Music as Background Noise
Damn You, Hollywood. Again.
Cast your mind back a few weeks. The air was cleaner, the world made sense, and herds of adorable golden retriever puppies roamed the streets spreading good will. And a younger, fresher-faced Eric Summer wrote an internet column which happened to mention that he thought most people didn’t really like music all that much–that they regarded it as little more than background noise.
Well, the long weeks have passed, and I have spent my time in quiet contemplation as I’ve grown older, and I think I have it pinned down as to why people think of music as background noise. As is usually the case in these matters, I blame Hollywood.
This train of thought began, as most of my trains of thought do, with Star Wars. I was driving home from work one day and I heard John Williams’ Star Wars score on the radio. I was happy to hear it. I like Star Wars. A lot. And as I listened, I realized I remembered exactly where most of the dialogue from the movies fit with the score. It was uncanny. So I drove on home, quoting Star Wars happily to myself and thinking. And then it dawned on me, clear and bright as a summer cliché: this score is inextricably tied with the movie it belongs to. It is simply impossible to separate the two. Any merit it has as a piece of music is completely dependent upon the pictures that go with it.
Which is not to say that it’s ineffective; far from it. It is a wonderful movie score, filled with memorable themes and underlining the emotional context of each scene it supports. But it doesn’t work without the movie. (more…)
On the Radio…YOU CAN’T SPELL ‘ACERBIC’ WITHOUT ERIC
As some of you may be aware, some of the TRAffIK contributors have started their own internet radio shows Sundays on www.isgoodradio.com Here is the current schedule for now.
Sundays on IsGoodRadio.com
2 pm – You Can’t Spell ‘Acerbic’ Without Eric w/Eric Summer
4 pm – What’s So Funny? w/ Sarah L.
6 pm – Ammunition w/ Siria
8 pm – Cut and Reel w/ Maureen Shampine
You can learn more about the dj’s here and about the shows here:
We’ll give you more background info on all of this soon, and will have a page where you can download all of the previous week’s podcasts. For now check out Eric’s first show (aired 9.13.09) where he touches a little on the Mike TV Mr. T’s Launchpad and Kiss or Kill Club music scenes and the bands that comprised them.
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…)
New Maximum Donkey Two Ways
I’ve decided to try something a bit different this week. I’m going to write an overview of the New Maximum Donkey show I saw at the Scene last Friday (two Fridays ago, by the time you read this). But as an experiment, I’m going to do it two different ways: first the way I’d normally write something, and second in the manner of a “regular” rock writer/blogger. Who knows? Maybe the way they write things is just more effective at conveying this sort of thing, so I’m willing to try it out. Here goes: (more…)
Fetch Me My Box of Soap!
A year or two, back when Myspace was still the place hip young trendsetters went to look at grainy webcam pictures of girls in bikinis, Get Set Go had a pretty sizeable presence on that quintessence of social networking. More than “pretty sizeable,” actually–it was huge for an indie rock band without the backing of empty business suits stuffed with money and cocaine (I guess the technical term is “A&R people). We had fifty thousand friends (only about 25% of whom were robots made of spam and pictures of boobs) and well over a million plays on our little embedded jukebox thingy. Hell, if we’d lived in Myspace instead of the real world, we’d've been hand-fed bitmapped pictures of grapes by callipygian spambots all day, and slept on .gifs of posturepedic adjustable mattresses lined with paypal account numbers. (more…)
The War for Independence – Don Hertzfeldt
The War for Independence – Chapter 7: Don Hertzfeldt
This one is almost topical, because I had a birthday a little over a week ago. No, it’s OK, don’t feel bad if you didn’t get me anything; I’m not a big birthday-celebrator. In fact, all I did that day was buy some comic books and barricade myself in my apartment. But it turns out that one of my favorite animators, Don Hertzfeldt, has the same birthday as I do! What are the odds? (Answer: appx. 1 in 365) But wait, it gets even stranger. Don Hertzfeldt has the audacity, the sheer nerve, to have been born exactly one year after I was. In case your brain is too numbed and/or blown to decipher the consequences of that degree of ballsiness, it means that Don Hertzfeldt is precisely one year younger than I am.
I know. It’s tough to take. Just allow yourself a few minutes to gather your thoughts, catch your breath, and put down the butcher knife. We can continue whenever you’re ready. (more…)