The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: music

  • The rising threat to music of the home taping phenomenon

    This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY&feature=player_embedded) is a hilarious take-down of the music publishing industry’s allegation that personal filesharing is “killing” music.  Part of the fun is figuring out the early 1980s references.  Also, I would totally buy a flag that had that cassette-and-crossbones logo…

    Also, remember that according to former MPAA chief Jack Valenti,

    [T]he VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

    Not that the content cartels would ever condone the use of overblown and hyperbolic language to frighten lawmakers into writing into law special rights to protect their outmoded business models…

  • Strip Polka — another silly Facebook meme

    OK, this is another silly Facebook object trouve meme. Let’s see how this turns out.

    INSTRUCTIONS::
    1. Put your iPod or other music player on shuffle.
    2. For each question, press the “next” button to get your answer.
    3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS! (or stupid)
    4. Tag friends who might enjoy doing this as well as the person you got this from

    My list is below the fold; my conclusions are given right here: This is dumb. Although it’s supposed to yield deep insights or at least some humor, it really just generates noise. There is a disturbing trend in today’s society tho believe in the innate wisdom of randomness, as if throwing a patische of things together somehow tells us something important. That can happen but it rarely does.

    More significantly, perhaps, the originator of this meme misunderstood iPods nearly as much as Apple does. I have 26 GB of songs. Most of them were on albums with other songs I like. Some were on albums I decided I didn’t like after hearing. Probably most have been listened to one or two times. Heck, some of them are just physics demonstrations. Picking songs at random from that collection is no more likely to reveal something interesting about me as, well, pulling Scrabble tiles from a bag is to reveal the Question to life, the universe, and everything.

    I can see two ways to improve this and give it a fighting chance of being interesting. First, the songs should be picked from a Party Shuffle of songs you actually, you know, listen to. Second, I think it would be better to pull maybe 20 songs into a playlist but then choose which song matched which question. Utter randomness is, by definition, without meaning. But allow me to mediate consciously, and I just might reveal something.
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  • America the Beautiful

    A stirring rendition, courtesy of Beyoncé at HBO’s “We Are One” Inauguration Concert.

  • Memory in Song (II)

    More oddly-prescient musings of Jackson Browne.

    “Lives in the Balance”
    Jackson Browne
    Lives in the Balance

    I’ve been waiting for something to happen
    For a week or a month or a year
    With the blood in the ink of the headlines
    And the sound of the crowd in my ear
    You might ask what it takes to remember
    When you know that you’ve seen it before
    Where a government lies to its people
    And a nation lies drifting to war
    There’s a shadow on the faces
    Of the men who send the guns
    To the wars that are fought in places
    Where their business interest runs…

    On the radio talk shows and TV
    You hear one thing again and again
    That the USA stands for freedom
    And we’ve come to the aid of a friend.
    But who are the ones that we call our friends,
    these governments killing their own?
    Or the people who finally can’t take anymore
    So they pick up a gun or a knife or a stone?

    And there are lives in the balance
    And there are people under fire
    And there are children at the cannons
    And there is blood on the wire…

    There’s a shadow on the faces
    Of the men who fan the flames
    Of the wars that fought in the places
    Where we can’t even say the names.
    They sell us the President the same way
    They sell us our clothes and our cars
    They sell us everything from youth to religion
    At the same time they sell us our wars.
    I wanna know who the men in the shadows are
    I wanna hear somebody asking them why
    They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
    But they’re never the ones to fight and to die.

    And there are lives in the balance
    And there are people under fire
    And there are children at the cannons
    And there is blood on the wire…

  • Memory in Song (I)

    It’s still surprisingly hard to write about 9/11. It galls me to see, again, our national “leaders” exploit this tragedy for political ends. And it saddens me that we don’t seem to have learned any lessons. So it’s really not in me to pen something deep and insightful. Instead, I’ll fall back on the melodic musings of Jackson Browne, writing long before today but seeing, apparently, the same sickening game.

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  • Review: Marc Cohn at the Westhampton Beach Peforming Arts Center

    Marc Cohn & band
    Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center
    Sunday 2008 August 24 8:30 PM

    It’s my habit to see Marc Cohn every chance I get during the New York leg of his tours. This explains why, three days after my last Cohn concert, I schlepped all the way out along Long Island’s southern shore to Westhampton. Tonight he had no opener; it was just his band and him. The WHBPAC is an intimate space, acoustically rich and comfortable. It lacks the grandeur of St. George’s Theater but is quite nice for a modern building.

    As before, the playlist is below the fold. I don’t have as many comments, as many of the songs are the same.

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  • Review: Marc Cohn at the St. George Theater

    Marc Cohn with Toby Lightman
    St. George Theater, Staten Island, NY
    Thursday 2008 August 21

    This is another in my ongoing series of reviews of Marc Cohn shows. See this earlier one and this one as well for comparison.

    The St. George is a beautiful venue, an old vaudeville theater (I assume) which has been either renovated or maintained lovingly in its original state. Ornate and glitzy, it nonetheless provided excellent sound for an intimate concert. The opener was a bluesy singer/songwriter named Toby Lightman, who has been featured (apparently) on the Home Shopping Network as well as singing the opening for NASCAR on Fox. Unfortunately I don’t know any of Ms. Lightman’s work, so I can’t review it in depth. She seemed to have a nice range, though, and her songs aren’t bad at all. She does appear to be a bit nervous on a stage by herself.

    After Ms. Lightman’s forty-minute set and a small break, Marc Cohn came on stage with his current touring band: Shane Fontayne on guitar; Joe Bobadillo (?) on drums; and John Ossman on bass. The set was high-energy and went on for more than an hour and a half, including two encores. The playlist is below the fold.
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  • Review: Counting Crows with Maroon 5

    Counting Crows with Maroon 5
    Also with Sara Bareilles
    Thursday 2008 Aug 7
    PNC Bank Arts Center
    Holmdel, NJ

    My usual way to review a show would be to give the playlist and say what I did or didn’t like about each. That’s not going to work this time for a host of reasons. First off, I don’t really know the body of work for either Sara Bareilles or Maroon 5. I wouldn’t be able to name almost any of their songs, and it wouldn’t be fair to give an in-depth review of material I was hearing for the first time, under concert conditions. I can say that I was impressed with both groups, enough that I’ll probably plunk down some cash and check out their studio work. Ms. Bareilles has tremendous range and an endearing quality to her voice. Maroon 5 also covered a lot of ground stylistically, from hard rock to something that sounded a bit like late Police work.

    I do know most Counting Crows songs, and I will be posting their playlist. But it really isn’t meaningful to analyze each in detail, for reasons that will be made clear below the fold.
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  • Contata (2)

    So, on to Contata proper. (See this earlier article for context.) A filk con is different from a regular con (assuming that my limited experience at Lunacon allows me to generalize about a “regular” con) in that the filk con is explicitly organized around the music. In a lot of ways, it was really just a rolling three-day concert. Unlike Lunacon, there were few panels or discussions per se (though I must admit I simply missed a few, on things such as tone-shaping or guitar-making). Instead, there were scheduled performances and “open filking” — which is basically an otherwise-unoccupied room wherein anyone could drop by and begin singing. And of course, the traditional midnight chocolate tasting.

    This put me in an odd position. As anyone who’s suffered through the Hun Talent Shows can tell you, I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. The only thing musical that I can play is an iPod. Thus I didn’t really have much to offer. (Only later did I come across Ian, who tells stories rather than sings. I thought, maybe I can do that, with enough prep work.) Indeed, the primary talent I brought to these sessions is my ability to clap loudly, honed at many a high school play. I could also join on the chorus — filk songs tend to have very crowd-friendly choruses — if there were enough other people to render my mangling anonymous.

    More below the fold.
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  • Contata (1)

    I spent this weekend at the hotel Hilton Parsippany, attending a sci fi con called “Contata 5“. In a somewhat strange co-branding fashion this was also NEFilk 18 — apparently, NEFilk is sort of an umbrella designation. Filk is an odd branch of music deriving from (originally, literally via typo) folk music — it’s folk with a science fiction / fantasy bend. Filking is one of those sundry ways in which being a science fiction fan is not the same as being, say, a New York Mets fan or an opera aficionado. It’s the shared culture and oral history that keeps the community close-knit and vibrant despite being spread over every known continent.

    Although I’d heard of the phenomenon, my first exposure to filk was at Lunacon this past March. Filking was a distinct thread woven through Lunacon — a chain of panels and sessions scattered among the calendar of events, at which more or less the same people showed up. I attended one late-night filking session to see what the buzz was about. To be honest, it was a little intimidating. This truly is an organized oral culture with multiple decades of backstory. Everyone knew the words and the anecdotes and the in-jokes — everyone but me, that is. My temptation was to high-tail it out of the room and write it off as a failed exercise.

    The story doesn’t end there though — more below the fold.
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