Persistent Distraction

Tomorrow’s playlist

1. Ani Difranco - You Had Time (5:48)
2. Ryan Adams - Call me on your way back home (3:09)
3. Skating Club - Free Cab Rides (3:15)
4. Aqualung - stange & beautiful (3:52)
5. Nick Drake - Time Of No Reply (2:46)
6. Cat Stevens - If I Laugh (3:20)
7. Tori Amos - A Case Of You (Joni Mitchell) (4:33)
8. Marie-Jo Thério - Jam a beaumont (6:05)
9. Coldplay - Such A Rush (4:02)
10. Damien Rice - Delicate (5:12)
11. Elliott Smith - Between the Bars (2:21)
12. Pete Krebs - Dressed to the 9's (4:17)
13. Starsailor - Coming Down (4:39)
14. Muse - Unintended (3:57)
15. Wilco - How to Fight Loneliness (3:51)
16. The Who - Behind Blue Eyes (3:40)
17. Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (5:06)
18. The Sundays - Here's Where the Story Ends (3:54)
19. Travis - Hit Me Baby One More Time (cover) (3:30)
20. Turin Brakes - Feeling Oblivion (3:41)
21. Doves - Firesuite (4:36)
22. Placebo - I Know (4:43)
23. DJ Shadow - Stem (Cops n Robbers Mix) (3:48)
24. Manic Street Preachers - A Design For Life (4:16)
25. Gorillaz - El Maana (3:50)
26. The Roots - The Seed (2.0) Ft Cody Chesnut (4:28)
27. John Frusciante - Away & Anywhere (4:07)
28. Kasabian - Processed Beats (3:08)
29. Sonic Youth - Tunic (6:22)

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Why I like sad pop songs, and why I don't when I don't

I prefer popular music to classical, and that is probably because pop songs have lyrics.  I like that not only for the poetry of the text, but also because lyrics require a human voice to deliver them.

A song works for me when the text and the music find the right chemistry.  Some songs manage this on their own, which is why they become standards:  "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair."  "A Change is Gonna Come."  "I'll Be Seeing You."  Others only catch my ear with a particular performance.

After the GOP hijacked "Born in the USA" as a Reagan campaign anthem, Bruce Springsteen took to performing the song as a solo acoustic number.  Just Bruce, his jangly steel strings, and a hushed audience. The first time I heard one of those recordings, I discovered a song I had previously written off.  I finally heard what the Republican Party and I had missed:  a lament on the pain and shame and waste of the Vietnam War.

Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Chavela Vargas, Tom Waits, Nina Simone, Kurt Cobain, Thom Yorke, Eva Cassidy, Jeff Buckley. . . as I look at that list, I realize that there is a common quality in the voices that make me shiver:  a bleakness that hints at what their art costs.

Thom Yorke once said during an interview, concerning the song, "Street Spirit:"

"I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song... That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell everytime I play it."

Philosophers, scientists, and at least one pop singer have said that we have sex because we have death.  If we didn't die, we wouldn't need to reproduce ourselves.  That's nice for the species, but for individuals, there's another necessity:  art, and specifically music.  Music lets us scream cathartically about everything that is painful about our condition.  And when a voice is scratchy and desperate and breathless, I get to keep a bit of that consolation prize.

There are hundreds of examples, but here are a few:

Tori Amos, whom I don't especially like otherwise, covering Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat," uses just enough uncharacteristic restraint and sparse piano to bring out the seedy sadness of the narrative.

U2's "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" in Mexico from the Popmart tour. 

Nina Simone's version of Brel's "Ne me quitte pas."  Many English-speaking singers have done versions of that song, translated as "If You Go Away," but the watered-down English text doesn't capture the neediness of the original, and it takes a Nina Simone to carry off  lyrics that would translate literally as "let me be your shadow's shadow, the shadow of your hand, the shadow of your dog..." without sounding ridiculous. 

Because yes, in the kind of songs I love, there is a definite danger of sliding into bathos.  Brel himself teeters on the precipice, especially in arrangements including violins (you have to be awfully careful with strings).   

The singer's voice is important to me, but I don't see the virtue in  virtuosity.  When Billy Bragg sings, "I love you so much that sometimes it's such / I'd walk a mile with a stone in my shoe," I feel exactly what he means.  And that song finds its way onto my playlists.  When Celine Dion sings "I know that my heart will go on," I think, "Pity, I liked her better before she got her teeth fixed.  I wonder whether Kate Winslet outweighs Leonardo DiCaprio."  When Maria Carey sings whatever it is she sings, I think, "Four-octave range, wow, and all in one syllable.  Where's the freaking remote?" 

When a diva sings, it's all about the diva.  My favorite voices bring something universal to their songs.  In other words, they're singing about me.

Name That Tune

Having spent much of my young adulthood in universities rather than doing honest work, I can remember when there no web to speak of, and searching the internet meant navigating a Gopher site from a telnet connection at 1200 baud.  In those days, not much was available on the net, and what was out there was not obviously catalogued.

I welcomed the Altavistas, the Infoseeks, the Webcrawlers et al.  They were nice.  You can have coffee with those search engines, and maybe catch a movie.  But sooner or later you stop calling.

Google, I love.   It's the cleverest thing since indoor plumbing.  I want to pick china patterns with Google and live happily ever after and have a boy first and then a girl.  I'll name him Googlio Iglesias and her Gioolia Googlia.

And yes, I can live happily for hours and days in a text-only world.  All the best things in life are written down, after all.

But every once in a while, I long for a different kind of search engine.

I find some random chunk of hardware in my storage room, and I want to know what it is.  I need a shape search engine!  Something that will let me do a 3D scan of this thingamajig  and tell me whether it's a token ring card or a moss-covered, three-handled family gredunza.  I haven't seen this yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on it in Mountain View, California.

Or I have a tune in my head, but can't remember the title or composer...  I want a search engine that accepts melodies as search terms.   For this last problem, until my beloved search Gooroos find a better way,  there is even now an embarrassingly simple, if quite limited, solution:  the parsons code.

Audience participation time.

Think of a melody.  Make it something popular, public domain, and simple, for the purpose of this test.  Choose a song you  remember from childhood, for example.  If you can carry a  tune (or even hear one) well enough to detect the difference between up and down, I'll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that Musipedia can find it for you.

All you need are three letters:  U, D, and R.  Start with an asterisk for the first note in the tune, and for every note thereafter, use U if the pitch goes up; D if it goes down; and R if the  note repeats.  Ignore the rhythm; apparently, if you get enough notes and the piece of music is in the database, the vertical contour of the notes is enough to pin down the tune in question.

Example:  "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" starts out like this in parsons code:

*RURURDDRDRDRD

Let me know your result, and make that doughnut a Krispy Kreme.  If I owe you a dollar, then you must have had a sadly non-musical childhood.  Go see someone about that, and meanwhile I'll be over here waiting for Google to teach their search engine to hear the difference between a Bach cantata and the call of a howler monkey.