When I was ten and eleven years old, this was some of the most exciting art I could imagine (It’s the box art from the 1985 Transformers toys, painted by a guy called Jeffrey Mangiat).
More Than Meets The Eye
366 Songs 282: Superstition
First, can we all accept that this might be the best live performance of a song on television ever? And on Sesame Street, of all shows. Clearly, we’ve been unfairly robbed of the kid-friendly Saturday Night Live that that show was always meant to be all these years.
And “Superstition”… I’ll admit it; for every Stevie Wonder song that I absolutely adore – “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “You Met Your Match,” his version of “We Can Work It Out” – there are about ten that I almost can’t stand. I put it down to his tendency to push his more saccharine moments (“I Just Called To Say I Love You”? “My Cherie Amour”? “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life”? AIEE) as singles and promoted tracks, especially when I was discovering his music for the first time; that kind of thing leaves its mental scars, but even so: “Superstition” is a song that refuses to leave you alone, unconvinced of its greatness. Listen to that creeping electric piano line, or the horns, nagging at you to acknowledge how great the song is.
With such unforgettable, unbelievable prime slab of funk behind it, it’s easy to forget about Wonder’s vocals – Although: That growl! That joy! – and the words he’s singing. That’s a mistake, though; it’s a smart, funny song, and a lesson for the more gullible of us: “If you believe in the things/That you don’t understand/Then you’ll suffer/Superstition ain’t the way” Maybe it’s my love for songs with such simple, simplistic lessons, but I kind of love that that’s the chorus for this one.
Here’s the (somewhat inferior to the Sesame version, but still great) original recorded version of the song:
“I Think That’s An Old Frame of Thinking, And We’re Trying To Break Out of It”
But to BuzzFeed Executive Editor Doree Shafrir, who is leading the hiring search, the idea that there are “fun” posts and “other” posts is an antiquated way of thinking. Instead, BuzzFeed requires three things of each story: that it entertain, inform, and manifest itself as something people want to share with their friends.
“Almost everyone always wants to talk about this split, which I feel is sort of a false dichotomy,” Shafrir says. “Why should we take for granted that a sort of quote, unquote ‘longform,’ serious piece won’t be shared on social media, as if the two things can’t exist in one ecosystem? I think that’s an old frame of thinking, and we’re trying to break out of it.”
From here.
I don’t know if the Internet is willing to accept the idea that longform journalism is going to make a comeback, but I like the idea that more and more people are willing to at least consider it (Things like this, Byliner, and Kindle Singles make me hope that there’s going to be some way of not only making longform journalism a going concern, but also a profitable one. Just imagine, as the saying goes).
Regnad
Testing, Testing
Hello, technology. Assuming this works, I am writing this on a Kindle; it was a birthday present and an attempt for me to get off the laptop as I know it but still be able to check the Internet, email and whatever in evenings and weekends. I made myself a promise, awhile back, to GET OFF THE COMPUTER when I wasn’t working, if only because I spend so much time working and need to change my environment some time without going crazy. It’s been good for me, but having this Kindle has been really nice to just do fun things online without feeling like I should work. Plus, it’s gotten me obsessed with the format of Kindle Singles and other cheap, short digital books. More on that later, I suspect.
366 Songs 281: OK
Presented to demonstrate the value of a good remix, here is (above) the album version – ie, the original – of Talvin Singh’s “OK,” from the album of the same name. It’s a really nice track, and it’s something that very clearly knows what it wants to do and gets there relatively painlessly.
And then, someone – A record label executive? Singh himself? I have no idea – apparently decided that, if they were really going to want to release the track as a single, it needed a little bit more punch. So, they reached out to Bjork collaborator Guy Sigworth, who just tweaked a few things and ended up with this irresistible juggernaut of a floor filler:
This, I would like to suggest, is what an outside voice can bring to a project. And so, thank you to all my editors, who make my work better with their comments and objections. Those who make it worse…? Well, we’ll talk about you another time.
366 Songs 280: Girl From The City
I have never heard another song by the fantastically-named Strawberry Alarm Clock – That is, I promise, the name of the band who perform this song – and, to be honest, I am in no rush to do so anytime soon. But nonetheless, I really love this song, in large part because of the movie it comes from, Beyond The Valley of The Dolls. A kitsch classic that’s as much a cheesecake disaster as it is a parody of the ’60s pop- and counter-cultures, BTVOTD is also gifted with some genuinely wonderful music, such as this great mid-tempo song that sounds like the Loving Spoonful trying to rock out an early Beatles number (Listen to that ending, with the bass climbing up). It’s one of those times where someone trying to create an intentional rip-off of a particular thing ends up, accidentally, creating one of the best examples of it. If more 1960s rock sounded like this, I’d like more 1960s rock.
This Is What 38 Feels Like
My birthday gifts to myself: Catching up on deadlines (I think? This is where I discover there’s something that’s slipped through the cracks) and stopping for the weekend. Seriously; I have been working on weekends for the last few weeks, and that’s just meant that I’ve been working seven days a week for varying amounts of time. That is, as the kids say, bananas and I’m taking happy advantage of the chance to, you know, relax over the next couple of days.
We’ll see how long it is until I get bored.
Oh, and I’m also going to shave finally, and maybe buy myself a book to read on my Kindle or something, too. That’s not too ridiculous, right…?
(To everyone who sent me birthday wishes on Facebook or Twitter: Thank you very, very much. I’m genuinely kind of humbled by them all.)
366 Songs 279: Another Day
I don’t know what it says about me that I woke up, on my birthday, with this song in my head:
The Rutles are, of course, the parody band that managed to somehow be so good that you can listen to their songs as songs and not jokes. Sure, there are some funny lyrics in here – “You’re so pusillanimous, oh yeah” isn’t something that many pop songs would try to work in, let’s be honest (Here’s what pusillanimous means, by the way) – but it all works as a song; the melody is wonderful, and it’s amazingly catchy. Neil Innes, who wrote all of the songs for both Rutles albums, really was a heavily underrated musical genius.
The song is, according to the Rutles’ fake chronology, something that belongs in the White Album era, and yet it’s arguably more durable than a lot of Paul McCartney’s contributions of that time, whom it most closely resembles; somewhere, there’s a universe where the Rutles were real, revolutionized pop music and had a very different, and somewhat happier, ending than the Beatles. Or, at least, they had the good sense to do a farewell album with this song on it:
(The Rutles’ parody of the Beatles’ “Free As A Bird” was also better than the real thing, for what it’s worth:
Still over-produced – Maybe that was the point? – but at the heart of it, this is a better song than “Free As A Bird,” let’s be honest…)
366 Songs 278: Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
There’s something very playful about Bob Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”; it sounds like a parody of the blues, in some way, with such a traditional backing and basic riff playing under Dylan’s usual whining (Although, this is from Blonde On Blonde, one of “the” classic Dylan albums, so maybe it sounded more fresh and exciting back then), and there’s a fun bounce to the whole thing. You can imagine everyone having a good time playing it, even as Dylan complains about an unfaithful lover who apparently was very into her headwear. This, however, wasn’t the way that I discovered the song.
No, I found it through a cover by Beck from a couple years back that has an entirely different vibe to it:
This is… bouncy, yes, but it’s a more glam rock stomp, and performed in such a way that recalls Beck’s music from the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack, so much so that I wonder if it was recorded at the same time; definitely, the fuzzy bass and cymbal-happy drums feel very similar to, say, “Garbage Truck” or whatever, and the beeps and blops at 1:27 are, I’m sure, lifted from the Katayanagi Twins battle from the movie:
I far prefer the Beck version; it’s a cover, yes, and it’s as much as unfaithful rip-off of other people’s music as the original, and yet… I don’t know. It sounds more fun, more exciting to listen to, and more into the joke behind the whole thing, if that makes sense. Like his Sex Bob-Omb tracks from Pilgrim, it’s a song that makes me wish I was twenty-years younger and able to play guitar.