Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
And, of course, how remiss would I be to not link this week’s piece I’ve cooked up for Time’s Entertainment blog? That would be here, as I try and work out whether or not the terrible new Bourne Legacy movie is about to usher in an age of blockbuster movies where story isn’t even a consideration.
Yes, I disliked Bourne Legacy that much. Really.
I think I’ve always ended up focusing too much on Dylan’s vocals every time I’ve listened to his music in the past; they’re so distinctive – especially when you come to them after years of hearing people make fun of their whiny, wheezy quality, the weird lilt of melodic tunelessness that he brings to everything – that they tend to overpower everything else, admittedly, but when this song came on my iPod when I wasn’t really paying attention earlier today, I finally heard the music under Dylan’s voice, and had this moment of… surprise, I guess, when I finally saw the Byrds/Dylan connection that everyone talks about for myself.
For all of the well-deserved, hard-earned praise and applause that is thrown at the feet of Dylan’s songwriting genius, I found myself weirdly hypnotized by the way that his backing in this song sounds to me like “I Feel A Whole Lot Better” by the Byrds; it’s the performance as much as the melody, a wonderfully jangly pop jaunt to the whole thing behind the harmonica and the singing. The pop-ness of Dylan has always been somewhat absent to me until now, and discovering it by accident today just made me like the song all the more; previously, it had always been Dylan’s lyrics I’ve admired the most in his own performances (And the lyrics for this don’t disappoint: “The silver saxophones say I should refuse you/The cracked bells and washed-out horns/Blow into my face with scorn/But it’s not that way/I wasn’t born to lose you” indeed), but now I want to go back and revisit the entire early back catalog and find some way to turn all of the vocals off and find out what’s going on in the background.
Comedy songs get a bad rap. No, wait, that’s not entirely true; comedy songs probably get the rap they deserve considering the amount of terrible comedy songs there are in the world. But not all comedy songs are terrible, is my point, and for every Weird Al parody of the hit song of the day that replaces one of the word with “fat” or whatever, there’s also a funny and well-constructed and -performed songs that are worth listening to. From that world, there’s Nellie McKay and “Bodega!” from her last (I think? I admit, I haven’t been paying the most attention to her career in recent years) album, Home Sweet Mobile Home. It’s clearly a comedy song – Anything that includes the passage “When love fills the air/And he asks me/’When will you be mine?’/I sigh, ‘My Valentine/Proposed to me in a bodega'” is clearly not entirely serious – but there’s a fun to it that’s infectious, and a tongue-in-cheek intelligence at play in the parodic elements, detourning expectations of what to expect in the song as it merrily rolls along. While it’s true that not every comedy record is the Rutles, Nellie’s a good enough substitute for me, thanks very much.
For once, no commentary. I was rewatching North By Northwest last night, and just felt overwhelmed by this music; it’s been in my head ever since, with its tempestuous sweep and spectacular use of the orchestra (Seriously, those kettle drums). Bernard Herrmann, you knew what you were doing, for sure.
People, people, people. That’s an entirely live performance above. Seriously.
This is easily one of my favorite pop songs ever; something that’s just so messy and ambitious, so funny (The “Cello Cello Cello” bit, with the word being sung because, in the original recorded version, they couldn’t afford to have real cellos on there, so they just sang the parts themselves) and so amazingly human. Even if I wasn’t won over by the entire thing by the time the song gets to its final movement – And it’s a song that tries to tell a story about a woman missing her lover, who’s been gone longer than she expected and is late in returning, in movements, little excerpts with different moods and points-of-view and, come on, that’s just great, right? – it ends with “You are forgiven” over and over again, which seems… I don’t know, astonishingly, beautifully kind, I guess (Not that anyone in the song doesn’t “deserve” forgiveness; it’s the choral nature of the way the line is delivered, repeated, as if there’s such forgiveness in the world for everyone, the word and the act as a magic spell for the listener).
Here’s the original recorded version:
And, just for fun, here’s a Green Day version that seems to want to do everything just a little bit faster than the original. But they do the “cello cello cello” part that I didn’t think they would…:
You are forgiven.
Firstly, I have no idea why this video for Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band On The Run” seems to be all about the Beatles, but I kind of love it.
Secondly, and more importantly: I’ve never really got into a lot of McCartney’s post-Beatles career (I’ve really only started investigating it in the last couple of years, to be honest), but “Band On The Run” is pretty much a return to the kind of track that McCartney was playing with on Abbey Road, isn’t it? The song-as-song-cycle that, to my ears, Pete Townsend was doing far earlier with The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away.” It’s not as catchy as something like the “You Never Give Me Your Money/Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” sequence from Abbey Road, sure, but it’s still an enjoyable spread of a song, weirdly luxurious and amorphous in construction.
Oddly enough, I’m not sure I’d ever heard the entirety of this song in its original version before I’d heard the Foo Fighters’ cover from just a few years ago; I was still in my “If It’s Not ‘Jet’ Then I Don’t Want To Know About It” phase of my reactions to McCartney’s post-Beatles work, and so when the Foos’ version started I was very “I don’t want this oh no” until the 1:18 mark, when a sense of “What is this?” came over me and took me through the end. By the time I was thinking “You know, this is a great chorus,” I knew I was in trouble. Damn you Macca!
TIME accepts Fareed’s apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed’s column for a month, pending further review.
What the news of Fareed Zakaria’s suspension for plagiarism brings up for me – As well as the basic “Why would you do that, do you really think you wouldn’t get caught, you idiot?” thing, because, hi, it’s the Internet – is the larger question about how much working off of firsthand reports counts as plagiarism. As ridiculous as it may sound, that’s something I find myself worrying about quite a bit, especially for things like the Comics Alliance stories I do, which (unlike the Newsarama blog posts) are attempts at straight-forward, no-editorializing, fast (ie, short) pieces that are often just rewriting press releases or announcements. I always try and offer something beyond simply “And then they said this and then this,” even if it’s just trying to draw connections between two pieces of information not necessarily obvious in the source, but, yeah. Man. I probably accidentally plagiarize more than I’m either aware of, or would want to.
Easily the best track off the new Blur 21 boxset, “1” sounds like the bridge between Blur and Gorillaz, with the band doing something more free and more groove-based than what they’d been up to previously, with the lyrics and vocals just one more (mumbled) ingredient into the mix. The use of the vibes really helps the construction, too, giving the song its own feel unlike anything else the band ever did. I love this song; I find myself wishing that whatever songs had come out of this previously-unknown session with jazz producer Bill Laswell had found themselves released properly, and Blur was given an entirely new direction, post-13.
What’s even more impressive is that while high unemployment is driving the national labor-force participation rate down, the Portland area’s participation rate is now growing. In the aggregate, Texas is where people have been moving to get jobs, but if you like overcast weather and independent coffee shops, greater Portland’s not a bad alternative.
So what went right? To an extent, Portland’s benefitted from the fact that some of its local enthusiasms—bicycles, food trucks, microbrews, artisanal whatnot—have become more popular nationally, giving a boost to some growing local companies. The Portland area has also benefitted from the region’s green proclivities. Renewable energy has been a growth industry nationwide, and Portland is home to the North American base of Germany’s SolarWorld and Denmark’s Vestas, one of the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturers.
Way to go, my home town. From here.
