or four minutes.
If one wanted to oversimplify (and one does at the moment), one could divide melodic/harmonic movement into two types: 1) the type that surprises, and 2) the type that goes exactly where you want it to at just the right time. In my head, these are labeled as the “Whoa!” and the “Fuck yes!” categories, respectively. Secret Powers are good at both. I remember an Electrolites show a few years back where my fellow Get Set Go member, Jim, said something like “I can’t believe people don’t pay Shmed millions of dollars to write these melodies.” This accessible melodic emphasis is true of Secret Powers as well, and I was glad to see that a few Electrolites songs were reconstituted for Polar Eclipse. Especially “Counting Stars.” I could probably go on for pages doing comparisons and analyses and being offensively academic about it all, but I’d rather just say that Secret Powers is a real real good band and recommend that everybody get their album.
I think it’s time to bring my remarks to an anecdotal close now. I was re-reading The Salmon of Doubt the other day. It’s a collection of previously unpublished writings by Douglas Adams, on all sorts of different subjects, and it’s very entertaining. There’s a bit in his introduction to P.G. Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings that struck me as being particularly germane to this topic (oh holy shit have I ever wanted so badly to use the word “germane” in a sentence):
“…exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day. In fact, what it’s about seems to me to be wonderfully irrelevant. Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything.”
Sure! P.G. Wodehouse’s stories are about butlers and comically deviant members of the idle rich. Secret Powers songs are mostly about girls and use chords common to the pop genre. But both transcend what they’re about and manage to be enormously entertaining examples of artists joyously practicing their craft.
Why Critics Can Suck It
From what I can tell, most people who consider themselves aficionados of music fall into one of two categories (I’m going to borrow from Ayn Rand here): the conformist (spoon-fed moron!) or the fashionable nonconformist (sanctimonious pussy!). (more…)