This performance apparently redeemed the Grammy Awards in many people’s eyes.
Though, many people were disappointed that Justin Bieber lost out to Arcade Fire. Many people. Not including me. So many people had not heard of Arcade Fire that this tumblr posting responses to their win was spawned (strong language warning over there).
There was a bit of confusion about the name of the band v the name of the album.
Radiohead’s new album The King of Limbs is available for preorder online. I’ll get a piece of that. You?
I was just listening to Vampire Weekend’s Contra album. And thought “gee, that sounds like Paul Simon”… so I did a little googling to see what they had to say about the similarity. Which led me to this – completely unrelated – Grizzly Bear singing Graceland.
Here’s the Vampire Weekend song that I think sounds particularly Simonesque (set to an amusing Japanese dance clip).
Here’s Paul Simon’s Crazy Love…
Here’s a mashup…
This site, Kill or Cure, exists to chart the Daily Mail’s sensationalist stories about things that give you cancer, or prevent cancer – or in the case of caffeine (and other substances) – do both.
For some reason this all reminds me of this Eels song – Cancer for the Cure.
These are good. Watch them. Check out the blog. I had no idea that Star Wars was such a pastiche (see part 2). Brilliant. It’s all very Ecclesiastes.
Remix. Remix. Everything is a remix.
Or perhaps, to quote Ecclesiastes:
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
Here’s a line from part 2:
“George Lucas collected materials, he combined them, he transformed them. Without the films that preceded it, there could be no Star Wars. Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.“
Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
Here’s the take on Avatar:
“Of the few box office hits that aren’t remakes, adaptations or sequels, the word “original” wouldn’t spring to mind to describe ‘em. These are genre movies, and they stick to pretty standard templates. Genres then break-up into sub-genres with their own even more specific conventions. So within the category of horror films we have sub-genres like slasher, zombie, creature feature, and of course, torture porn. All have standard elements that are appropriated, transformed and subverted.
Let’s use the biggest film of the decade as an example. Now it’s not a sequel, remix or adaptation, but it is a genre film — sci-fi — and most tellingly, it’s a member of a tiny sub-genre where sympathetic white people feel bad about all the murder, pillaging, and annihilation being done on their behalf.
I call this sub-genre “Sorry about Colonialism!” I’m talking about movies like Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, The Last of the Mohicans, Dune, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man Called Horse, and even Fern Gully and Pocahontas.”
This extended look at Kill Bill’s hat tips to everything in cinema is a little too violent for me to embed. But check it out.
For those struggling to get the music in church right, and looking to use more than the “traditional piano and organ”… you can play any song in the hymnal with just C, F, and G.
Here’s an assessment of your personality on that basis. I have a Muse Shirt. I’ve liked them since 2002. So there. All you bandwagon jumpers and kiddies…
This is cool.
One of the things I love the IT Crowd for is the T-shirts. I saw this one. And I had to find it in the real world.
You can get it from here.
In no particular order. Because order is difficult. Picking ten proved difficult too. I ended up with 11. As you can see, and read.
Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks
Local Natives – Airplanes
Two Door Cinema Club – Undercover Martyn
Florence and the Machine and Dizzy Rascal – You Got the Love
Whitley – Head First Down
Gotye – Eyes Wide Open
Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
Mumford and Sons – Awake My Soul
Boy and Bear – Fall at Your Feet
Deerhunter – Helicopter
Angus and Julia Stone – Big Jet Plane
I’m as excited by Boy and Bear now as I was about Mumford and Sons when I wrote this post. Check out this Crowded House cover.
I caught this Vampire Weekend song on the Jools Holland show while channel surfing the other night.
It was catchy, and I had heard of Vampire Weekend but not heard from Vampire Weekend (at least not memorably) before then. A bit of YouTubing later and I’ve decided I quite like them.
Muse were pretty epic last night. They have a beautifully crafted stage presence that makes the songs you don’t like on their albums make a bit of sense. It’s almost as though they write their songs with the arena and not the CD player in mind… wait. That’s exactly what they do. Apparently. According to this interview anyway, which has some relevance (I think) to writing music for churches. Not that I’m an expert on the matter. But I know what songs I like singing and don’t like singing (and I have a yawn test – if I yawn while singing a song it isn’t much fun to sing).
“Q: Speaking of your live show, Muse uses a lot of layers and complicated structures. As you are writing, do you three confer about how the songs will translate live.
A: The end venue, which relates to the last question, it has an impact on the writing, whether you like it or not. You’re always thinking – how is this going to be listened to. Our time is dominated mostly by touring, not by being in the studio. If we were just a studio band, we’d make one kind of album, but because we know we are going on the road, you can’t help but make music that has a relevance being in a large venue.
Using pronouns like “we” and “us”, instead of “I” – you move away from the personal and start moving to singing about more – even the whole venue will feel like it’s about them, or about all of us together in that room. It has an impact. It’s a major difference between the first album to this one, I feel the music we’re making is making a bigger effort to reach out to the people at the back of the venue. You can’t help but wanting to engage the audience.
Q: Do you miss playing small clubs?
A: I like it for different reasons. When you go into a small club, you can totally misjudge the set-list. There’s a certain type of songs which work well in a small venue and others that work well in a big venue. You can get it wrong. There’s a song from the last album called “Take A Bow”, and I imaging on this album it’ll be the track “Eurasia”, that if you played at a really small venue it would actually be crap (laughs). It just wouldn’t work. The pretensions of it, or the over-reachingness of it would be exposed.
Whereas when you go into a stadium environment, it feels perfectly relevant. The boldness of the emotion, the instrumentation of the music fits very well.
Q: So when you are writing, you are writing to the space?
A: I wouldn’t say it’s conscious. I’ve noticed it’s happening unconsciously. It might be the impact of playing in front of large audiences for a long period of time. It makes you think differently about people, it make you think differently about yourself. It’s no longer just a subjective, lonely experience.
“
This time tomorrow Robyn and I will be on our way home from a Muse concert. Awesome.
I’m hoping for some of this.
Not this.
Or this.
Paranoid Android is one of my favourite Radiohead songs. Here’s Thom Yorke singing it with an acoustic guitar.
And here are Australian comedy band Tripod singing it a capella.
And here’s an 8 Bit version of the song.
And a bonus, because it was on YouTube and I saw it – here’s another one of my favourite Radiohead songs. Live.