In most cases, you suggested a band (which to be fair is what I asked for), so I picked the song to listen to by the highly scientific expedient of using the first video for each band that has an embeddable youtube link.  (When possible, I tried to pick something with an actual music video rather than a fan dub.)  If you suggested a specific song, though, I listened to that one.

N.B.  This post doesn’t follow our general policies on clean language and adult situations, which is why the rest of it is behind the cut. Only appropriate for a rock n’ roll piece, I guess.

1) The Vaccines:  Post Breakup Sex

(recommended by Babybiceps)

•  Once upon a time, a band called The Strokes appropriated a sound and approach to music from The Cure, and skunged it up a little bit into something that, for a while, at least, in 2001, seemed vital and new.  The Vaccines basically seem to have just de-skunged it right back into being The Cure, except without all that charmingly idiotic naivete that makes The Cure worth getting into in the first place.

•  I assumed that this song was going to be about post-breakup sex with your ex:  like, you broke up with him/her, ended up having coffee, and ended up screwing in a gazebo.  Instead, it’s essentially about rebound sex, which is a much less interesting topic.

•  WHERE IS THE MASHUP OF THIS SONG WITH BIRTHDAY SEX BY JEREMIH? WHERE? Because I would prefer to listen to that version.

•  On the plus side:  this is a really well crafted song.  The melody, the form, the arrangement, the couple of little self-consciously raw touches (like that awkward “Ah-aaah” bit at the end of the bridge) are all solidly satisfying. It sounds like what a song’s supposed to sound like, and if that means it never quite surprises you, well, there’s worse things. I will be filing these guys together with Oasis, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, and Cole Porter in the great Spotify playlist of my mind. And that’s not an insult, by any means.

2) The Joy Formidable:  Cradle

(recommended by Babybiceps)

•  So someone apparently read my crossover fanfic where Veronica Mars is Draco Malfoy’s bratty little sister and made it into a rock band.  And that’s fine. (I am basing this characterization entirely on her haircut and outfit, which, to be fair, is all I’ve got to work with.)

•  The visual gimmick of this video is pretty clearly supposed to be that Post-Punk Malfoy Mars over there is on a teeter totter with all the various other people, and that’s fine.  But it’s sort of fun to try to imagine what else might be going on.  Are they all posting on horses? Jumping on a trampoline? Nodding really, really enthusiastically?

•  I liked this a whole hell of a lot, truth be told, but I think about %90 of my enjoyment is coming from the lead singer’s voice.  The guitar solos and whatnot were totally fine, and I actually quite like the ethereal little “ooweeoo” vocals, but the song almost lost me whenever she stopped singing.  Not a great sign for my future enjoyment of a band — I find that typically a really great voice can get me to like just about exactly one album all on its own, but after that it’s diminishing returns.

•  On the plus side:  in this song, at least, her voice sounds awesome.  It’s partially a function of how she’s recorded, I think — is there an chorus effect of some kind, there, or an overdub? And partially a function of the difference between the extreme presence and brittleness of her voice, and the extreme distance and suppleness of the backing vocals.  But mostly it has to do with the way her voice falls away from the pitch after hitting it, which turns a song that only has three notes in it, properly speaking, into something complex and sonically interesting.  Autotune has its place in music, but let it be said, pitch correction of ANY kind would squash this song like a bug.

• I have my reservations, but I will be listening to at least another song or two by these people.  Here’s hoping they stick the landing.

3) The Black Keys:  Tighten Up

(Recommended by Babybiceps)

•  Good things about the video:  I like that the Glasses family carries donuts around in their pockets to use as friendship tokens.  Little kids flipping eachother off and shouting (silently) “Mother FUCKER,” and going all feral and murderous is an old joke, but one I’m not tired of yet.  The way that the reveal of the adult woman is keyed to the awesome breakdown in the song is just brilliant, and a good example of how a video can bring out the best in a song.

•  Bad things about the video:  Women being sly and conniving and playing dudes off against each other is an old joke that I am, to be honest, pretty tired of.    Here as in the video for Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You,” the director seems to think it’s cuter if you do it with kids.  But it’s not.

•  Good things about the song:  Everything.  This totally goes into the rotation.  So funky, so crisp, so soulful!  And that breakdown, as already noted, is pretty choice. (I’ve got rather a soft spot for songs that change, then end, rather than going back to the A section.)

•  What’s bad about the song:  Alas, it gets disqualified on a technicality.  I can’t count this as “getting excited about a new rock band,” because based on the evidence of this song, The Black Keys are a soul band, and I get excited by that kind of music all the time.  Imagine Otis Redding or Sam Cooke singing this, and ask yourself whether you’d have to change anything else about the arrangement. Listen to this and Gnarls’ Barkley’s “Crazy” back to back, and tell me there’s a generic distinction to be made between them.  Still, that was a treat to hear, and it’s nice to know about these guys.

4) McLusky:  Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues (There’s the adult situation.  The song-picking algorithm, she is a harsh mistress).

(Recommended by Babybiceps)

•  Interesting title, to say the least.  I find myself wondering what “Lightsabre Cocksucking” is.  Does one… does one put the lightsaber in one’s mouth?  That seems extremely unsafe.  Or does “cocksucking” modify blues, so that it’s really just an intense case of the lightsabre blues?

• More to the point, I’m always intrigued by songs that reference a form of music that they aren’t.  This isn’t a blues song, it need hardly be said.  So what’s the word doing there?  Off the top of my head, it feels like a reference to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”  And yeah, there’s a sense in which hardcore (or this band, at least) can be seen as a successor to Bob Dylan.  One particular aspect of Dylan’s style that is, developed as far as it could possibly go, and all else discarded.

•  So, as the singer for Joy Formidable is to pitch, this guy’s voice is to rhythm.  It’s not… quite… there, in a way that’s probably actually super hard to pull off.  It’s quite wonderful, really. But again, I worry about this band’s ability to hold my attention over the long run.  Can McClusky make a song that isn’t basically this song wearing a fake moustache? I will have to find out.  And the trouble is, if there other songs really are quite different, it’ll probably feel like they sold out and went corporate.  You’re damned if you do…

•  I tried listening to two other Mclusky songs, “Falco vs. the Young Canoeist” and “Undress for Success.”  My fears were justified.  The first one sounds too much like “Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues” (although this may be a function of me not knowing enough about hardcore to recognize all the subtle expressive differences.) The second one seems so disappointingly normal alongside the other two.

And that’s it for this installment.  In a couple of weeks, I’ll pick up with Timothy Swann’s suggestions.  Going into this, I set an artificial limit for myself of only listening to one song by each band before writing the post, with the idea that if I found myself unable to stop myself from breaking the rule, it would mean that I had found a band that I was really into.  Mclusky was interesting enough that I broke the rule, and although I didn’t like what I found enough to say “done and done, resolution fulfilled,” I feel like I’m halfway there.

Related Posts

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• Episode 131: Went to Elementary School and is Partially Deaf
• Episode 27: Pwnerthinking It
• Episode 13: Crossing Sections off the Map
• The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs

Is it Katy Perry herself, drawing on her intensity of emotion to speak truth to her own condition? Is it the social psychology of gender, speaking from a deep rooting in the minds of many? Is it an echo of Paul Simon? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? Russell Brand?

"I will be part of your interpretive discourse. Always."

Roland Barthes begins his seminal essay “The Death of the Author” with a similar question related to Balzac*. His answer to his own question seems extendable to the literature of celebrity, from the accounts of their thoughts an actions, to their own statements in the public sphere, to the murmuring curiae across all professional, amateur and social media, to the very names and identities that appear in our lunchtime conversations:

We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

That is to say, nobody is really “saying” that Katy Perry unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter. We are reading it, but once it is down in text (or really, any medium that is subject to interpretation by a reader), it is no longer attributable to an active, talking person capable of will and intent. Because she is not alive in this context, “Katy Perry” is dead, as are any individuals who might claim to speak for her or about her with authority. Their intentionality no longer exists with regards to this story, or in the collected discourse that makes up the myths, tales, gossip and songs around the literature of Katy Perry’s celebrity existence.

(Russell Brand the celebrity is also dead in this same way, but because of social forces and also because he is somewhat less well-liked, more controversial, and more prone to self-destruction, this is somehow less shocking.)

Dammit Jim, I’m a Doctor, Not Perez Hilton.

Bones McCoy needs a Zooey Deschanel-esque portmanteau, a la "adorkable", that combines "spacefaring doctor from the future" with "homespun country wisdom" -- and also "grizzled."

Announcing the deaths of things people like is one of the ways philosophers and theorists socially alienate their involuntary readers — so to step away from Barthes’s postmortem, let’s talk about what it means — in the act of literary interpretation — for identities to shuffle off their mortal coils, for intention lose its claim on meaning, and for the writer to be “dead.” The death of the author is to one degree or another taken for granted in the trendy study of literature these days, and at risk of making the jump from good blogger to bad graduate student,  it seems just as clearly so in the interpretation of celebrities.

After all, the interpretation of celebrities and the argument over the meaning of celebrities are a great deal more popular and enthusiastically practiced these days than up-close-and-personal encounters with Balzac*.

But let’s be clear what we’re talking about, because if we don’t, we end up feeling sheepish next to the Wolfenstein 3D enthusiast in the “Neitzsche is dead… God” t-shirt.

We are not saying Katy Perry does not exist as a corporeal being — that she no longer walks, breathes, lives, loves or feels in her brain, a distinct object with its own phenomenology. No, Katy Perry’s physical existence can be experimentally confirmed (though only the very creepiest of logical positivists would make the attempt).

We are not saying Katy Perry deserves no credit for her work, that she is unpraiseworthy, or that she shouldn’t necessarily be paid royalties for “California Gurls,” so long as we live in a society where people possess intellectual property rights — and/or the authority to extend such rights — for which currency is exchanged.

We are not saying that she is irrelevant, or that what she does is meaningless or unimportant.

We are saying that, with regards to the literature that is Katy Perry — and specifically interpreting and attempting to discern the meaning of that literature — Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.

More importantly, since Katy Perry isn’t generally in the business of this anyway, nobody else can step forward and claim to derive that same authority from knowing her intentions.

“I know what this article means, because I am Katy Perry’s number one fan. I know her heart, and I know how she feels about Russell. This is what it really means,” is nonsense.

In saying Katy Perry is dead, we say she isn’t alive and present as a celebrity exerting her intentions through celebrity gossip about her. The many influences on it and the maelstrom of ideas, preconceptions, echoes, references, marketing meetings, Facebook wall posts, and everything else associated with it, once they are literature, aren’t really derived from the willful acts of a celebrity anymore. There are too many intermediaries between the writing and the reading of a text (or, again, any interpretive medium) for the reader to allow for this sort of authorial authority to preside over meaning and interpretation.

The Walking Tall Tale

But what do I mean when I say “the literature that is Katy Perry?” Katy Perry is a person, right? And all this talk we go about doing with regards to her being a person doesn’t make her any less a person, does it? Let’s look back to Barthes:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”

Definitions of literature in literary theory, whether relative or absolute, tend to flock around this general area — literature is information that doesn’t have to correspond to reality, but can have an effect, whether that is beauty, truth, tension, sublimity or any of the other familiar or exotic goals of literary pursuits, without needing to do anything else.

Poetry is a form of literature. Drama is a form of literature. Film is a form of literature. I’m positing, and I can’t reasonably be the first person posit it, but that doesn’t matter, (especially in discussions of the death of the author — because, after all, as you read this, I am not present in or in relation to it as a living being either) that celebrities themselves have these days so far transcended a relationship with reality that they have become a form of literature themselves, supported by the discourse around them across media and platforms.

Why do these people have a show? They’re just famous for being famous.”

- Every curmudgeon who thinks he is clever but is really just having a bad day, including me sometimes, about the Kardashians

By “the literature that is Katy Perry” I mean that Katy Perry as we read and interpret her — the body of information that we encounter that has this name associated with it in which we look for a certain meaning and/or significance — is far less a corresponding description of a person than a literature in itself, endeavoring in these same familiar and exotic literary pursuits.

Dasein In the Membrane (A.K.A. I Don’t Know If This Rhymes, Because Nobody Uses This Word In Actual Conversation)

As I’ve noted in previous articles and podcasts, I find the term Dasein, drawn from Martin Heidegger’s Being And Time, useful in discussions like this, because it doesn’t bog us down in scientific argument over the qualities of a person or of cognition, or of the functionality of the mind, and concerns us primarily with the thing capable of  experiencing “stuff.” Dasein refers to an entity which, “in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being.”

Sein und Zug

People who are alive in the world are Daseins. Philosophical zombies, theoretical beings who are materially indistinguishable from people but who do not possess subjective consciousness (which I find to be a problematic term because it sidetracks us into discussions of emergent properties and information theory), are not Daseins. Trains are not Daseins. Thomas the Tank Engine, were he to be real, would be a Dasein.

Daseins can be authentic or inauthentic. It is generally believed to be a good thing to be authentic as you’re going about the business of being-in-the-world. Celebrities, especially heavily managed and choreographed ones, with teams of publicists, stunt marriages, scripted interviews, meaningless but lucrative endorsements of useless products, and other such Kardashian endeavors, are often seen as inauthentic. They are fake, phoney, and emotionally detached, their pictures are heavily Photoshopped, their bodies are virtually cybernetic — the litany is familiar; they are not being honest.

I would take it one step further and say that when you see something like this:

"You gotta have blue hair." - Strong Bad

You’re not looking at an image of an inauthentic Dasein — Hell, you’re not even looking at a person anymore. There is so much interference and cultural interplay in this information that you return to an act of reading as described by Barthes, divorced from the act of writing. You are looking at something “narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself” — you are looking at literature with a dead or absent intentionality.

Why Arguments About Objectification So Rarely Actually Go Anywhere Productive

Now, this of course, brings up a major problem. The idea of the death of the author runs afoul of complaints about objectification.

And as much as it may sidetrack me, I have to mention it here, because after posting that picture people are going to yell at me about it anyway in the comments (except I’m not here! And my intentionality does not exist in this work as you read it, ‘natch!).

The idea behind objectification is that by understanding a representation of a person as less than a fully realized person, we instrumentalize or use that person, which, in a Kantian sense, is a crime against the dignity they ought to be afforded as rational beings, and in a Marxist sense, sets up a dialectic that subjugates and alienates them, most likely for the economic benefit of your own class of people.

However, if you want to look at an image of Katy Perry (or even a darker, sparser corner of the Internet where people actually look at Balzac*) and employ judgement in relation to the “thing-in-itself” through any number of rational formulations, or if you are seeking to lift up Katy Perry from her subaltern place in socioeconomic discourse, you will be sorely disappointed, because you are knocking on the door of an empty house. And, no I’m not saying she’s dumb (I’m sure she’s very smart).

Katy Perry isn’t actually there. That image is a literature of Katy Perry, and if you’re looking at it, the intentioned Katy Perry with whom you are seeking to interact with is already dead.

So, arguments about objectification often run into this problem, as for political reasons people continue to will that literature be capable of producing its causal agent for redressing, redefinition or redemption, when that agent is long absent and even asking for it is an incoherent act.

This of course does not mean objectification is good, or that protesting it is bad — but just that most of the time it is quite difficult to do anything about it, except to try not to allow systematic trends in its use to create deleterious effect on people’s standards of living.

The important thing to remember here is that these problems are intrinsic to the act of interpretation and finding meaning. One of the ways to try to get out of this is to not try to find the meaning in things, but to engage in art in different ways. That in the rest will have to be covered in another article.

Katy Perry Is A Commercial Enterprise

You may notice this advertisement exemplifies pretty much everything I've been saying. You might.

You might have stopped earlier in this article when I said something that was clearly and knowingly incorrect, or at least incomplete:

Katy Perry herself cannot step forward and claim authority as the author, or as the celebrity. When we are sitting there looking at the Huffington Post article about her unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter, she cannot point to it and show us where she is in it, or persuasively claim to know what it means, because dammit, she is Katy Perry.”

-Me, “Earlier In This Article (We were all so young then. Look at the hair I had! Crazy!)”

If you’re paying attention, you might have stopped here and said of course she can! Dammit, she is Katy Perry!

And indeed you would be right — Katy Perry could indeed step forward and make an authoritative statement about what the article saying she unfollowed Russell Brand on Twitter actually means, and she’d have the power to back it up. She could have her lawyers send a cease and desist. If you did the wrong thing with her celebrity, of which she did not approve, she could sic Chris Dodd on you. I don’t get the sense that Katy Perry is mean-spirited enough to do these things, but people who would lay some claim to her celebrity intentionality would.

Regardless, let’s say she did do it, would she be doing it because she is correct?

Far from a refutation of the death of the author, this power is one of the big reasons why the essay “The Death of the Author” exists — because this sort of act is not an act of interpretation, but an act of intellectual tyrrany — that if you aspire at all to freedom or dignity in the human mind, you should find it abhorrent that in capitalist societies and other similar societies people of wealth, power and influence get to step forward and claim to everybody else what something means just by virtue of them being the “author,” which is of course cognate with the word “authority.”

If celebrities are the modern-day folk heroes — the lenses through which people see their own lives, craft their relationships, and plan their own rituals, it the literature of their day-to-day is in celebrity gossip — what right that derives from truth rather than power does Katy Perry or one of Katy Perry’s lawyers have to come along to a random dude or lady reading People magazine at the checkout line and insist on what it means?

It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author… The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author…”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

If celebrity is literature, and I think it is, and the act of interpreting celebrity is confined to the reader of celebrity, which I think it is, and if all the confounding factors make intentionality in the creation of celebrity untransferable, which I think they do, then for an interested party (including the Dasein associated with celebrity of the same name) assert authority over readings of the literature of that celebrity by virtue of authorship or celebrity itself is an act of economic and social power — not interpretive value, reading, or meaning.

It’s bullying. It’s not nice. And I’m gonna tell Roland Barthes**, so nyah.

Let’s finish with something from the end of Roland’s essay, for symmetry:

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

- Roland Barthes, Ibid.

**- Roland Barthes is dead. Unfortunately. PBUH

*- Always pun intended. Always.

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“Rock of Ages” is pretty much the platonic ideal of an 80s period jukebox musical. It’s the story of a kid who wants to play hair metal on the Sunset Strip. There’s a band on stage, and they rock really hard. The costumes and music perfectly evoke the aesthetics and mood of the time period.

So my question is, what would the ideal 90s period jukebox musical be like? I’d argue that the 90s don’t have as clear of an identity as the 60s, 70s, or 80s. Would it be set in Seattle and feature grunge music? Or what about LA with early 90s hip hop? It could even use the LA riots as a current events backdrop (which Rock of Ages lacked) and would have the side benefit of allowing for Asian characters (I’ve always seen myself as playing a gun-toting Korean grocery store owner in my Broadway debut).

The latter also raises the question: could a hip-hop musical ever make it to the Great White (ahem) Way?

Perich
I would mortgage my future to finance a musical about the golden age of hip-hop, so long as it was set in Brooklyn.

Lee
Well, we can have the best of both worlds. Make it an East Coast vs. West Coast story with thinly fictionalized versions of Biggie and Tupac.

Forget mortgaging your future. I bet something like this could catch fire on Kickstarter.

Belinkie
It would obviously have to be bi-coastal. You might even have to split the stage in two visually, with Cali on the left and New York on the right. Atlanta could have a balcony, but honestly I don’t know how heavily the south or midwest would feature in a golden age hip hop musical.

Perich
Too late! Future mortgaged!

Also, which story are we telling—a rags-to-riches success story about a rapper rising to the top (which would have to be one coast) or a West Side Story tale of two studios, both alike in dignity (which could feature both coasts)?

Fenzel
You can represent the South with a James Brown figure who appears to one of the characters as he wrestles with his place in the historical legacy of music. You do a medley where a soul/funk song is first played straight, then sampled and incorporated into the corresponding hip-hop song.

Belinkie
Okay, so it’s about two friends that grow up in the Brooklyn projects together. They grow up performing “Rapper’s Delight” on a street corner, free-styling to impress the girls. When one of them is twelve, he gets moved out to Compton. Maybe an aunt adopts him after his mom gets shot. Then they meet again at a rap battle ten years later. They want to resume their friendship, but there is tremendous pressure from their entourages to start a rivalry, show some east/west coast pride. Maybe they each have a hotheaded sidekick/protege who is a little more aggressive and does the violent dis songs.

Oh, and there’s a girl who grew up with them who is now an exec at Atlantic Records. She’s the love interest, and also the “Hey, maybe hip hop could go mainstream!” person. And cast a famous white comedian as some shady promoter type.

Personally, I’d shy away from the “they both are shot” ending, and also the “let’s put aside our differences and record an album together” ending. Maybe we can stuff the girl in a fridge to get the boys to stop feuding.

Fenzel
You can have the East Coast and West Coast rappers at a standoff, guns drawn—and they fire at each other nine times. At the last second, a Midwestern rapper leaps between them, taking all nine bullets and falling in a crumpled heap on the ground, which convinces the two other rappers that violence isn’t the answer as they see its terrible toll.

The Midwestern rapper then gets up, dusts himself off, and sings “Candy Shop.”

Sheely
Matt’s description of the female character reminds me a bit of the song “I used to love H.E.R.” by Common.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C99iG4HoO1c

In the song he personifies hip hop as a woman and uses her story to tell the story of the evolution of the genre. In the musical, this could be played out literally in this character, tracking the changes in hip-hop and changing with the times, kind of like the Jenny character in Forrest Gump.

Instead of a promoter, the shady white dude could be a record company A&R, the position charged with identifying and signing new talent. I’d very much like if he happened to be a mountain climber who played the electric guitar.

Perich
All right, Belinkie has convinced me the bi-coastal thing can work. (Blessed are those who hadn’t yet seen Belinkie’s response and still believed) Now what’s the tracklist?

Belinkie
Making good progress here. So of our two main characters, the one whose mom was shot and moved out west has a harder, gangsta style. (He’s the one who would do “Gangster’s Paradise.”) Let’s call this guy Otis. To balance him out, his sidekick is a more mellow, fun-loving, Snoop Dogg stand in. He’ll do “Gin and Juice,” obviously, and some of the other goofier rap classics. Maybe he does “The Humpty Dance” trying to mock the comic relief rap promoter.

Meanwhile, his east coast friend is more of a “socially-conscious” Talib Kwali/Eric B/Mos Def type rapper. He’s got better rhymes and better flow, but he’s not as commercial. Maybe he feels pressure to sell out a little once hip hop starts to take off. That’s his character’s dilemma—do you rap what the public wants to hear, or what’s in your heart?

And I realize that “Gangster’s Paradise” is by no means a “hard, gangsta” song. But it would definitely be in the musical, right?

Perich
Whereas the West Coast protagonist’s dilemma is: do I keep rapping what’s true to me (violence on the streets, anger at the cops) even as it inspires younger generations to imitate a gangster lifestyle that puts them in danger?

Sheely
I’d love to have the female character do Lauryn Hill’s “That Thing”, as I can see it working well as a ensemble number (the lead girl warning the others to “watch out”).

When the two characters are about to reunite, I’d love to have “Going Back to Cali” and/or “California Love”, possibly in medley?

When the character moves from Brooklyn to LA, could “Straight Outta Compton” be his introduction to his new environment? The only issue with that song is that many of the lyrics and references are very specific to the members of N.W.A.

Stokes
There are at least three related ways that musical lyrics and rap lyrics are not alike.

First, musical theater songs usually have a really tight focus: they are ABOUT something. It can be something stupid and irrelevant to the plot, but the songs don’t usually run off on tangents. Rap songs are usually all about tangents. The Rick Ross song “Hustlin’” is, uh, unusually specific in its focus, but it’s still all over the place by Rogers and Hammerstein standards. Put a line like “I know Pablo/ Noriega/ The real Noriega/ He owe me a hundred favors” into a musical, and what can you do with it? Either you let it hang there feeling out of place, or you introduce Noriega as a character, and establish the relationship he has with the Rick Ross character, and see some of those favors called in.

And it wouldn’t stop there. Where’s Jose Canseco? Where’s the guy serving a hundred lives? Where’s the lil’ Mama who claims to be twenty-two? That’s all in one song, remember. Take any two songs, and the problem will escalate. And when guest rappers start dropping by contributing unrelated guest verses… (Granted, you could probably do an interesting jukebox rap musical set up along the lines of Company if you make Ludacris the main character and limit yourself to songs where he does a guest verse.)

Second: Within one show, you typically only get one or two songs about any given topic. One song about working through grief, or clambakes, or whaling, or June busting out all over is fine. Two is pushing it. The only exception is love songs — these go back and forth all night — but even then you only get one or two for each of the couples, and the songs end up being about their relationship, or even about a specific moment in their relationship, rather than about relationships in general.

But rap songs, especially gangster rap songs, focus on the same limited territory: you show off not by finding new things to talk about but by finding a new and better way to say the same things. West Side Story has exactly one song in it that is about how awesome the protagonist’s crew is (“When You’re a Jet”), and exactly one song about how tough life on the streets is (“Gee Officer Krupke,” kind of). It would not work at all if every song were about those issues. But a rap album that didn’t have that kind of thematic unity would feel kind of sloppy. We wouldn’t call Illmatic one of the great artistic statements of the medium if it had a random song where Nas’ girlfriend talks about how much fun it is to put on pretty dresses.

Third, some songs in musicals are just distractions from the narrative, and rap would work fine for that. But there are also a lot of very important songs that do relate to the narrative, and these function by stretching out and intensifying a particular moment. (Sticking with West Side Story for a minute, the “Tonight” montage is probably the best example of this.) Rap doesn’t work for this purpose at all. When rap songs have a narrative element, they accelerate time rather than slowing it down. In “Gimme the Loot,” it only takes a couple of minutes for Biggie to 1) get out of jail, 2) meet up with his old accomplice, 3) decide to go out robbing, 4) reminisce with his buddy about what incredible hardasses they are, 5) find two victims, 6) rob them, 7) get noticed by the cops, and 8) shoot up said cops. A musical would need two songs at absolute minimum to get through that territory (1-4 and 5-8), and could squeeze eight or even nine songs out of it without breaking a sweat.

Belinkie
So at the very end, the two rival crews are poised for a climactic shootout, on the very corner where Otis and Wrather (I’ll go ahead and call him Wrather for fun) learned to rap as children. They stare each other down, knowing the insanity of what they’re doing, but unable to see a way out. There’s no common ground. Then, all of a sudden, a beautiful woman crosses the stage, oblivious to the standoff. For ten seconds, everyone just watches her pass.

Finally, one of them speaks. “Oh. My. God,” says Otis. “Look at her butt.”

“It is so big,” says Wrather, nodding. Then, he smiles a sly smile. “She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends.”

Otis glares at him and tightens his grip on the pistol, wondering whether to take it as an insult or not.

Suddenly, he cracks up. The tension is broken, and everybody laughs.

“But, you know,” Otis chuckles, “who understand those rap guys anyway…”

Cue the bassline.

OK, guys, I think we’re ready. What do we call this? “Dropping English?” “Smoking Aluminum?”

Think we’re onto the next Broadway hit? Want to improve the plot or track list? Is Stokes right after all? Sound off on the great hip-hop musical in the comments.

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Unless you’re Rebecca Black, the accidental YouTube sensation, and the number one entry in 2011′s Google Zeitgeist:

I’m sorry. Did you forget that Rebecca Black and “Friday” happened? Let me remind you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0

In a way, I suppose that the dilemma of choosing between the front seat and the back seat is indicative of the great policy split of our era between advocates of government intervention in macroeconomics and advocates of a more laissez-faire approach. In a way.

Keynes vs. Hayek: which seat should I taaaake?

But in all seriousness, it’s clear that, once again, the Google Zeitgeist is anything but a zeitgeist. It doesn’t represent the true spirit of the times; it just represents what people search for on the internet (celebrities and technology news, plus a horrific disaster thrown in for good measure). But it does represent something significant, given the ubiquity of Google and its position as the first stop for many people on their way to other parts of the internet. So with that in mind, let’s use this as an opportunity to revisit the Rebecca Black “Friday” phenomenon, several months after its peak and likely at one of her last moments of relevance in pop culture.

For those of you who lost interest in Rebecca Black several months ago, here’s a quick update on her post- “Friday” adventures. She’s released two other songs, appeared in the Katy Perry music video “Last Friday Night,” and even scored an endorsement deal with Australian telecom company Telstra. That’s the good news. The bad news is that her subsequent singles have seen diminishing success, much less anything close to the notoriety achieved by “Friday,”  and worst of all, she was bullied out of her middle school.

She was the most searched for person on the entire Internet, she appeared in a Katy Perry music video, and yet, she experienced the ultimate alienation that any young person could face: exile from her school and her peer group. In the same year. She went from complete anonymity to near-total ubiquity to the ash heap of history (or at least to its outer edges). In the same year.

It would be too easy to ascribe this extreme volatility to the fast-paced, zero attention span information age. That certainly is at play here, but what’s far more interesting (not to mention relevant to the ostensible topic of this article, Google Zeitgeist), is the accidental, serendipitous nature of the whole affair. Presumably, nobody sat down with a master plan to create a song/music video so terrible and yet so appealing that it would catapult a nondescript middle-school girl into worldwide fame and the top of a list of most popular searches on Google for the year. Technology allowed this accident to happen, but it’s still an accident. An exception that proves the rule that, in spite of oddball viral fads that produce huge sensations from the grassroots, our world views are still dominated by hegemonic influencers and tastemakers, just as they were in the days before the Internet.

Look at the rest of the top ten list.

Six of the top ten are essentially the products of huge corporate publicity machines: a major label musician (Adele), mass market technology products (Battlefield 3, Google+, the iPhone, and the iPad), and the man who ran one of the best corporate publicity machines of all time. The other three are essentially current event items: Ryan Dunn, the Jackass star who was killed in a car accident, Casey Anthony, the subject of a sensational trial, and the aforementioned Japanese tsunami/nuclear disaster.

Rebecca Black may avoid the seemingly inevitable fate of obscurity and go on to a long and successful career as a musician. But assuming she doesn’t, she will remain an exception, an accident, rather than a truly zeitgeist-defining moment.

Which was a very long way of saying what we knew along: that the Google Zeitgeist isn’t a zeitgeist at all.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSFLZ-MzIhM

And rightfully so. It’s a fantastic song. It’s happy and heartwarming, and even a little poignant at times.

But it starts with an odd assumption: that there are already a lot of songs about rainbows, and that we should be familiar with them, in order to ponder the question:

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows/and what’s on the other side?”

Wait. Hold on. Just how many songs are there about rainbows?

Well, there’s “Over the Rainbow,” the classic song from The Wizard of Oz and a staple of the American songbook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HRa4X07jdE

And then there’s… there’s… well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t name any songs about rainbows off the top of my head other than “The Rainbow Connection” and “Over the Rainbow.”

I started to get suspicious. I wanted hard, quantitative data on songs about rainbows. Fortunately, I came across a huge dataset of songs on the Billboard charts from 1890-2011.* With over 38,000 entries, this isn’t the entirety of pop music output during that time, but it’s certainly a highly representative one. Using frequency of words in song titles as a proxy for songs being “about” something, I crunched the numbers…

…and found that there are only 42 (Billboard-charting) songs about rainbows.**

It gets even more disappointing when you compare that to the frequency of other topics of Billboard-charting songs: there are over 3,300 songs about “love,” for example. There are even more songs about “sex” and its variants, e.g. “sexy” (50) than “rainbow(s).”

Click for larger version

That prompted me to worry that there may be more songs about “fuck” and its variants than rainbows, too, but that turned out not to be the case. Yet.

No snarky caption. This is just a great piece of album art.

So it turns out that there aren’t many songs about rainbows after all, much less those that also explore “what’s on the other side.” This may cause us to entirely rethink the meaning of “The Rainbow Connection.” When Kermit claims to hear voices, perhaps it’s not “the sweet sound that called the young sailors.” Perhaps it’s the same delusional thoughts that led him to believe that there are a lot of songs about rainbows, when in fact, there are only 42.

Or perhaps Kermit is tapping into musical traditions outside of the pop music that appears on the Billboard Charts. The lyrics of French medieval ballads could be full of references to rainbows.

Actually, there’s a far more mundane explanation for this. It’s not that there are so many unique, individual songs about rainbows out there. It’s that “Over the Rainbow” is so insanely popular and is performed or played so frequently that we get the impression that there are in fact “so many songs about rainbows.”

This is the most likely explanation, albeit less interesting than the mental illness interpretation. Sound off in the comments if you have any alternative theories!

–

*The linked article reports on the genesis of the “Whitburn Project,” which was back in 2008. Others have since updated the dataset with more recent songs; hence, the 1890-2011 timeframe. You can download that updated dataset here if you’re curious.

**There are actually less than 42 distinct songs about Rainbows in the dataset. There are only 27 unique song titles; the 42 count includes multiple versions of the same song title (7 for “Over the Rainbow” and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” each). I stuck with 42 since the every other data point is for song instances instead of unique song titles.

Update: Here’s the full list of 42 songs about rainbows. Any of these sound familiar?

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But this summer, Michael Bay treated us to a monster blockbuster that was just begging for the Dark Side treatment. It was, of course, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Even before it was released, I was thinking, “Man, I cannot wait to sync this movie up with Pink Floyd.” And that’s pretty much the only way I recommend watching it, by the way. It’s a total headachy mess, and this is coming from someone who loves Speed Racer.

However, replace the bombastic score with a little Roger Waters, and the whole thing becomes much more entertaining…

I followed the same procedure as the traditional Wizard of Oz syncing, starting the album the moment the studio logo appeared. Let me run you through the highlights.

01:00 – The movie begins with a scene on Cybertron, as an Autobot ship tries to make a desperate escape. As it screeches away from its attackers, the opening track of Dark Side reaches its screechy conclusion and segues into “Breathe.”

04:00 – Now we get a montage of NASA’s first manned moon mission. This syncs almost perfectly with the beginning of “On the Run.” According to Wikipedia, “it is an instrumental piece that deals with the pressures of travel.” Beyond this coincidence, the synth works nicely with all the 1960s tech.

05:45 – The song reaches its climax just as the movie gets to the big reveal: a giant Autobot ship is hidden on the dark side of the moon. I swear I didn’t add the creepy sci-fi sound effects.

08:15 – The camera zooms through the derelict spacecraft, revealing Sentinel Prime. Almost perfectly in time with the first bass note of “Time,” Sentinel’s eye lights up. More sinister bass notes play as the movie’s title unfolds itself.

20:20 – The song “Money” begins as Shia LeBoeuf goes on a series of job interviews. As he attempts to charm a series of skeptical business types, David Gilmour scowls, “Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit.”

40:50 – As the album’s final track begins, a mysterious man confronts Shia LeBoeuf with a secret about the dark side of the moon. “It is code Pink, as in Floyd. Dark Side! Why do you think no one’s been up there since 1972?” That’s the year that most of the album was recorded, by the way.

42:15 – Dark Side‘s final chord rings out as we see a shot of a book called Moonfire. Coincidence? Well yes, coincidence. But still fun!

I have one more “Dark Side of Everything” to share sometime. I’ll give you a hint: it involves Meryl Streep dancing almost perfectly in time with the song “Brain Damage.”

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Happy Spinal Tap Day, everyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuzpsO4ErOQ

Share your thoughts on this seminal rocku-mockumentary in the comments.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8

(Note: although the zombie theme of this music video is begging for deconstruction, I don’t see it tying into the lyrics, so we’re “bracketing it” from this analysis. But feel free to pick it apart in the comments.)

It’s not a rock song–it’s dance pop through and through–and yet, the title is “Party Rock Anthem,” and there’s a prominent reference to the most rock of rock bands, Led Zeppelin.

Is this meant to be a thorough repudiation of “rock” music as it’s commonly known, or is it cleverly appropriating some of that spirit into a new context?

What does it all mean?

From the iTunes "Pop" section

Party rock is in the house tonight
Everybody just have a good time
And we gonna make you lose your mind
Everybody just have a good time

The song asserts in the opening chorus that “party rock is in the house tonight,” which immediately forces us to confront the tricky definition of “rock” as a music genre. I stated earlier with confidence that this song is clearly not “rock” and that it’s “dance pop,” and most of you would probably agree, but we need to ground ourselves in some common understanding of these labels.

Musically speaking, the simplest way to set “rock” against “pop” is instrumentation. “Rock” music is typically driven by the guitar and backed with acoustic drums and electric bass, while “pop” is more likely to rely on electronically generated sounds for its instrumentation. And although “rock” music has incorporated more electronic sounds over the years, the guitars are still very much front and center in the sound. Let’s use the iTunes top “rock” songs list as shortcut to illustrate this. Scan through the artists and listen to the previews. This is the sound of modern rock. Now do the same for the iTunes top “pop” songs list. Way more synth, way less guitars. So it’s no surprise that iTunes classifies LMFAO in the “pop” genre.

From the iTunes "Rock" section

OK. That was a long-winded way of establishing that musically, no one is going to accept this as “rock.” But what about the non-musical aspects of “rock”? Consider the following phrases:

“This rocks.”

“Let’s rock.”

“Rock out!”

“I’m rockin’ the new Amazon Kindle.”

“This party is rocking.”

These expressions of enthusiasm, energy, and power obviously have roots in the energetic aspects of rock music, but can be used to describe things that are, strictly speaking, non-musical. Hence LMFAO’s ability to channel “rock” in a non-rock song.

But here’s the problem. All of the examples above use “rock” in the verb form. A subject does the “rocking,” or is characterized by “rocking.” But in the song “Party Rock Anthem,” the word “rock” is used exclusively as a noun, as a thing that’s “in the house.” We’ve already established that this song isn’t “rock music,” so if that’s not “in the house,” then what is?

LMFAO has effectively created a new definition for the noun “rock.” ”Rock” is a state of mind, not a music genre. LMFAO is simply taking the evolution of the culture that grew up around “rock” music to its next logical step: divorcing it from its source music altogether.

Huh. I guess rock music really is dead.

But it’s not that LMFAO wants rock music to die, nor are they necessarily mocking it by calling a dance pop song a “Party Rock Anthem.” No, they’re just tapping into the benefits of rock culture without using any rock music because the larger music cultural context allows them to get away with this. “Rock” musicians are no longer the cultural titans that defined American popular music with their monster guitar solos and crunchy power chords. In a fractured “rock” landscape that includes everything from the Insane Clown Posse to Foster the People, no ”rock” hegemony exists to challenge a “Party Rock Anthem” that is not a rock song.

Led Zeppelin, playing rock with rock music.

But that rock hegemony used to exist. It was led by bands like Led Zeppelin, which LMFAO seems to be writing off in these lyrics:

We party rock yea!
That’s the crew that I’m repping
On the rise to the top
No led in our zeppelin

It’s clear that LMFAO considers themselves to be ambassadors of this new rock-less rock and are not ashamed of it (“that’s the crew that I’m repping”). It’s also clear that they see themselves, and presumably, their rock-less rock, ascending in popularity and achievement.

But their vehicle for ascendance is still a “zeppelin,” albeit a “led”-less one. We see in this a reflection of how LMFAO has appropriated of the cultural spirit of rock (zeppelin) without its musical and occasionally pretentious, moody thematic features (led). They clearly feel that they aren’t weighed down by this burden and are thus able to make rock-less rock music entirely on their own terms.

Conclusion

I guess I do see a little Monet in this...

LMFAO, a dance pop music duo, is boldly advancing its “party rock” music, one that is devoid of any musical aspects of rock but seems to be channeling the broader culture of rock. It’s easy to write this off as a careless misappropriation of one art form into an highly dissimilar form. Like evoking nineteenth century impressionist oil paintings when talking about a crayon drawing just because they’re both renderings of a tree.

I don’t entirely disagree with this statement. But do give LMFAO credit for boldly defying the commonly accepted use of the word “rock” in music. And lest we forget, rock music was born out of defiance of social and musical norms. So perhaps it’s only natural that once “rock” itself has become a norm, “rock” will come along to challenge it.

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Puberty. The kid’s voice finally changed at the late age of 16, and he spent much of 2011 working with a vocal coach to manage the transition. It appears he’s made it to the other side, as his first new single in months now features a decidedly lower-voiced Bieber. Ladies and Gentlemen, the sound of post-puberty Justin Bieber in his new song, “Mistletoe”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUjn3RpkcKY

So how much lower did his voice get? Well, in musical terms, in this new song, he peaks at “A,” while in his 2009 debut hit, he reaches the “C” above the previous “A.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4

Using these two songs–his biggest pre-change hit and his first single post-change–we can approximate his downward shift as a minor third. Which, in the music world, is quite a lot.

So what does this seismic shift mean for our young phenomenon? In practical terms, his old songs are unsingable in their original keys, which means that in order for him to sing them live, he’s going to have to sing transposed versions that are taken down a few notches to accomodate his new, lower vocal range.

And this is really sad. Because in doing so, the songs are, well, neutered. Allow me to explain why this is such a big deal after the break.

If you must sing "Livin' on a Prayer" at karaoke, at least do it in the proper key.

I actually complained about the neutering effects of transposing songs before on this site. While explaining The Karaoke Quotient, a formula for objectively determining the appropriateness of a song for karaoke, I made a big deal about being able to sing a song in its original key :

Soaring ballads and screaming metal songs kill singers with their range. Most men can’t hit those high notes in “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Bon Jovi himself can’t even do it these days (Ritchie Sambora does it instead). But note that I mentioned in the original key. Songs with high notes like “Livin’ on a Prayer” are often transposed down a step or two [for karaoke], which helps with singability, but kills in terms of remaining true to the feeling of the original song.

I didn’t cover it in too much detail in that article (as there were nine other parts of the formula to explain), so let’s do that now. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of coming across one of these transposed tracks, you may have noticed that even competent singers have trouble starting on the right pitch, even if there’s plenty of lead-in. After they’ve stumbled around for the first verse, they typically lock into the right key during the chorus, which just doesn’t get as high as it should. The energy and power of that impossibly high chorus is just sucked out of the song because we expect it to be, well, impossibly high.

It’s not just my personal theory on song keys and transposition, either. In the book This Is Your Brain On Music, author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitan describes an experiment in which he asked non-musicians to sing, unaccompanied, their favorite songs from memory:

The results were surprising: the subjects tended to sing at, or very near, the absolute pitches of their chosen songs. I asked them to sing a second song and they did it again. This was convincing evidence that people were storing absolute pitch informat in memory; that their memory representation did not just contain an abstract generalization of the song,but details of a particular performance.

In other words, almost all of us, musicians and non-musicians alike, are finely tuned to the particulars of a sound recording to the point that we can recall their melodies in their original keys without any help. So when we hear a familiar song with familiar instrumentation but in a different key, our minds rebel. We don’t enjoy the song as much as we would if it were in the original key. When the song is at a lower key and the high parts just aren’t as high, we notice that difference and interpret it as a reduction in the song’s energy level.

This is the problem that Bieber will face when he takes the stage with transposed lower versions of his songs. They just won’t carry the same punch that they used to.

Don’t believe me? Try this on for size. Here’s perhaps the most famous singer to manage the pre/post-puberty transition, Michael Jackson, singing “I Want You Back” in the early 1970′s with the Jackson 5:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_5hQ8cEE7Q

and here he is as an adult, singing the same song, but transposed down from A flat to D (four and a half steps, for those of you keeping musical theory score at home):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnvB8CT_M7I

Yikes. Now, don’t get me wrong: the second version isn’t bad, but it’s different. And more importantly for Justin Bieber, it feels foreign to the artist. Like it’s…not his song anymore.

Which is actually true. It belongs to a different singer: a boy, not the adult man that the boy eventually became.

I used the word “sad” to describe this situation at the beginning of this post. And I meant it. That boy singer is lost and gone forever. He’s not coming back. The world will no longer be able to hear “Baby” the way it was meant to be performed live, in the key of E flat.

It’ll be interesting to see where Bieber takes his live show, and his career, from here. Even without the voice change, I’m sure there’d be an urgent need to produce new material, but that need must be greater now that he can’t rely on his old material to sustain a live show. Or maybe he’ll try to get by on transposed versions of old songs as a significant portion of his live show for many years to come. And maybe his legions of fans won’t mind the effect transposition will have on their favorite songs. The experiment I quoted, after all, was done well before our current Bieber-ified era.

But what about you, OTI readers? Are you bothered by transposed versions of your favorite pop songs? If you’re not a musician, were you even aware of such a thing before reading this? Sound off in the comments, especially if you can cite other example of artists significantly transposing their songs into lower keys and if people have noticed.

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So to keep things interesting, I’ve taken the opportunity presented by my genre of choice for this installment–indie rock (or maybe alt rock? If you have a better genre label for this music, let me know in the comments)–to get a little more creative with the arrangement and to highlight the subtle yet important countermelody in the chorus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zSHH3vT7GA

(MP3 Download)

I’m referring to the “high-low, high-low, high-low, high-low” countermelody that’s played on the synth in the original and on both piano and synth in this version. I won’t blame you if you haven’t noticed it until now, but listen to the original again (I know you want to) and focus on that part:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4

I honestly think this is one of the many small, unique things about this song that, taken together, propel it past “run of the mill” generic pop tune into ultra-platinum hit. ”High-low, high-low, high-low, high-low.” It provides a steady platform upon which the busy melody and drum parts can rest, and it sits at a higher register than those parts, thereby cutting through the rest of the noise and giving the song much of its unique sonic fingerprint. It’s a small work of musical genius, and it deserves the time in the spotlight I’m giving it in this rendition and analysis.

Also of note in this rendition: I’ve axed the Ludacris rap almost entirely. I did include “When I was thirteen/I had my first love” at the end so it wasn’t entirely omitted, but no more than that. Some of you may be relieved, others may miss it, but I had two good reasons for cutting it: one, it’s too distracting and takes any rendition of this song directly to “camp” territory, and two, it would have made the whole longer than I would have preferred, given the song’s slow tempo. That being said, I’m open to bringing it back, but please do let me know how you feel about it in the comments.

And let me know what genres should come next! I’m pretty sure I’m going to end this with a Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” 60′s pop version, but I’m not sure when that will be or how many other versions will come before then. So get your suggestions in now while you can!

Previous Installments of The “Baby” Project

• Part 1 – Punk Rock
• Part 2 – Country

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