April 26, 1969
Justin Hayward always was the most talented songwriter for the Moody Blues. And this one was excellent.
Here’s a quick analysis of the album structure for Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. After discussing it at length with a few friends, I wanted to find the real details as to why the album structure was so great.
Here’s what I’ve found:
- They have paced the album to have a mirror structure tonally. The “1st Half” and “2nd Half” of the album are almost the exact same length, and the entire album uses Touch as a central balance point.
- Given Touch’s melodramatic tone, they’ve placed both of the tracks with the strongest groove (both happen to be Pharrell’s guest tracks) right before and after Touch.
- The two slowest tracks are each 1 place from the beginning and end, to keep the overall balance of the album in equilibrium.
- There’s amazing attention to detail in the key changes from track to track. Most easily noticeable in the Chilly Gonzales piano segue from track 3 to 4.
TLDR; Daft Punk have focused on creating something that is intended to be listened to from front-to-back, without any real focus on getting the “singles” in front of you as early as possible. This is something not seen too often in popular music since most things have moved to digital track sales.
Love Is All Around - Joan Jett And The Blackhearts
Today Minnesota became the 12th state to permit same-sex marriage in the United States. So, appropriate Joan Jett cover of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love Is All Around”, is appropriate
1) When you get to a point where you’ve read an amazing number of books, you change. You’ve read so much that what may seem new or interesting to most (and even to the writer of the book you’re reading) is just a variation to you. Your expectations regarding the work change.
Due to subjectivity being what it is, many writers can mistake what’s happening and view it as the books getting worse, not their own aesthetic changing. Two things can happen. One, despair at what they perceive is the dying of quality. You see this a lot with people who hit a certain number of books read: they begin to rail against the dreadfulness of everything. It can lead to bitterness, cynicism, and outright hatred of something they previously loved.
Secondly, and you see this with a lot of artists, is that they begin to gravitate toward something that feels new to them. They seek out ‘artist’s artists’ and are not happy when those voices aren’t welcomed by the mainstream, because these are stories aimed at people who’ve simply consumed a terrific amount of fiction to be able to enjoy the work.
2) If you’re able to either unconsciously or consciously navigate the above, what you’re left with isn’t a raw, initial passion for reviewing what you love, but a more craftman’s-like examination of the book for an audience you may no longer really be a part of, but can remember being a part of. It’s easy to slip into this vein, by will or luck, because it does allow you to keep reading a ton while reporting back on the basics of what you read.
What those reviews are basically covering is “If you like X sort of thing, this hits X okay, with some additional Y and Z, if you also are into that.” Do they feel sucked dry of a bit of the reviewer’s authorial voice? Yeah, probably, because the reviewer has had to step back out of necessity in order to report back to a larger audience.
My thoughts: I don’t know if I can be said to have read an amazing number of books (or manga) but I think I have felt a bit of 1). Also, when you blog for free and are not paid, doing 2) seems kind of boring, because don’t you want to read things that you find interesting?
Relevant to music writers. To say the least. Though music writers have a third option - endlessly re-tracing and bearing witness to the times that did seem fresh to them.
At the same time the very idea of MTV was feeding fears that music was becoming ever more superficial (check out the Mobius strip of Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing,” which both came from the POV of a character dismissive of video stars and had an acclaimed video), MTV Unplugged played a critical role in the development of authenticity policing. The idea that pop stars — entertainers — had to prove themselves in stripped-down formats went hand in hand with the suspicion that they were inauthentic in the first place, an idea that music videos didn’t invent but certainly advanced. (Milli Vanilli released Girl You Know It’s True in 1989, the same year MTV debuted Unplugged.)
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NPR’s Linda Holmes via MTV’s Musical Legacy: How ‘Unplugged’ Sold The Radio Star (via nprmusic) Important work being done here. (via barthel) |
Few people know this but in the mid seventies Neil got into a nasty LSD habit after divorcing from his first wife, actress Carrie Snodgrass, in an attempt to escape reality. He would spend months alone in his Northern California ranch quietly trying to make his own one man Pet Sounds 2 but the album was never to be. This is the long, lost cover. So rare it’s not even making the cut for the next Archives volume.
The new open systems embrace waste.
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Seth Godin “Most people, most of the time (the perfect crowd fallacy)”
(via peterspear) This quote reminds me of why I don’t really trust Seth Godin (he says politely). If this vision of the open system internet is ever even slightly true, it’s true at the point at which a given online system or network is set up, when it’s easiest for these “unfound stars” to emerge*. After that, cumulative advantage - rich-get-richer - sets in rapidly and a new “selected few” emerge who then stand to profit as the old “few” - media companies and gatekeepers, in this case - move into the space. There’s nothing new about this - it’s how frontier economies have always worked (and in the case of the web, at least there weren’t existing populations on the ‘frontier’ to persecute and drive off). Presenting it as a radical shift that Changes Everything is disingenuous, but then Godin is one of the pioneers, and it suits him to pretend everything is as it was 15-20 years ago in the web’s frontier period. Aren’t new networks being set up all the time, though? Yes, but the means of distribution of said networks is pretty fixed: a path of information leading through Silicon Valley through tech events to tech sites to Wired and the hipper business journals… so often the earliest claims on these new networks are from the same bunch of people, which explains why most new ‘social’, ‘open’ services feel so enervated and frankly inbred. (The most vibrant and successful new networks - Tumblr and Pinterest - emerged outside this loop to some extent, and weathered a certain amount of tech scorn: hipsters and hicks, respectively.) This interesting piece on the “Harlem Shake” meme covers related ground, I think. It mostly works to point out how very difficult - almost impossible - it is for something to break through culturally (even as a ‘meme’) without commercial pushes and gatekeeper attention. A modest local success becomes a phenomenon when it gets the ministrations of a media company whose role is to detect things that are “pre-viral”, which they find by looking on Reddit - whose cultural affinity to the tech network seems pretty strong, of course. Buzzfeed works like this too, so do a bunch of other aggregator/amplifier sites. This tier of gatekeepers is a new bunch of what Godin calls “anointers”, but they are anointers nonetheless. *There are a ton of reasons why even in these ‘ideal’ conditions it isn’t true, mostly to do with the fact that open systems don’t magically wave away structural prejudices. (via tomewing) |
Brandywine River, Delaware
Photograph by Michael Melford, National Geographic
American industry in the 19th century. Walker’s textile mill joins many others that dot the riverbanks. Upstream, the DuPont Company made gunpowder; other mills produced everything from paper to snuff.
Hey, that’s just downstream from the Hagley Museum and Library—the old DuPont gunpowder yards. I was just there yesterday doing research about the history of the fellowship program I am a part of. Sweet that NatGeo had a photographer there (last fall apparently) to capture “the most beautiful mile on the Brandywine.” It really is a beautiful walk. It’s so serene that it really is impossible to imagine just how noisy, busy, dirty it was when all of these mills were running at full power in the 19th century.
In fact, the Hagley Fellows will be hosting a conference on the history of the senses in the old DuPont Soda House (ca 1900) (current photos) on April 20. Pass it on and stop by if you want. Be sure to register!
