Archive for March, 2008
Monday, March 31st, 2008
watch it and weep
i think bad lyrics can make a song worse. i particularly despise crappy, mush songs superimposed on generic production, complete with soaring strings and the like. i think the unusual production was one of the reasons why i liked umbrella (there, i admitted it :p). (can’t figure out how to get the link in colour - i am a luddite)
on the other hand great or even good lyrics aren’t really necessary for a song to be great. sometimes the quality of a song is improved just by how the voice is used as an instrument. its almost irrelevant what the lyrics are. isn’t this one of the reasons we enjoy music in a foreign language which we don’t understand?
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oh and this is absolutely incredible. i need to get this album. soon.
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
the sound of music.
"Why Records DO All Sound The Same", in the March 2008 issue of The Word [best music mag around], which i was thumbing through today at a Barnes & Noble.
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
damn you, atomsmasher.
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
To boy: The carrot cake missives
Ah, but the point is, it isnt foreign music, in a language you dont understand, isnt quite the same as a song which do understand, and you recognize that the lyrics are bad. I think it makes the whole experiance poorer.
Also, it seems our conversation was rather prescient: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7321147.stm
Al, for your benefit, amongst the innumerable avatars of inanity that graced our conversation earlier today, i can recall
1) a debate on whether musicans who write songs with bad/meanigless lyrics should be sold into slavery
2) a hybrid inductive/deductive hypothesis for the question that has long troubled us (used in its broadest sense) - “where do the pretty girls go in winter?”
3) what is the one pakistani song you hate to love.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
And your pants too..
Apologies if this breaks the cycle of philosophically grand hogwash i usually reserve for JB; (yes Al, you can stop gazing at my navel now, thanks ever so much) but since i am, for once, not making powerpoint slides that break new ground in the art of meaningless verbosity until 4 this morning, i thought i would blind you with the brilliance of some of my orginal thoughts instead.
The point I am trying to make is, that I am as open to sleeping my way to the top as the next person, but frankly the Macca settlement has me appauled - surely this cant be just (Rod Liddle, Sunday Times):
Tucked away in the small print of the entertaining McCartney-Mills divorce settlement was a £50,000 annual sum payable to the lovely Heather for “charitable donations”. Nobody seemed to think this odd apart from Heather, who, being an extraordinarily generous woman, had asked for £627,000 per annum to “donate to charity”. This sum included £192,000 for private flights, not including helicopters (that was another £120,000), so she could give of herself to the poor, the needy, the dispossessed millions – always travelling first class, natch. Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
zeitgeist, insight or both?
I’ve never really tried to get into Dylan (although I did love ‘things have changed’ from wonderboys, which was also a very good film.)
However I came across a cover version of ’senor’ by Calexico and Willy Nelson which I really liked and I thought I’d throw this question out there.
Does it really matter if culture is timeless or not? For instance if Bob Dylan doesn’t really have that much relevance for me (although I know Atomsmasher is a big fan), surely it doesn’t diminish the value of his work and the immense contribution it had on the cultural life of America. Similarly, I doubt people will really understand the Simpsons twenty years from now but do we really care? Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
silly wabbit.
will he leave nothing unsullied?
although, if he’d stuck to just hugging rabbits, the world would be a better place for it.
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
english chelsea fan, this is your last game; we’re not galatasaray, we’re sparta f.c.
how strange is this?
and what is the legacy of 68? i find it difficult to read accounts of the events of that year around the world, since i’m not sure how much of it is simply nostalgia and romanticism.
Friday, March 21st, 2008
an iron fist in a velvet glove.
well, there are lots of questions and ideas to explore there. the one that jumped out at me from the post was the relationship between income levels and some sort of ‘cultural awareness’ [sorry to resort to such a such crude term; i think i need to read up on my cultural theory =/].
first off, i think there are elements of local and global cultures that would be above any income-cultural awareness equations, if any such equations exist of course. so, take, for example, cricket in pakistan. yes, there was a big increase in the numbers of basketball hoops at elite schools and massive bungalows in the 90s, and there are the exclusive golf courses too, but i’d say the passion for cricket works on a level above wealth.
we could say the same thing for many music icons like nusrat fateh ali khan, noor jehan, nazia & zoheb, vital signs, junoon, etc.
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
cowabunga, yaar!
i think if we do any more navel-gazing we’ll frighten off any readers we might have. anyways, someone to whom we should be very grateful has uploaded an episode of the mighty turtles dubbed in urdu (videos at the end of the post).
after i’d gotten over rediscovering what a terrible accent they gave michaelangelo, this got me thinking about shared cultural experiences in a country like pakistan.
one think which strikes me about western countries is that there are common cultural landmarks which are easily identified by people from all strata of society. my theory is that this makes it easier for people from even lower income families to reach their potential, especially in careers which require the ability to socialise successfully in order to be successful.
