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The Invisible Man

Hey, remember I was talking about ownership of what you work on, and the fact that I get depressed when I think about my lack of ownership/control about what I wrote for io9 the other day?

It may be difficult to tell from that screenshot, but that’s what happens if you click on my name on any story I’ve written for that site now. Instead of a profile that lists all of my stories, you get a “Profile not found” page. I found that out yesterday, finding an old story of mine while Googling for information on something, and then clicking through to have what I expected would be a bittersweet moment of nostalgia.

There’s no malice behind it, I don’t think; the site has been updated and overhauled at least twice since I left, and it’s more than likely no-one bothered to update profiles for writers who weren’t with the company any more when such updates were being made. But still, it’s a funny/sad full stop to that whole period of my life, I guess, and an illustration of what I was talking about before.

At least you can still find me on Techland.

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366 Songs 195: Cheese and Onions

Aside from the fact that this is a perfect parody of the Beatles’ psychedelic period output – Seriously, the arrangement and production on this are ideal; if you took off the vocal, you could probably convince many that this was some unfinished Beatles track with George Martin working on it behind the scenes – what makes me love this song above all other Rutles tracks is the horrendous pun at the center of it: “Do I have to spell it out?” Neil Innes sings, before going on to spell out the words “cheese and onions.” That he ends that spelling bee recitation with “Oh no” (Making it finish “Oh En Eye Oh En Ess Oh No”) is just the icing on a particularly enjoyable cake.

In another world, Oasis would’ve grabbed Innes to produce one of their albums.

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366 Songs 194: Every Single Night

If ever a song made me want to give the artist a hug, this would be a strong contender for the that title. There’s such a vulnerability here, not only in the obvious moments (The fluttering “I just want to feel everything,” sung in such weightless tones, you worry that Fiona Apple is about to disappear before you), but the force behind the “Every single night is a fight with my brain,” with that last word drawn out with aggression and restrained anger. Add in the visualization of creativity as not only pregnancy (“These ideas of mine/Percolate the mind/Trickle down the spine/Swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze”) but a painful, difficult birth (“Brother, get back/Cause my breast’s gonna bust open/The rib is the shell and the heart is the yolk yoke/And I just made a meal for us both to choke on”), and there’re layers to pick through here, and all of this something to recognize with, empathize with and wish you could make it easier for her.

(That the instrumentation in the opening and closing so closely resembles something like a music box or child’s toy just underscores the intent of vulnerability; it’s sentimental and cheap, but it definitely works…)

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366 Songs 193: Werewolf

There’s something consistently alluring about the way in which Fiona Apple’s vocals throw themselves around in a similar way to her lyrics. Listen to the swoop and the dive of her here, as she condemns a former lover and takes responsibility for her own culpability all at once (“I could liken you to a werewolf/The way you left me for dead/But I admit/That I provided a full moon”), or the sweep of her voice as she reaches “One thing leads to another…” and the note changes, weirdly comfortably as the piano drives beneath her. In many ways, this feels like the archetypal Apple song, smart, blunt, complex and just a little scattered. It’s honest, and yet disguised enough to keep the innocent unnamed. If only more confessional artists had such skill.

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“Authority Has Been Replaced By Authenticity”

Authority has been replaced by authenticity as the currency of social journalism. The key to engaging with a community is to seek out those closest to the story. They rarely have a title but are people of standing within a community. They are guides to the wisdom within their crowd and interpreters of nuance: if you are verifying video from Syria you don’t want a foreign policy wonk, you want someone who can distinguish between a Damascus and a Homs accent.

From here, by Storify’s Mark Little.

There’s definitely something to this, I think; the way that social media has changed journalists’ interactions with sources, and where they find sources. I’m not exactly a fan of the “LazyWeb” crowdsourcing of listicles (“Hey, Twitter! What are the Top 10 [Insert Subject Here]!” is something it always makes me mad to see out there, because it’s… well, lazy, but I know that I have found multiple sources via social media that would’ve eluded me otherwise, and different types of sources, too.

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366 Songs 192: Jubilee (Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around)

Easily my favorite track of the (rather impressive) new Bobby Womack album, “Jubilee” mixes an old-school spiritual vocal format with an especially inorganic backing – Part of me thought, at first, that this was definitely one of the Damon Albarn-produced tracks, because of the clear “cheap drum machine” aesthetic in the backing, but as we get the synth cymbals at the end, I’m not so sure – to create something that feels timeless and universal, bringing generations together with some kind of hymn to self-belief and humanity. Even if the structure of this was not so compelling, though, Womack’s voice would still stop me in my tracks. The man sounds incredible; this song does, too.

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366 Songs 191: The Real Thing

And here’s to reworking/detourning advertising jingles. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s Product Placement is a really enjoyable album, fucking around with found material created to sell you things and turning it into something that’s as much commentary on that as it is music in its own right. From that, “The Real Thing” is likely my favorite track; it’s actually one of the more straightforward mash-ups on the album, just two different versions of “It’s The Real Thing,” the most famous one by the New Seekers and the genuinely amazing Ivor Raymonde Orchestra one from the early 1970s. For the most part, the Raymonde Orchestra version carries the whole thing, and you can understand why when you listen to the original:

Seriously, how great is that? Cheesy, yes, but just awesome. Listen to that drum break at 2:16!

For completeness, here’re the New Seekers:

That has a charm in itself, doesn’t it…? With those ingredients, how could any musical cake fail to be delicious? Much tastier than Coke, that’s for sure.

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Reading The Tea Leaves For Real

I’ve recently decided that I should look into reading tea leaves. This isn’t a joke, as much as a passing thought; I’ve been drinking loose-leaf tea for months, and always have leaves left at the bottom of the cup, so I figure maybe the fates are trying to tell me something that I’ve been missing out on all this time. The Internet tells me that it’s called “tasseography,” or even more excitingly “tasseomancy,” and that seems like something I would happily claim as a part-time career. “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m a writer, but on the side I dabble in tasseomancy.”

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366 Songs 190: The Number Song

For some reason, I remember this being the soundtrack of the year of my Masters degree, or at the least the end thereof. I’m not sure if history actually agrees with me on that; I suspect it may have been released after that year of weirdness and discomfort was over, but I don’t want to ruin things with reality by checking. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… was a frustrating album for me, in large part because it didn’t have the ADD kineticism and intensity of this song all the way through – Although part of me wonders how listenable an album it would’ve been if it had – but this remains the one DJ Shadow track that will forever justify his entire career for me. I adore this track, with its single-minded purpose to make you want to shake your butt and the off-kilter way it goes around making sure that happens.

Also spectacular: Cut Chemist’s remix, which adds more old-school R&B (especially those horns):

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366 Songs 189: Once Around The Block

There’s something so appealing about the way that this song sounds so dated in every way aside from the lead vocal: The multi-tracked guitars sound like something from the 1970s, and the backing vocals sound like a Swingle Singers recording that never got released, but they work so well together it’s all forgiven. Add Damon Gough’s warm, lackadaisical vocal over the top, and what you have left is a sweet, somewhat sloppy, song that sounds like something you can’t quite remember, which is pretty much its best selling point.