This Must Be the Place – great cover by Miles Fisher.
Tagged: music RSS
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80s Music Played as Ragtime
Pretty dang successfully, too. I love anachronism so much.
Total Eclipse of the Heart at the end is the best one.
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Did I just get Rickragged?
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An Album for Maundy Thursday
I review Elvis Perkins’ new album. You don’t need to read my review, but you do need to listen to the album.Many songwriters put on affectations of suffering. The self-pitying artist is a familiar cliche. Perkins’ own personal history gives perhaps more justification for this than the typical post-bourgeois indie artist can claim. He had the ethos to pull off tragedy, and he did so to much acclaim in Ash Wednesday. And this is exactly why the progression from Ash Wednesday to this new album is (wonderfully) surprising.
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Presidential Sing-a-long
President-elect Obama has an impressive repository of tunes, penned in his honor. A quick re-cap:
This was catchy.
This had a hott backbeat and lots of strings, but only one actual lyric and less English than the first one.
This was downright creepy. Especially the frenetic chanting at the end.
And now that Barack has been elected, the formerly-hologrammed will.i.am was supposed to release a third song, titled “It’s a New Day” here, yesterday. He has failed to produce, but I’m looking forward to hearing what he comes up with.
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1) This is a total Austin post. Brian has gone meta-hip.
2) Lots of extremely attractive multi-racial people in the will.i.am song. Does Obama not have ugly fans?
3) I hadn’t seen the second will.i.am video before. The first one was disturbingly moving. Must be because I’m a Gap-wearing, latte-drinking, blue-state white boy. But this second one… I swear this looks like an SNL parody. “I believe in Barack Obama because he believes in us.” !!!
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Entertainment Update
I’ve been pretty disappointed by this TV season (looking at you, Fringe and Pushing Daisies!), which has me rooting all the more for Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. There’s a new trailer and it looks pretty good, as TV trailers go.
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While looking at that trailer, I saw a preview for another mid-season Fox skein called Lie to Me. The show looks pretty bad, but has a song Frank and I have been listening to quite a bit the past few months. The title also reminds me of one of the most amazing and angsty Joss Whedon penned Buffy episodes. At the end of a harrowing day Buffy and Giles wait over the grave of their friend, who has been turned into a vampire. Buffy asks Giles if life ever gets easy. Her friend emerges from the grave and Buffy summarily kills him.
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: It’s terribly simple. The good-guys are stalwart and true. The bad-guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats and we always defeat them and save the day. Nobody ever dies… and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.
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Remembering Michael Crichton: The first Michael Crichton book I read was Sphere, and immediately after chewed through his entire bibliography. The conclusion was at the same time startling and satisfying, like no other novel with a ‘twist’ ending that I had read. I’m sure he had his duds (I’ve deliberately skipped a number of his movies, including the movie version of Sphere and Congo) but Michael Crichton clearly had a rare mastery of storytelling with books, movies, and television. My boss at the library told me that when she finished Andromeda Strain she couldn’t sleep for days afterwards. Everyone seems to have at least one story of a Michael Crichton story really affecting them.
Michael Crichton had his personal problems, and I noticed that his novels began to read more and more like movies in recent years. But perhaps I was just getting older, and the quality of his output remained the same? If so, thank goodness I discovered him early! His books stand with Robert Louis Stevenson and the best genre writers, and I certainly hope that after he has been dead for a sufficient period of time he will enter the literary canon. He was not a Christian, but like Dickens he was damned smart. It will be interesting to see if his common-sense objections to anthropocentric global warming will be vindicated by history.
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While looking for a decent Michael Crichton obituary (the search continues), I was surprised to see an obituary for Yma Sumac. More surprised to see that she had died so recently – her persona was so larger-than-life that I assumed her to be from another time. She was a sensation in the US in the 1950s, a novelty act perhaps comparable to Josh Groban in our time. She had a reported 5 octave range, the largest in the world. I’ve posted a song to the music player so that you can experience it.
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That Dollhouse promo looks incredible, if only for the question, “But can you wipe away a soul?” YES! I’m there for this, most definitely.
And wow, Bon Voyage getting used in TV. Always a nice way to put some coin into the ol’ family coffer.
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Nope, sorry. I still win. Take another look at the Killers’ album cover, this time while singing (to yourself if you like), “Are we human, or are we dancer?”
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THE MOLITOR
I think that’s the guitarist on the cover, right?
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New Song for You
[xspf]_start(FALSE, ‘mode=2&order=11′)[/xspf]
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Labor (Union) Songs for Labor Day
I was thinking about all the sweet labor songs that are out there, and this playlist happened.
Notice (and these thoughts are particularly for Chris and the anti-capitalist crowd) how early labor songs borrowed tunes from Baptist hymns, and how the tone gets more and more messianic as things progress.
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Testing the post box.
1. Good news! The post box that appears at the top of the blog when you’re logged in works! Enjoy!
2. If you’d like to add mp3s to the player, mention the song in a post and I’ll add it to the side.
3. I’m trying out a new feature: the HPN lifestream – http://halfpastnoon.com/lifestream/ Right now it just has me, because I don’t stalk you all on the internet.
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“Good news!”
You forgot the “everybody” part. I seriously can’t read that line without hearing Farnsworth’s voice.
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F is discussing. 
A 4:56 pm on August 24, 2009 Permalink
Tag clarification – by The Girls Can Hear Us, not Daft Punk. Just reminded me of them.