Q: How can I make this funkier?

Wow, so it's been almost six months since the last posting. I apologize to the fans, first and foremost. I hope you've stuck with me, and not given up hope (the same hope that you likely gave up for Slash and Axl making music again; the NBA to play a game; or for Dr. Dre to finally release that Detox album).

Please, stop. Just . . . don't.

Life got a little crazy with the third-year law schoolin' and Editor-in-Chiefing and so forth. But, here we are, closing in on exams; instead of working on understanding the nuances of patent litigation or the intersection of the Eleventh Amendment, the Anti-Injunction Act, and federal common law, I bring you a new post. A short and sweet one, but a post nonetheless.

I hope in this post to answer the question posed in the title, "How Can I Make This Funkier?" I think we've all asked that at some point, right? I mean, some people made an entire career out of asking for things to be "funkier," or to be made "funky," in general.

He didn't really have to ask, did he?

As I was listening to some tunes today (on my awesome hi-tech ultra mixtape mixer/maker, the iPod - big ups to Steve J-o-bs, RIP), I was struck by the greatness of a little ditty you might recall from 1997/98: Fiona Apple's "Criminal."


"Peek-a-boo, it's about to get creepy in here." - Fiona Apple, 1997

Sure, you remember it. You saw the video just like I did and were pretty weirded out by it. Maybe you couldn't put your finger on it:

Uh, is this security camera footage?
Why is she so skinny?
Are these the non-porn parts from a late-70s porn?
What's with the reflective cat-eyes?
Is this about heroin?
Why are you in my closet?!
Seriously, is this porn?

The first hit for a Google search of: "criminal porn." Never been so happy to see Charlie Sheen. Thank you, Safe Search: Moderate.

YouTube won't let me embed the video, so you'll have to go here to see the Mark Romanek/Harris Savedis creepy-fest. Regardless of the creepiness and the lingering dirty feeling you had when the video was over, you couldn't deny - that song was awesome! Yeah, it pretty much kicked everybody else's ass on the scene at the time (read: Ma$e and Chumbawamba) with its amazing production (layers, people!), creepy vocals, and [above all] the drums! The production elements and arrangements are courtesy of Jon Brion (don't sleep on him) and Fiona. She might be a total celebrity-kook, but Fiona's got skills. The drums, though, are courtesy of frequent Apple-collaborator and certifiable BAMF, Matt Chamberlain. Just check out that discography if you need any proof.

So, you know the song. Point is, I caught something today I hadn't really appreciated/noticed before. I encourage you to listen to the track with headphones to find it yourself. In fact, here it is:

Yeah, you remember it now. Listen at 0:45-ish, where it goes into the "Don't you tell me to deny it" part before the chorus. It gets a lot funkier there, doesn't it? Why is that? Is it the chord change? Maybe. Is it just the rising tension? Possibly. I think, however, it's something more subtle and unique, and something that has been making songs phantomly funkier (fantomly phunkier?) for years. Answer: 2 hi-hats.


Not to be confused with . . . see what I did there?

It's hard to hear on the YouTube vid, but if you've got the track on mp3 or (gasp!) CD, you can hear the second hi-hat added in the right channel right as that pre-chorus bit starts. It's likely that it's a whole second drum track, overlaid on the first. I don't know exactly the process involved in the recording, but this is what I posit based on what I'm hearing. Chamberlain is playing 16th-notes on the hi-hat here (with a lot of 'e' accents), layering on top of the 8th-note groove of the main verse. Yeah, it's subtle, and it works very well.

How do they make it better when they reach the chorus, though? The whole "What I need . . ." bit? It's extra soulful (for a skinny white girl, anyway), so you need a tambourine. Perfect. The tambourine lays down the same 16th-notes that the second hi-hat is giving us, and it's in both the left and right channels, so we've got three layers of percussion here, pushing us through the chorus. Add to that Fiona's dotted eighth-note rhythms that go across the barline (see the "'cause I'm fee - lin - like - a - cri - min - al" part), and the trippy sounding woodwind patch (or is it a mellotron? calliope, maybe?) that leads us back into Verse 2, and you've got a pretty much perfect first 1/3 of a song. But they're not done. As soon as we get to Verse 2, all those layers drop out and you're back to one drum track, no tambourine, and just the groove.

Damn.


"You're welcome." - Jon Brion and Fiona Apple

And this continues for the rest of the song, eventually culminating in that incredible bridge (2:46 - 3:11) with the brass part ascending through the A-flat 7 chord while the bass part descends, Matt Chamberlain plowing some sextuplets (the only triplet rhythms in the tune) finally releasing the tension, which gets us back to a re-cap of the "What I need . . ." part.

Whew.

So, in sum, I think the root of all this excitement/tension-release/layering can be found in one element: the second hi-hat. To me, the hi-hat is one of the drummer's most powerful tools. When used correctly, it can really add a lot to a production. It keeps time, it can be accented/un-accented to create texture, and it can be opened and closed to create long, tied sounds or short, crisp "barks." A drummer doesn't need more pieces on his kit to spice up his playing, he just needs to be creative with what he's got. Look at ?uestlove, the drummers for James Brown, or that guy from Mute Math. They don't have complicated set-ups, they just work with what they've got.

Pictured: misleading simplicity.

And as far as the hi-hat goes, it takes some chutzpah to go out on a limb with it. You can't just be opening and closing that thing wily-nily. On the contrary, you've got to have style. And if you dare write a song that might layer drums or percussion over the first drum track (and if it's a second hi-hat that's an even taller order), well, you better know what you're doing.

Here are some folks that do know what they're doing:

Soul Searchers, "Ashley's Roachclip"

Go to 3:36. Yeah, you've heard that before. A lot. One hi-hat but it sounds like two (the drummer's touch, no doubt), plus tambourine. Damn.

The Jacksons, "Shake Your Body Down to the Ground"

The layering starts from the jump. It sounds like the toms are being played separately from the hi-hat/snare/bass part. Then, at 0:33 we get to the chorus ("Let's dance / let's shout . . ."), and we get another layer in the left channel: lo and behold! a second hi-hat. You like it.

Tom Petty, "You Got Lucky"

I know what you're thinking, "You're following up a classic break and f'n Michael Jackson with Tom Petty?!" And the answer is yes. This is a perfect example for today's thesis: a second hi-hat, when appropriately scored, makes a tune funkier. Go to 2:41. There it is, the second hi-hat layered on top of the part we've been hearing for the duration of the song. Here, I bet it's either two different sized hi-hats, or one is a drum machine and one is a real hi-hat (given the differences in the sound the hi-hat makes when opened). Stan Lynch goes us one better on sonority, though, and plays the second part to complement the first (by opening the hi-hat on the 'ah' of 1 and the 'and' of 2, leading right into the previous hi-hat part that opens on 3). He creates a dialog between the two. Subtle, and perfect for the song.

So there you have it. A whole post about the power of the hi-hat without one mention of Stewart Copeland (a man so prolific on the hi-hat (apparently) that he was credited with just playing that on Peter Gabriel's, "Big Time"). I think I've made my point, though, that subtlety usually equals funkiness.

Pictured: Stewart Copeland, the model of subtlety.

It's that intangible funkiness that just grabs hold and makes you say, "I love this." And that's the best kind, isn't it?

The Gay/Not Gay/Definitely Gay Lyrics of George Michael

Dear America of 1985: This man is NOT gay. Not at all. Pay no attention to the multitude of clues you are being bombarded with. This guy wants nothing more than to sell records and sleep with chicks. Love, Sony Records.


[*author's note: Props to Jphive, my good friend who is the genesis of this post. Also, there was so much picture-evidence for this topic that I had to create a "George Michael" folder to manage them all. Seriously.]

Georgios Panayiotou. George Michael.


Trivia tidbit: GM also dabbled in Colonel Harlan Sanders fetishism for a bit in 1985.

We all know the story of little Georgios, no need for me to rehash it for you. It breaks down like this: little Greek kid with a huge voice goes to England and gains HUGE success with his schoolmate in a band with an onomatopoeia for a name, dumps that no-talent schoolmate into obscurity, goes solo and has more MASSIVE success world-wide, decides he wants to be a serious artist, stops appearing in videos and has a protracted legal war with his label, then gets arrested for waving his willy at an undercover cop, comes out of the closet, and then seems to make a career out of getting arrested.


The road to fame is paved with community service.

Now don't get me wrong - I love George Michael. I'm not afraid to say it, either. Yes, I own all three WHAM! albums on vinyl. Yes, I have copies of Faith and Listen Without Prejudice, too. I think he is one of the best singers out there; he has an amazing voice. In fact, I would agree with my old friend Matt Sterling and dub him "King of the (Alive) Gay Singers."


Sorry, GM, this guy still holds the title of "King of the Gay Singers." And not just because he already had the cape, sceptre, and crown.

Are all his songs great? No (ever heard "Too Funky"?...terrible). But did he have some massively popular and catchy hits?
Hell yes.

Can you deny the greatness of "Careless Whisper"? "Wake Me Up (Before You Go-Go)"? "Father Figure"? what about that duet with Elton John? And did you ever hear his cover of "Somebody to Love"?

The guy had 8 #1 singles in America, as well as 7 #1s in the UK...sold 20 million copies of his first solo record, Faith, as well as 10 million copies of the title single! This guy was a hit machine in the 1980s. I think in 1987 or 1988 he had 3 singles still in the top ten at the same time! Couple that with his successes in WHAM! and you've got a very serious money-maker on your hands.


The double entendres are free, however.

But all this seems to be largely forgotten about GM because of a little legal trouble he had back in 1998 (not to mention all his subsequent legal trouble - lay off the sticky-icky, George). Seems he engaged in a little "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" tit-for-tat (but not really, in this case, is it?) with an undercover LA policeman at a public park/gay hook-up locale. His ensuing arrest made world-wide headlines as now it was clear that one of the the premiere global sex-symbols of the 1980s was batting for the other team. America and Britain were shocked!


Shocked, I tell you.

I mean, you have to understand just how big of a star GM was. From WHAM! to his first solo album, he was everywhere. You couldn't turn on MTV without seeing this guy. And they made sure to sell him to all those hungry teen girls with disposable income the best they could.


Hot pink long-sleeve Tshirt: not gay, as long as you wear it with neon yellow fingerless gloves.

With WHAM!, he and buddy Andrew Ridgeley were popular enough to sell about 20 million albums, have a farewell tour that concluded at Wembley stadium (which was 8 hours long and attended by 73,000 people), and were the first western pop stars to do a concert in communist China. Yeah, WHAM! was the diplomatic unit (no pun intended) sent to extend the hand of goodwill to China in 1985!


Banana-yellow jacket and matching pants (with fringe on each) without a shirt: not gay in the least, as long as your silent partner also wears a get-up that's mono-chromatic and a primary color.

As a solo artist, Faith was HUGE! He made a video for every damn single, each single was catchy and a hit, and he even scored some controversy points with all that "I Want Your Sex" business (but it turns out he didn't want "your" sex, he wanted "that guy over there's" sex).


Suspenders, a high-waisted belt, and an Amish-looking hat: definitely not gay. It was just popular for men to dress like "Downtown" Julie Brown in 1987.

And yet...looking back, did he leave us some clues as to which way he swung? Was it really all so shocking in hindsight (no pun intended, but see what I did there)?


Mesh shirts: not gay as long as they're tucked into your jeans. Without a belt.

To wit:

"Freedom '90."

Here's a song that was released on GM's second solo album, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1. Still waiting for Volume 2, actually, but see what GM did there? He was so tired of all the success and money and fame from his first solo album (the multi-platinum Faith, which scored him an endless supply of cocaine, cash, and women, I'm sure) that he wanted to do what all artists do: show the world that they are "serious" about *insert art form here* and focus on that. They want to make sure their audience knows they're mature artists, not just money-grubbing fame-whores. And they want their same audience to come along with them (i.e. keep buying all their albums because they're artistic, not because they want money) for their "journey". Can you please just listen to my music, without prejudice!? So, GM does this and is actually pretty successful with it. Listen Without Prejudice made it all the way to #2 in America, stopped only by this man:


If you dress ridiculous enough, you will be #1 in America.

And, GM did it without ever appearing in his own videos. This was the heyday of MTV, people, so that's a big deal. MTV was literally making pop-stars via videos from 1983 until probably 1996 when they stopped showing videos and replaced them with reality television (and now they're making stars out of those attention whores...this is how a person named "Snookie" can be famous without irony). But GM, who plastered his unshaven face and tight-jeaned ass on everything possible in 1987 and 1988 to promote Faith,


Feathered hair and state-trooper shades: not gay at all. As long as you wear a leather jacket over your wife-beater.

decided to forego all that "promotional" hoopla on Listen and just sing the songs. Often, he would use super-models as the actors in his videos, helping foster a relationship between pop music and fashion that seemed to be something people cared about in the 90s.


An unholy alliance, to be sure.

This brings us to "Freedom '90" and its hidden/not-so-hidden lyrics. The video was the first to use super models instead of the pop star, and was directed by David Fincher, who would later bring you "Vogue", "Janie's Got a Gun", and Fight Club.



All this is fine and good, but it's the lyrics we're concerned with here:

Heaven knows I was just a young boy
Didn't know what I wanted to be I was every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy
And I guess it was enough for me
To win the race? A prettier face!
Brand new clothes and a big fat place On your rock and roll TV
But today the way I play the game is not the same
No way
Think I'm gonna get myself happy

Ok, that's not too obvious. Just a guy singing about his boyhood dream of being a little bit famous, being popular, and getting on TV. Cautionary tale though in the last couple lines..."today the way I play the game is not the same"...what could he mean?

But then we get to the pre-chorus bit:

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I told you so
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone else I've got to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Take back your singing in the rain
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man


These clothes certainly don't make the man...I mean, a lot of people wear sleeveless Ts and bright white shorts that are cut to show off maximum thigh, right? Wham!, indeed.

Oh. I see. Yeah, that's not really veiled at all, is it? People actually thought this was just about GM being a "serious artist" and not "just a pop star" or about him wanting out of his record contract. Sure.

And then the chorus:

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me

Pretty clear.

In all, knowing what we now know about GM, it makes the song better. He was able to craft a kick-ass pop song (I mean, you can't deny how great the song is) that also had a cathartic element that worked on 3 levels. 1) his opposition to his own fame, a theme that is rampant in music industry whores; 2) his need to get out of his contract with Sony; and then 3) the actual matter of his hidden sexuality, that could have been the catalyst for all the self-loathing and self-promotion in the first place!
It's pretty brilliant, in a way.

Now if only Tom Cruise or Christian Bale had a recording career...


Impossible.

Is this Swedish girl from the Future? Pt. II

Funny, she doesn't look like a Japanese robot. Because, seriously, Japan has singing robots.

So, after a long (like, very long) absence, I have returned to satisfy the 10 or so of you out there who have been patiently awaiting our follow-up to the "Is this Swedish girl from the Future?" post from almost a month ago.

In our last blog, we explored the first part of my two-part thesis to explain the Swedish musical phenom known only as "Robyn". Recall that the first prong of my thesis was that Robyn was a musical genius, akin to WC Handy or Little Richard. Further recall that this prong was thoroughly and quickly debunked when it was revealed that it was not Robyn who was the musical genius after all, but her songwriter, Max Martin.

Crestfallen, we dive into prong two of the two-prong thesis: that, in the alternative, Robyn is from the future.

Now, I know this is yet another incendiary thing to say. Surely Robyn cannot be from the future, for time travel has not been invented, right? And if it was invented, surely it was not invented by the Swedish, as they spend their time inventing safe automobiles and expensive-yet-cheap furniture for young professionals to covet.


"Use the giant screwdriver on the giant screw and hold a map in front of your upset tummy while putting together this miserable furniture." - IKEA instructions for the Bjarnum.

Or, no, only the Japanese are from the future, because that's the only logical explanation as to why they would produce such weird toys, literature, and anime?


I mean, seriously, this is weird, right?

The reason I'm positing that Robyn is from the future is because after she had moderate success as the proto-Britney Spears, she went on to have (probably) less-than-moderate success being the progenitor of another pop singer: Fergie from the (hopelessly embarrassing) Black Eyed Peas.


U-g-l-y, Fergie has no alibi.

Now, wait a minute, you say. How can this Swedish chick be both the forerunner or Brit-Brit and the forerunner of meth-faced Fergie? There hasn't been that much talent in one person since at least Michelangelo!


At least not since this Michelangelo...

But yes, I do believe Robyn was the talented forerunner of the talentless Stacy Ann "Fergie" Ferguson. And here is the song that helps me prove it:

Robyn - Konichiwa Bitches.mp3

That's Konichiwa Bitches, from Robyn's 2005 self-titled album. For those scoring at home, Robyn also speaks Japanese (or at least knows the same amount of conversational Japanese as I do), which helps lend some credibility to the whole future hypothesis a little more, don't you think?
Also, check out this creepy video with a sock-monkey playing drums while she inhabits a 2D cut-out world reminiscent of a Tex Avery/Pee-Wee's Playhouse acid trip:



But back to the music, doesn't that song sound a whole lot like a little hit Little Miss Devil's Dust had in 2006, Fergalicious?

	Fergie - Fergalicious .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

I know the songs are not EXACTLY the same...but just like in our Britney/Robyn comparison, I think there are strikingly similar elements in the delivery of the lyrics and some of the melodic content. Not literal copying here, but copying of the "essence" of Robyn, which I think lends credence to Robyn's talent outshining the talent (or lack thereof) of Stacy Ann "Hillbilly Crack" Ferguson.

Now, this time around we don't have the songwriting link between the two works (will.i.am wrote Fergalicious, while Robyn and Klas Ahlund wrote Konichiwa Bitches. Actually, there were ELEVEN writers listed for Fergalicious. Yeah, ELEVEN. I guess it's really difficult to come up with lines like: "My body stays vicious/I be up in the gym just workin' on my fitness" or to rhyme "I'm tryin' to tell" with "clientele"), so it's not a Max Martin-type thing. Further, we don't have the connection of working with the same producers at subsequent times, either (as Britney Spears worked in Sweden with the same team that had worked with Robyn). So, without any other evidence, I think it's pretty obvious: Robyn brought back her musical genius from the future.

Or, said another way, Robyn was simply born too early. The world wasn't ready for the slow-rhyme-talking and disinterested style of Robyn in 2005. Perhaps it was the inclusion of the Japanese word that people didn't respond to? Perhaps it was the "Bitches" in the title, as the world was maybe a much more conservative place in 2005 than it was in 2006?


Glenn Beck didn't get on TV until 2006, so there was no one in the country to compare Hitler to everything while using "air" "quotes" in 2005.

Probably not. I think it's just another case of poor Robyn getting passed up, in the right place, but a little bit early.

Or...maybe they're just both rip offs of this (start at the :29 second mark):

Supersonic.mp3

That's JJ Fad's Supersonic, from 1988. I definitely spent some time roller skating to this jam back at Doyle-Ryder.


Uh...yeah, something like that.

Turns out Arabian Prince (a former member of NWA, no less, which proves that gangster rap was not nearly as threatening as white people would have you believe) wrote and produced this song. He eventually sued will.i.am for the striking similarity to Supersonic. Looks like he won, or at least settled, too, as 3 of those 11 writers on Fergalicious are the writers credited on Supersonic.


Arabian Prince is the guy you don't recognize over there on the far right.

So, perhaps my second prong of a well-crafted thesis has also been disproved: it wasn't that Robyn was some Swedish angel from the future coming back in time to give us a glimpse of the music Americans would spend their dispensable incomes on; it wasn't that Robyn was only a conduit for the fame and fortune achieved by a Crank Skank and a man who uses lower-case letters and punctuation in his own moniker in order to appear ironic or artistically wisened (Fergie and will.i.am, respectively); it wasn't that Robyn really got screwed over for being too talented, either.


"Scante" Ferguson and Billy "i.am.william" Adams, Jr.

It was that they both probably had old copies of the same JJ Fad record.


Stockholm was rotten with copies of this record in 1989.

Not nearly as groundbreaking or sexy a proposition, if you ask me.

Is this Swedish girl from the future?

Robin Carlsson - the Swedish Marty McFly?

Anyone out there heard of Robyn? If you were graduating from high school and watching a lot of MTV back in 1997 like I was, then you've answered "yes" to the preceding question.
Robyn is the Nordic pop-princess that brought us such hits as, "Do You Know (What It Takes)", "Show Me Love", and "Konichiwa Bitches" (to which we will return).
I remember seeing the video for "Do You Know (What It Takes)" on MTV (at a time when they still showed music videos) and really liked it. I mean, I was admittedly a music snob back in high school, with music snob friends, so for me to admit this was pretty difficult to do. I think that I had earlier admitted that I did, in fact, like Duran Duran - and this was a breakthrough that allowed me to publicly approve of Robyn in the summer of 1997. I liked Robyn so much, in fact, that I purchased the CD-single of the song, "Do You Know"...perhaps it was because I thought it was funny, perhaps it was because I really liked songs with parentheticals, or perhaps I really did enjoy the new sounding pop of this Robyn with a 'y'. Either way, I was pretty happy with my purchase (and now-defunct Tower Records was happy for me to have their overpriced CD).

Fast forward to 1999. I'm living in San Jose, CA now, working at Warehouse Music and am introduced to a new pop-princess, American style: Britney Spears. I'm sure we don't need to go over this, but, Britney Spears was the high school girl that couldn't really sing but looked great in her 'not-yet-barely-legal' Catholic schoolgirl uniform dance video that took over pop music for a few years (500,000 copies sold of her debut single in one day) because she preyed on statutory rape fantasies and the dispensable income of young people aged 13-21 (these two phenomena are not related).


"These are the furry epaulets that will change music...forever!" - Britney Spears

As you recall, her debut single, "...Baby One More Time", was a monster. The video was everywhere, it was played all the time, and the whole country now had a female analogue to their fascination with the Backstreet Boys and N*Sync. Perfect.

I heard "...Baby One More Time", but I wasn't struck with Britney's bad singing, I was struck by the overwhelming similarity to a one-named Swede who was pretty much forgotten by now: Robyn.

Listen to the two side by side, and you've got pretty much the same song. All the way down to the vocal stylings of Ms. Carlsson (who can sort of sing) and the vocal impressions of Britney Spears (who cannot), the two songs are strikingly similar (to use copyright infringement parlance) to me. Maybe not the same exact melody or chord progression, but the style is certainly the same, right on down to those eighth-note synth parts and the ultra-clean harmonies (well balanced, to boot).

Compare for yourself (we can wait 9 minutes):

Baby One More Time.mp3

01 Do You Know (What It Takes).mp3

I was upset by this. No one remembered poor Robyn, with her bleached blonde anime bangs from 1997; everyone wanted Britney Spears to save pop music, to bring back its youthful glee (largely absent since the over-exposure of David Cassidy, et al.), and to rake in millions of dollars. All Britney did was steal Robyn's style and put a youthful face on it. No justice.

So this leads me to the first prong of my thesis: Robyn was a musical visionary, and Britney Spears is akin to Elvis Presley.

That sounds incendiary, I know, to equate Louisana/Mickey Mouse Club trash with Mississippi/Memphis/gospel music trash 'The King', but think about how similar the situation is: Robyn puts out her album in the US, it does ok (maybe that's an understatement, it did go platinum), but she is largely forgotten. Britney comes along 2 years later, does pretty much the same thing but puts her plaid skirt and pigtails on it and it's a sensation (like, 14 times platinum). Just like Elvis stealing rock n' roll (whether he stole that from Little Richard is for another time). Right place, right time. Sorry Robyn.


The possibility of an NSFW up-skirt shot surely contributed to at least 1 million of those sales.

Well, it turns out that Robyn and Britney's striking similarities may not have been due to musical prolepsis/Britney Spears-being-like-Elvis after all. I did a little research on the matter (not that you're surprised by this), and found that the link between Robyn and Brit-Brit is actually this man:


Max Martin - a Swedish musical badass that is always getting chased by sharks.

Max Martin is a Swedish music producer/writer that has pretty much written most of the popular songs from the end of the 90s and on into today (a quick resume? "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"; "Since U Been Gone"; "California Gurls" to name a few). I mean, really, you look at the guys resume and you can't really believe he was involved in so many hits! He's like Lionel Richie, but Swedish! He did a lot of work with American pop acts (Britney, Backstreet Boys, and Kelly Clarkson, to name a few), but he started with hometown artists like Robyn. That's right...this guy wrote "Do You Know (What It Takes)" a couple years before he wrote it again for Britney, this time as "...Baby One More Time". Lightning strikes twice, I guess.

As a side note, although Martin did write many of Britney's best songs ("...Baby One More Time", "If You Seek Amy", and "3" *a fantastically underrated song, I might add*), he did not write her best work, which is obviously (and undisputed-ly) "Toxic".


Thanks to two ridiculously-named producers (Bloodshy and Avant) we have this masterpiece of synth-pop and surf guitar.

Britney Spears - Toxic.mp3


With the first prong of my thesis so thoroughly disproved, we'll put that aside and continue forward into the second part of this post and prong two of thesis:

Robyn must be from the future.


With our limited research, we believe this to be the most likely means of travel for Robyn.

...to be continued in Part 2!

Serendipity or Plagiarism? You decide.

Not to be confused with this "Serendipity", which everyone has decided is crap.


Driving home today, I heard the following on the radio.



That's Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun In The Summertime" from 1969. A fantastic song for a summer day like today. Hearing Sly Stone is usually a great experience and I highly recommend it.

As I was listening to the chorus, the encyclopedia of pop music in my head was cross referenced to the volume "L":



That's Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain" from 1979's In Through the Out Door. Strikingly similar? You betcha...and I can guarantee those English blokes had heard a Sly record or two by the late 1970s.

As the Family Stone continued another volume of my inner encyclopedia of pop music was brought down from the shelf...Volume "G":



That's Genesis' "Misunderstanding" from 1980's Duke. No hiding here...more English blokes, led by a drummer (Phil Collins), taking liberally from an English band with a pretty damn famous English drummer (John Bonham of Led Zeppelin), who took liberally from a pretty damn famous American band (and really, who made a career out of 'taking liberally' from anyone and everyone who wrote a song and didn't become famous for it). I think serendipity might be out on this one.

Then there's this piece to the puzzle:



That's Toto's "Hold the Line" from 1979's Toto. As far as it fitting into the lineage (before Genesis), here's what Toto's famous drummer (Jeff Porcaro) had to say:

That was me trying to play like Sly Stone's original drummer, Greg Errico, who played drums on "Hot Fun In The Summertime." The hi-hat is doing triplets, the snare drum is playing 2 and 4 backbeats, and the bass drum is on 1 and the & of 2. That 8th note on the second beat is an 8th-note triplet feel, pushed. When we did the tune, I said, "Gee, this is going to be a heavy four-on-the-floor rocker, but we want a Sly groove." The triplet groove of the tune was David's writing. It was taking the Sly groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman approach - from Modern Drummer Magazine, 1988

So, I can further guarantee that Genesis knew of Toto (since they were a band made up of very famous, very employed session players that got together to lay down all-too-perfect music of their own), and just ripped them off too.

Nothing against Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks, mind you, I like "Invisible Touch" as much as the next guy...I'm just hoping Sly got his props.

-C Murder

Genius at Work

True genius knows no bounds.


The title of this post is "Genius at Work", and it in no way reflects the author, but people the author considers genius.

There's something about people that produce great things (whether they be works of art, music, literature, etc.) that I find completely compelling. In fact, I have no problem DVR-ing an hour-long documentary about the making of the Sydney Opera House (Jorn Utzen you clever bastard!) or full length features on the evolution of 8-track recording (about that rapscallion Tom Dowd, see "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music") or the making of Duran Duran's Rio on VH1 Classic.


Duran Duran: Genius comes a-yachtin'.

What intrigues me about these endeavors is the process involved. We look at something like the finished product of the Sydney Opera House, for example, and we see a cool looking building with some spheres and cones and shit. Pretty sweet. But what's more interesting to me, is how in the hell:

1. They came to that design.
2. They actually made it!


The Sydney Opera House, which its architect has never seen in person.

I think we take for granted the process of execution when we see the finished product. I don't have to be a world-famous (or relatively obscure) architect to appreciate how f***in' hard it must have been to create those spheres out of concrete, put them up, and make sure the building didn't crash down around them!

So, yeah, I'd say that's pretty genius. Now, that's genius by committee, but still pretty bad ass.

The same can be said for the way I approach music. Now, this is not to say that all musical endeavors are genius (see Michael Bolton, The Jonas Brothers, and Soulja Boy), but there are some that certainly are.

To wit:
"Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys.

	BEACH BOYS - 01 - Wouldn t It Be Nice .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Now, it seems rather innocuous on its surface, as a lot of Beach Boys' songs do, but I ran across this, and it helped further embed Brian Wilson as a genius of popular music and music production. Take a look:



Listening to Brian Wilson direct that assemblage of studio musicians (that's the "Wrecking Crew" who played on just about every song that came out of LA in the 60s/70s) I am blown away at how he can put those layers together.
Keep in mind that this is also 1966. At most they had 8 tracks (if Tommy Dowd was there, see supra note), but they probably had 4. So, they had to have all the music played live, no room for overdubs, no individual tracks to punch in and out of, and according to [*ahem*] Wikipedia, it only took 21 takes...pretty amazing. Then you've got the tight harmonies of the vocals, that blend with that overall production. It really is amazing (and this is before The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, too, an album that everyone tried to replicate once it came out in 1967...yet that album and Pet Sounds, from which "Wouldn't It Be Nice" comes, sound like peers).

My appreciation for it skyrocketed once I saw/heard the process of recording. There is so much value to the end product that is not seen because the end product is so good! The process is invisible, and you're left with a work of art. Also, I find this stuff incredibly interesting. To see Brian Wilson's process is to peer inside of his creative mind a bit. Obviously, he's not the best communicator, but the ends justify the means here, for sure.

I also think the construction of the song itself is pretty genius. To me, as is said in that short tube YouTube documentary above, it's "a happy song about not getting what you want". That's pretty apt. And pretty genius. Brian Wilson wrote a song that could come across happy, and yet be pretty depressing when you look at it through that lens.


Robert Smith of The Cure did not invent 'happy to be sad', after all.

That's how I've always viewed the song. Though, in my frame of reference, I don't even think it's all that happy.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long,
And wouldn't it be nice to live together, in the kind of world where we belong?

That's not really that "happy" of a sentiment, you know? It's framed by the "Wouldn't it", which really makes it a song that laments the current state of the singer, while couching it within an upbeat context. He's saying, it's not great or nice right now, but wouldn't it be if the following things happened? Really, it's no different than the lamentations of say, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", "I'll Follow the Sun" by The Beatles, or "I Wish" by Skee-Lo.


Skee-Lo probably wishes he had 8 'D' batteries.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up, in the morning when the day is new,
And after having spent the day together, hold each other close the whole night through?

Ouch. That right there is heart-wrenching, isn't it? I mean, if you've ever loved and lost (author's note: check that box, 'yes'), then this is a kick-in-the-stomach kind of line. When you find yourself in that category of people then that's how you feel: it would be nice to do those things, but they are past. So this can also be read as a lamentation of the past, when things were better, and you wish you could return to them (see also, "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder, and "Glory Days" by Bruce Springstein). And yet the music remains pretty happy throughout. Damn you Wilson!


5 out of 5 experts agree: getting dumped feels like this.

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true,
Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do
We could be married
And then we'd be happy

Wouldn't it be nice?

Again, taken from the perspective of the singer that wants these things but can't have them, or has lost them along the way, this takes us further down the spiral of depression. He says "maybe if we wish and think and hope and pray"...so he's trying to be positive about the possibility of all these future things out of reach that might make him happy, yet he really can't bet on it. How true is that, Brian Wilson?

And again, it closes out with "wouldn't it be nice", which is a question, not an answer to all the problems the singer has presented us with throughout the song. Does the person he's singing about know he feels this way? Does that person want these things, too? Does the singer even want them, or is it just a comfortable nostalgia for a relationship that never was? At the end of the song, there isn't an answer to Brian Wilson's question; we don't know if it "would be nice". We think it would, but instead of answering definitively, he just lets it linger.

I'd call that genius.

Further proof of the powerful juxtapositioning this song can provide can be seen in Michael Moore's film, Roger & Me, a fantastic little piece about my depressing hometown of Flint, Michigan. Seen in the clip below is Ben Hamper, an auto worker who had a bit of nervous breakdown the day he lost his job and heard "Wouldn't It Be Nice" on the radio on the way home. He recounts a bit of the story below, and then Moore uses that to jump into a montage about the Flint of 1985. Check it out:



So, yeah, that's kind of what the song embodies for me, too: a lost ideal that we will still hold on to, even when everything around us begs us to question the ideal's very existence. But for me, I believe it does exist - and it would be nice.

Genius.