Friday, July 16, 2010

Nerdiest City in the South? You Decide. THIS WEEKEND!!

One of the reasons I like Orlando so much is that it is, arguably, the nerdiest city in the South.  Sure, there are other pockets of nerdiness spread across the Deep South, and Florida is not really a part of the Truly Deep South, but seeing that Orlando is home to lots and lots of programming centers, Disney, and the country's 3rd largest university (with its three Engineering buildings), not to mention NASA a short distance away, there is plenty of industry to attract nerds to the area.  Far more than say, Alabama, Mississippi, or South Carolina.

And what about those smart kids who start off in Intro to Engineering and decide that, despite their nerdy personas and their or their parents' wishes for them to make lots of money, a career at Lockheed Martin is not for them?  Well, the non-NASA nerds in Central Florida have built up quite a culture, too.  And that culture hits its zenith this weekend at Orlando's very own festival, Nerdapalooza.

In its fourth year (begun in 2007), Nerdapalooza has claimed its own place in both Central Florida culture and nerdcore culture in its own right.  Moving from living rooms to Taste restaurant in College Park to the Orlando Airport Marriott (so its audience feels right at home, as if they're attending some sort of -con), the festival includes local acts as well as nationally touted nerdcore legends.  On Saturday, George Hrab (of Philadelphia Funk Authority, and someone please, write this man a wikipedia entry!!) will play and on Sunday, MC Frontalot, the rapper who allegedly coined the term "nerdcore" will play.

I won't be there, but alas, I will say that I think although I don't love every bit of nerdcore I've ever heard, I generally enjoy the company.  I am too old and too peaceful to hang with the punks, too adverse to cigarette smoke to hang with the rockabillies, not drunk enough to hang with the alt-country crowd, too enthusiastic to hang out with jazzers, too weird to hang out with the classical crowd for longer than rehearsal time - if I had to pick a musical crew to call my own, it'd be the nerds.  I may not own enough black hoodies to be in Emergency Pizza Party, but alas.

There are a million podcasts, websites, all that geeky stuff I could point you to, but instead, I'll just link you to the official Nerdapalooza site, the excellent blog Hipster, Please!, and give a big shout-out to two friends (or two acts that include friends of mine) who are playing on Sunday!!

Marc with a C


You'll almost certainly hear this song during Marc's set during Nerapalooza, due to popular demand, but you should also check the rest of his illustrious catalog because he's got so much else to offer.

 Zombies! Organize!!


Admittedly the Z!O!! clip is not particularly typical of their performances - the girls rap a lot more - but the sound is fairly clear and the subject matter is right on tap.

And in more tribute to nerd music, my favorite all-time band of nerds.  (And dare I say, the concert crowd in which I have always felt the most comfortable.)



Happy Nerdapalooza!!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love YouTube as a Music Service

I was at a party in Deland recently.  That's right.  I said party, in Deland, Florida.  Ugh.  It was late, and I was not intoxicated in the least (because I was driving and I am responsible!).  So once we got done playing Rock Band, as is the norm with this particular group of people (and they always ask me to play drums...ugh.  Drum sticks + engagement ring = ow), there was dancing, and I sat down to the host's laptop where I played DJ.  Then one really drunk girl begged me to play some Lady GaGa.  As I searched through the host's iTunes collection, rife with Swedish synth pop, I found no Lady GaGa.  She pleaded with me to go to YouTube to find them some.  I obliged, and was thanked profusely later.

And yes, GaGa more than anyone else, has benefited from the increase of YouTube.  With the most viewed video of all time, she sells so many more records, or downloads rather, and overpriced concert tickets this way.  But she is a serious case of right place, right time: YouTube wasn't always king.

As a Napster Kid, for a long time it really bothered me that YouTube had taken over as the internet's leading source of hearing music.  Maybe I'm relieved that it's taken over from MySpace - and very glad that I never have to put up with flashing banner ads that essentially shout at me thing like, "WHICH ONE WILL NEW YORK CHOOSE - TANGO OR CHANCE!?  VOTE FOR A FREE IPOD SHUFFLE!!" if I don't want to anymore.  And those damn MySpace players are really unreliable, too.

But when someone bought concert tickets for me and a friend, and he said, "check them out on YouTube," I got really cranky.  I refused to do it.  Then during my day job, I heard a kid actually say, "Why would you ever go see a live concert when you have YouTube?"  I almost cried. 

Don't get me wrong.  I grew up loving loving loving music videos.  Before I was a Napster Kid, I was the Poster Child of the MTV Generation.  As with many children of divorce, I would drown out my parents fighting with hours upon hours of MTV.  Even when my family didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, my mother ensured we had cable, I think mostly for this reason.  Aside from basking in the glow of Nickelodeon in its golden years, I watched enough MTV to develop a lifetime obsession with popular music.  I didn't listen to the radio as a kid.  My parents liked music - one important musical memory came from the summer of 1989, when my family bought an LP single of George Harrison's "I Got My Mind Set on You" and kept putting the needle back over and over again, overjoying at 6-year-old me and the kids of their visiting friends dancing to it like we were Fraggles or something.

But MTV was what ignited my passion.  I grew to worship and try to emulate Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson.  Much of what I saw terrified me, especially the wave of grunge that overtook in 1991.  I had nightmares about Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video.  (I was nine.  Give me a break.)  But I loved it, and watched deep into the 90s, as the videos faded from importance and the network pioneered the practice of making reality show cast members into stars.

In the late 90s, the internet took over, primarily as a place where I could find people who shared my musical obsessions rather than thought I was weird for having them.  My first evening ever on the internet was spent reading through a fansite called The Temple of Billy Corgan.  (I was sixteen.  Give me a break.)  But then there was a beautiful practice of filesharing, and I got all in on the Napster thing.  I never thought anything about it was bad - downloading MP3s for free seemed to be the American Way.  Of course, that had to do a lot with the artists I listened to.  Lifelong favorites of mine like Corgan and Ben Folds were all over giving stuff away for free online, so much that Corgan himself gave away Machina II - which some people consider to be the musical savior of the Pumpkins: 1st Edition - for free.  In the year 2000.  Thus, since my heroes didn't mind that I did it, I did it too, and laughed at Metallica.  Music as a strictly aural art took hold in my mind at that point, and didn't let go.

In college I majored in music, and tried to get my grubby little hands on every bit of it I could, classical or otherwise, trying to judge everything I came across for what it was, not what sort of standard I held it up to.  (Even a band like The Fiery Furnaces.)  But music videos had long been struck from my mind.  In the early Aughts, I worked an overnight job and listened to lots and lots and lots of Launchcast.  If you watched videos on Launch, then you had a very, very slim selection.  And you always had to wait for them to buffer.  By just listening to music, sans images, you could get so much more.

Over the years, sites like last.fm and Pandora have taken over; unfortunately, I've never worked any other jobs that provided me so much damn downtime.  Blip.fm is a fun thing to play with on the twitters, but it's not really a viable listening service.

So why does YouTube get more cred for being a music service than sites that set out for that purpose like Pandora?

Maybe it's the fault of people like Lady GaGa, who set out to revive the music video.  And that damn band with all the treadmills.  And it began to bother me.  Call my an Apple loyalist, but when I want to give someone a sample of a song, whether I'm teaching or otherwise, I search the iTunes store and just play the free snippet of the song they'll provide.  When you're trying to demonstrate something, that's all you need, right?

The only problem is that not everything is on iTunes.  But everything, and I mean everything, is on YouTube.  Everything.  Even for stuff that doesn't have a music video, which is weird, considering that the sound quality on most YouTube videos is crap.

But wait!  Holy It's Not 2006 Anymore, Batman! 

 

When I was 6, my parents had not indoctrinated me with Beatles to the point where I had a historical frame for how awesome this song/video really is/was, but looking back, wow.  I love it.


I'm not really great at playing the Look How Much Obscure Music I Know game, but everything, everything is on there.




And so on.  And so forth.

So really?  It is perfect for people who want their music in a single serving package.  One song, one good to go.  It's like a buying a single and not having to listen to the B-side.



Whereas myself and my fellow devourers of music (my fiance is a bookworm - when I am chastised because I am not so much, he defends me by saying, "She's a music worm") prefer a long stream of music.  I need it continually in my blood - hence the appeal of MTV when I was younger, and the few good radio stations we had when I was a teenager.  To the dismay of all of my college music professors, I also do things to music rather than sit and authentically listen.  I'm sorry, but the laundry and the dishes need doing, and they are done much better to rhythm and melody.  YouTube takes me away from multitasking, and forces me to gawk at a screen.  Bleh.

But like I said.  They.  Have.  Everything.




Hence, until we come up with something better, this is it.  Which means that the music video is back to being king again.  Oh boy.

And to make musical examples, just like conductors of ensembles do these days, I will continue to post videos to both a) add color to my blog entries, rather than prolonged use of unlicensed images, and b) provide musical examples.

If talking about music is like dancing about architecture, and a picture is worth a thousand words, then the sky seems to be the limit with music videos.

Like the beloved comic book writer Harvey Pekar, who passed away this week, once said, "You can do anything with words and pictures."  Of course, he was talking about comic books, but who's to say that music videos can't do the same thing?  Or that YouTube will own us all in a few years?

Unless, of course, this sort of stuff is what we do with the power we have...

Monday, July 5, 2010

Janet Jackson over Lady GaGa, Any Day

Seeing that I'm going to depart my 20s rather soon, I think it's okay to get over what is arguably the most pretentious decade in any music lover's life.  You get really excited about everything you learn about during that decade, be it through college professors or thumbing through record stores, talking to the employees.  On average, at about this age (the undisclosed age I am now), you stop apologizing for the things you really like but might have been too ashamed to admit when you were 23.

And seeing that I've now taught at least 12 weeks of general music, focusing on the development of hip-hop and its modern varieties, I can own up to a lot of stuff that I used to love in my childhood but left behind in favor of not looking lame in high school.

The foremost of these things I liked as a youngster?  Janet Jackson.  The first song my mom remembers me dancing around the house to at age 2 was a Michael Jackson song - "Beat It", to be specific - but I was too young when his career was at its zenith to really remember him in his glory days. 

When I was a Tween, Janet ruled, and for good reason.  Sure, her dancing was more about Paula Abdul than her, and her music was all about Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, but damn. 



I mean, seriously!  The choreography is freaking awesome, and she's covered up, head to toe.  The girls in this video didn't have to wax an inch of their bodies before appearing in it.  In the late 80s, when Madonna had the cone bra and videos were just starting to get steamy, dressing Janet in military garb must have seemed like it would be a terrible move. 

It wasn't.  Supposedly Rhythm Nation was the first album to ever spawn 7 number one hits...and the only one to do so to this day?  Check Billboard for that.  Apparently, on Billboard.com, you can also stream music, and if you're like me, you can sing almost every damn word to the entire album.  Brings me back. 

When I was in elementary school, and insistent that I would be a singer/dancer when I grew up, my mom brought the family to Blockbuster and rented the Rhythm Nation "short film" that included this video.  It included three other music videos and a plot line to string them all together somehow, focusing on a young man from the ghetto, who realizes that he can rise above all the madness around him by dancing his way out.

Ah, a plotline for the ages.

Regardless, Janet turned out to maybe not be the best role model for young girls throughout the years.  She inherited the Jackson family crazy, sampled a Joni Mitchell song (poorly), had some unfortunate plastic surgery, had a secret marriage, and showed her boobs at the Super Bowl.  Okay, so that last one might not have been her fault.  Still.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, being a typical little girl and relishing in the pop music of my day (and of the year or two prior), because of stuff like Rhythm Nation, I would go around saying things like "Racism sucks!!!!!" rather than "these boys be blowing up my phones".  It might have been the vogue of the time, but I'm never opposed to the vogue of the time actually doing something productive for the whole of society.

I'm just saying.




"I tell anyone who's heart can comprehend / send it in a letter, baby / tell you on the phone! / I'm not the kind of girl who likes to be alone..."

(The "short film" also has an extended dance sequence at the end of "Miss You Much", if memory serves me correctly.)

How Can Anyone Not Like Power Pop?

The previous post about The New Pornographers in concert is just a teaser for a larger subject that's been on my mind.

I recall with great clarity a party held at my college apartment, oh, four years ago, when one of my friends decided we were going to take over DJ and slip in The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema (still their best album).  We did, and we were rockin' on, and my one roommate (who was younger and in many ways, slightly less sophisticated), tore through the living room, said, "This sucks!" and popped in some Smash Mouth.  My friend and I just looked at each other and shook our heads.  It's impossible to get through to some people.

Sure, Smash Mouth is easily categorized as pop.  And the lead singer has a lot of tattoos, and I think they started out kind of rock-y, so some people will throw them under the pop/rock label.  But it seems to me that today, things that can truly fall under the categories of pop and rock have lost a lot of the force that once categorized them as Power Pop.

There is the old truth that very often, people will only like what they're conditioned to like.  This very often goes without saying.  Beat people over the head with it enough and they'll be convinced that they enjoy it.

But I don't understand how this does not relate to the subgenre known as power pop.  You can almost call it a number of things (as with any genre, really), and some labels are more accurate than others.  For example, the term Baroque Pop makes me want to stab my eyes out.  Unless you've got some harpsichord and serious ornamentation going on there, you are lying to yourself (Stephen Merritt being the only person I've heard write a legit Baroque Pop song).

Upon consulting to see what falls under the wikipedia label of power pop, I see a lot of stuff I really, really love, namely champion power pop band Material Issue.  Usual suspects are listed, such as The La's, Matthew Sweet, Fountains of Wayne, and the granddaddies of power pop, The Kinks (also one of my absolute favorite bands).  Discusses Pete Townshend coining the term in NME in '67 - I thought of him too, obviously, when I heard "I Can't Explain" on the radio the other day.

And then it moves into pop punk hits of The Aughts.  Bleh.  Sure, the All-American Rejects get airplay because their songs are so catchy, but I don't think they count as power pop mostly because they're all pop, no power. 

Older bands such as Material Issue and the Kinks are just more substantial than many bands who try to roll in on the power pop label these days.  Put Cheap Trick and OK Go in a cage match - even now that all the Cheap Trick guys are really old - and see who comes out the victor.  The whole point behind power pop is that there is power behind it.  I'd say the power comes from serious musical chops and heavy use of "rock" instruments as opposed to one-trick guitar ponies, or light, highly synth-based instrumentation.  But that power is also derived from enduring songs rather than forgettable ones.  Somewhere in my childhood, the Material Issue song "Valerie Loves Me" crept into my head.  I forgot it for a good 15 years, at least, and then it resurfaced when I started to frequent a specific bar that played a lot of 80s and very early 90s gems.  Something in my brain clicked, and it was like finding a long lost cousin.  Every time I hear that song, I still dance like an absolute maniac.  My friends look at me like I'm nuts, like that old roommate did when we jammed out to "Use It", but alas.

Lo, the power of an enduring pop song.  There is no magic elixir or secret weapon that enables anyone to do that, really.  And still, songwriters like Jonathan Richman and Robert Pollard are legends among their own cult followings, but they'll never get the recognition they deserve.

This is why I don't understand how a band like The New Pornographers aren't more popular than they currently are - like, mainstreamly popular - aside from the name.  Yes, you could hear "The Bleeding Hearts Show" on that University of Phoenix commercial a few years ago, but it bothers me that the golden days of power pop are over.  I've heard it asked before, but why can't this stuff chart anymore?  Would it, if Lady GaGa were singing these songs?

And that goes for a lot of bands who are considerably more twee than TNP - Tullycraft comes to mind, as does Australian bloke Keith John Adams.  Tullycraft even wrote a song that deliciously comments on punks going softer, which is way more power pop-esque than simply adding a melodic line to a "punk song", or making a song with a very simple melody "punk" by speeding it up.  Tee hee!



And for those interested, Keith John Adams does a pretty good job at infusing his melody with real power:



I also recommend both of these acts because they are phenomenal live - and when Tullycraft plays, their melodica player even serves a purpose!

Man, just listening to these songs, I am dancin' already.  But if I traveled back in time to that party 4 years ago, no matter how much I boogied to KJA or how high I pogoed to Tullycraft, only my friend who also loves The New Pornographers would have been dancing with me.  Everyone else would have said it sucked and walked off.  I have since found other people who love this music as much as I do, and god only knows.  Maybe power pop is making a comeback?  I see lots of teenagers running around in The Who shirts, even though most of them don't know who The Who are.  Which reminds me of my favorite two minutes in all of cartoon-dom: Who's on stage?

In the meantime, forget all of those Rhino Records compilations that I still haven't gotten all the way through.  I need to order the sequel to this before it goes out of print.



God this video is SO EARLY 90S!!!!!!!!



This is not the greatest quality, but it captures the spirit of the song (albeit you can't hear Pete's vocals all that well).