Ever since somebody decided to feature one of my blogs in the community section, which is hugely flattering, and I got disproportionately excited about it (I need to get a life), my profile has been inundated with visitors. So I've decided to start a playlist so that I can blog about something other than myself for once. I've decided to refer to the artists actual names rather than their profile names, but only where they make that available on their profile. After all, I don't want to violate anybody's privacy.
Linsey Pillow - Prayer for a Husband
I think Linsey Pillow is brilliant. You may say, "yeah, well you think Taylor Swift is brilliant". I do, and not only do I think that Linsey Pillow is brilliant in the same way as Taylor Swift, but that she's even better. She writes better songs, and mixes genuine teenage, girly innocence with some pretty strong insight (and, if you've read her blogs, remarkable theological orthodoxy) and what's more, her record contractlessness renders her impervious to any accusations of being disingenuous corporate whore. In fact, Linsey could never be accused of being any type of whore. Actually I feel a little guilty about even using the word "whore" (three times) at all when writing about her.
Now Linsey is a christian songwriter, which, even as a christian, is a term that tends to provoke my gag reflex. "Christian Music" is basically any other type of music, repackaged for kids whose parents labour under the delusion that all music is evil unless it specifically invokes Christianity. As a result it has spawned a whole industry of corporate whores (four, sorry) ripping off popular musicians but with lyrics containing artistically empty, pseudo-religious thematics to the order of, "blah blah blah, Jesus is cool." No, sorry, Jesus is not cool, and neither is Linsey Pillow. But she doesn't care. Her music isn't lame pastiche with a Jesusy veneer, it's art. Real art. A true expression of who she is, and she's really nice. She leaves really nice messages on your wall, wishing the very best for you.
As to the song itself, I'll quote the comment I left on it on her profile, which she said was the best comment ever. Why did she say that? Because she's really nice.
"This song is wonderful. In fact, I think it's the first 5 rating I've ever given. The melody and chords are simple and moving and are totally sold by your performance. The lyrics are not only well crafted, but also show that you have a really firm grasp of what God intends for a marriage to be, and I really admire your attitude towards it. And do you know what's awesome? God answers prayers like this."
Dumb Blonde, Dead - Time and Taxpayers' Money
It's amazing that I like this song despite the fact that it does so many things that I hate. Partially the nerdy male vocals, but mostly lyrical references to other artists, not so subtle declarations of "indie" tastes, and cliches about the good dying young, churches burning down, not being sure about how you feel about something... blah, blah, blah... in fact, lyrically, the verses are pretty weak, but the chorus is just class. The line, "What a waste of time and taxpayer's money," is brilliant. In fact it's so brilliant that even though I wish the verses had some real relevance to it, I still love it regardless.
Otherwise, the song does everything right. It has a wonderful, memorable melody, and the female vocals are faultless, and the duets just lift the chorus to the right level. The subtle guitar arrangement serves the song, and doesn't overburden the melody. The structure too, keeps thing short and snappy, and makes sure that you get enough, but not too much. In fact, one might even describe the song as economical, which holds relevant to the lyric.
I've also put on Gillian's solo version of Prince's "When You Were Mine", which I feel is proof positive that awesome vocals make a track, and the instrumental accompaniment is just that. And Gillian's vocals are awesome. By their EP at:
You've probably noticed that I have a major soft spot (not a hard-on you cynical bastards) for girls who play guitar and write songs. Shoot me, I do. That'll do for now. I'll write about other artists later.
Considering recent events I suppose writing any kind of blog about Taylor Swift, particularly concerning her "You Belong with Me" video, obliges me to pass comment on Kanye West and his outburst at the MTV VMAs (Admittedly I wouldn't have used both abbreviations if I knew what "VMA" stood for. But I don't, and I don't care to).
Of course to have an opinion on that little episode, I would actually have to watch it, so I delved into YouTube, only to discover that it was damn near impossible to find the actual footage due to the dozens of video blogs on the incident, misleadingly titled such things as: "Kanye Disses Taylor Real Footage". Bastards. Do they really think I give a damn about what they think? No. I want to witness this buffoonery myself.
And yes, I'm well aware of the apparent irony of my bitching about people blogging about something, in the middle of a blog about the same topic, but really this is just context for my real topic. But I digress...
I'm sure it's been said before, but it bears repeating: Kanye West is a massive tool. What's more, I decided to look up Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video that Kanye claimed to one of the "greatest music videos ever". Now it's a decent, fairly catchy pop song, and the video is very well choreographed, but hardly a world-beater. So, I looked up Taylor Swift's "You Belong to Me Video" (Now featured on my profile), having some vague memory of having seen it before. I watched it... and I liked it.
I like Taylor Swift. I'm not sure why, but I do. I'll probably never buy any of her albums, so I obviously have some understanding that there is something about Taylor Swift that should make her unacceptable to 23-year-old male music fans, and yet I really enjoy that video.
The song isn't the most original thing in the world, and does resemble early Avril Lavigne, and the pre-chorus section is immensely similar to "The Girl All the Bad Guys Want" by Bowling for Soup (an anthem of my teenage years... ah... nostalgia), but it is pretty catchy. The video is obviously a high budget studio production, and of course the whole thing smacks of major label marketing, and yet I can stomach it. I think it's because Taylor Swift is genuinely a teenage girl, and the music she makes may be multi-million-selling pop, but it is still a genuine expression of who she is.
Curiously, Green Day, those self-styled rebels, political revolutionaries and anti-corporate voices of a generation also accepted an award in the same show. I think this revealed, to those to whom it was not already patently obvious, the disingenuous nature of Green Day's "Revolutionary" image. In contrast, Taylor Swift genuinely is a naive, adolescent girl. She dated a Jonas Brother for goodness sake (but thankfully broke up with him and escaped the evil clutches of the satan-worshipping, Jew-hating monster that is Disney).
It even strikes me as strange that it is Taylor Swift's teenage girliness that I find endearing, when it is that very thing that I would criticise the movie Twilight for (I loathe that film). But while Twilight presents the world as functioning in the way that a teenage girl presumes it does (which it doesn't), Taylor Swift merely presents a teenage girl, stuck in a world that seems to go against all her presumptions:
"Why can't you see,
You belong with me?"
The reason the video works so well is that is tells a story parallel to the song. The song narrates her inner, emotional narrative: the love, the longing, the self-consciousness and comparing of herself to other people:
"But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find, That what you're looking for has been here the whole time"
Meanwhile the video picks up the outworking narrative; the events that are demonstrative of and influenced by this inner narrative. The fact that they can see into each other's bedrooms, their own little worlds as it were, is a great method of demonstrating their ability to see each other for who they really are. The use of writing signs to one another to communicate is a brilliantly simple, visual device, which creates the narrative payoff at the end.
My favourite screenwriting tutor once told us that a blonde woman in film is visually suggestive of her transgressive nature, and that this is a symbol made convention mostly by Film Noir. I however disagree. I believe that Film Noir's use of the attractive blonde as transgressive and "sinful" is a subversion of the image of an angelic figure ("Angel's with Filthy Souls" if you will). Taylor Swift's appearance at the dance at the end of the video presents the audience with an angelic figure, in contrast with her dark, slutty, brunette alter ego of the cheerleader girlfriend.
In taking a chance on expressing her real feelings to the guy, she lays transparent who she is in front of him (who probably already knew) and everyone else, and the true nature of the character is angelic. She is herself, and she really is beautiful. She gets they guy and they live happily ever after, I suppose.
The underlying theme of both song and video is the desire to be loved for who we really are. While being expressed through a teenage girl in this case, and being particularly relevant to teenagers who are still figuring out who they are, it is a universal theme, which appeals to pretty much everyone. I guess that's why I like it.
Or we could watch Beyonce dance. Personally though, I don't think an erection is the yardstick for a good music video. And if you did get an erection from watching the "Single Ladies" video you obviously didn't listen to the lyrics.
Incidentally, I wrote all this while listening to the "Butthole Surfers". Go figure.
So, to continue my more art related blogs I think I'll tell you a bit about the new song I've posted up here (called "If" in case it's not screamingly obvious).
Firstly, I'd like to say I'm not going to reproduce the lyrics here, you can find them attached to the song in my Mp3s section, and secondly, I'm not actually going to tell the story of who or what the song is about like I did with "Petty Theft". Why not? Because I'm not a cryptic songwriter and it's pretty apparent what the song is about, and there isn't really an amusing anecdote behind it. If there is a story, it isn't mine to tell...
What I am going to tell you is how the song evolved. It all started with me messing around my Dad's old Fender acoustic (my muse instrument of late), after listening to Bon Iver's album "For Emma, Forever Ago". I found a few chords I liked, a little melodic thing here and there, and pretty soon I had a verse and chorus part and sat and wrote most of the lyrics.
Altogether the song took a few days to write, mostly redrafting the lyircs. The interesting thing is the instrumentation. Although my flatpicking/strumming style in this is loosely a country/bluegrass technique, the song itself certainly isn't. And although I initially thought I'd do the song with only a couple of acoustic guitars, the banjo and the mandolin parts just seem to be there when I was playing it to myself. The full band version will have drums, bass, an electric guitar and an organ as well, but the bluegrass instruments lend themself to the song for some reason.
Then of course, all the vocal parts came out of me not being able to decide how exactly I wanted to sing the chorus. So I recorded all the ideas I had, and mixed them as well as possible, the strongest track being the octave of the melody. My mother recently told me I should try singing an octave higher than I do in most songs. Funnily enough, it works. I don't hit flat notes as much, even if the high notes are a stretch, it does give my voice an element of... I don't know... desparation? Grasping? And hey, that's thematic in this song.
Like most of my favourites of my own songs, I wrote this in a short space of time, pretty much knowing what the song was about from the offset. All the parts were written purposefully for the song (not made from spare parts).
So the two guitar parts on the recording are my Dad's old fender, the banjo is mine and the mandolin belongs to my sister.
I feel like it's a bit of a waste just using my blog to bitch about things, so I thought I'd give that shit up and write about more interesting and productive things. So, first off, this is the story behind my song, "Petty Theft" that's been up here for ages... the names have benn abbreviated to protect the guilty...
A few years ago, my friends and I all got together in Belfast when we weren't at college and went to see Chuck Berry, figuring we'd probably not get the chance again before he dies. The man was 80. Anyway, the next night, which was my buddy, D's last night before he returned to San Francisco and I went back down to Dublin, we were at a loss as to how we could top Chuck Berry. But we managed, and it was all thanks to me.
I had an ill deserved reputation for being bad with women. It's not true. I'm just horrendously unfortunate thataways. But the four of us went out to this bar, and J and D wanted to meet girls. I wasn't enthusiastic about the prospects. D was going to chat up some girl and wanted me to entertain her friend, whom I initially had mistaken for being two people. I had a better idea. I saw a group of four girls, all reasonably pretty, except one who I just thought was stunning, and I suggested seeing as there was four of us and four of them... well you don't need a PhD in applied mathematics to work this one out.
I started a conversation with P, the real knock-out. D got to dancing with her tall, Swiss friend. P turned out to be, not only pretty, but funny, interesting and we had a lot of stuff in common, she really seemed to like me, she laughed at all my jokes she used words like, "attractive" to describe me. I thought this was going ridiculously well. We introduced D to her cousin, B, who tried to tell me something, but I couldn't hear her. At this point P turned to me and said, "I'm sorry. You seem really cool and I really like you, but I have a girlfriend."
All I could do was laugh and think, "This could only happen to me."
Anyway, we talked on and she ended up asking for my phone number anyway. A little later J came up to me and said into my ear, "Go on, get in there y'boy ye," or something to that effect and I had to tell him, "No, dude. She has a girlfriend."
J laughed and said, "This could only happen to you."
He and B are still dating. Thus is the product of my hard work.
Anyway, travelling back down to Dublin on the bus I kept humming this melody in my head, over one of the lines (I forget which one) that made it into the song. By the time I got back to my upstairs room in the house of Cronin (that's a long story) I had a first verse and a chorus, and then I had to sit down and work out the chords. That's unusual for me. Usually I get a guitar bit I like and then work in the vocals on top. I think this may have been the only time I worked out the instruments around a pre-written vocal melody.
After a couple of years of gradually whittling down three verses to two (I cringe at some of the original lyrics I wrote) I recorded it for your listening pleasure. It's a flawed recording, but I still love the song.
I can't believe I haven't mentioned it before now, but I played a gig last week. As part of (Dublin) Abbey Presbyterian Church's yearly art festival I opened a couple of evening gigs. Both evenings I played three songs on my own and another three accompanied by my brother on guitar and my sister on flute/mandolin/vocals.
My solo numbers were all original, even a few songs that I haven't stuck up here yet (give me time). I think I did "Petty Theft", "Take a Deep Breath", "Invading Imagery", "The One You Got", "Just Asking", and... er... "Seein' You Again".
All the tunes I did with my siblings were covers arranged for our three-piece sound (flute/mandolin, banjo/dobro and guitar). We did "From Where I'm Standing" by Schuyler Fisk, "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show, an old Appalachian folk tune called, "The Blackest Crow", and finished with "Helpless" by Niel Young.
I'll try to stick up some photos (Copyrighted and courtesy of Niamh O'Rourke).
My laptop is dead. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and I have disposed of its earthly remains. I've just finished college, so now I actually have the time to sit and work on my writing projects, I no longer have a computer.
I'm moving out of my flat on Wednesday, and leaving Dublin, to move back in with my parents in the North. Damn it. I love my parents, but I moved out four years ago, and I've invested too much time and effort into the illusion that I'm an adult to give it up now.
But I'm broke, unemployed and £15,000 in debt. Most of that is owed to the Student Loans Company, and they're not going to see penny one of it for a very long time.
There are good things going on in my life too, but let's face it, I just write blogs to bitch about things, and in this case, to apologise if I don't reply or contribute as regularly as I did.
Being a grown-up sucks. You have to deal with wierd, complicated, interpersonal shit that just shows you that everyone is screwed up and does stupid fucking things and hurts people they're supposd to care about and lie and pretend that nothing's wrong. Everything is shitty, fucked up and broken and sometimes you get to see it so crystal clear, that it makes you sick to your stomach.
But after dealing with all the crappy parts, sometimes, just sometimes you find bits that are wonderful.
One of my sisters is studying nursing in Edinburgh, and her current placement is in surgery, and this has provided her with a few stories that are really worth sharing.
The first of these takes place a few days after Valentines day, when a nurse from the gynecology department rushed into the break room to show the nurses there a specimen jar containing a strawberry that had just been removed from a middle-aged woman's vagina.
The wierd thing is that the woman wasn't in surgery to have it removed, she was actually having a more common gynelogical procedure, but when the doctor performed a smear test he found traces of a, "foreign object." Apon further investigation they discovered a half-decomposed strawberry lodged in the woman's vagina. Of course it's hospital procedure to formally identify any foreign object removed from a patient, so it was given to the nurse to take down to the lab in a specimen jar, with the doctor's name, the patient number and the surgical procedure written on the front, along with a label which read:
Let's face it, as a die-hard Alan Moore fan I felt it fairly inevitable that the film adaptation of Watchmen would be disappointing. After all, V for Vendetta missed the mark and From Hell was utter shite, so why should Zack Snyder's big screen rendering of another Moore classic be any better? But somewhere, in the back of my mind I thought, "300 wasn't bad, maybe, just maybe he'll manage it. Maybe he'll make the cinematic masterpiece that the comic book rightly deserves."
And was I disappointed? Yes. Even more than I thought I would be. Not because the film was irredeemably bad, but rather because it was so nearly so good. The screenplay was wonderfully adapted; David Hayter and Alex Tse really excelled themselves in stripping down the complex, multi-strand narrative into a three-hour movie and still retaining the core narrative, characterisations and meaning of the comic. The cast were well chosen and all act their hearts out, Patrick Wilson and Billy Crudup both give stellar performances as Niteowl and Dr. Manhattan, and Jackie Earle Haley steals the show in his perfect portrayal of Rorschach. But its all in vain, for Zack Snyder's shallow attempts to relive the hyper-stylised visual triumphs of 300 rob the audience of the ability to engage with the characters and the story properly.
In 300, stylised visuals, especially action sequences, are used to great effect, creating the necessary aesthetic distance from the extreme violence, and emphasising the gracefulness of the spartans, and thus giving the audience cause to sympathise with the principal characters while they perform horrendous acts of barbarism. The characters are fairly shallow and one-dimensional, so the text loses nothing through the distancing of the audience.
However, the key notion of Watchmen is a discussion of super-heroes in the "real" world. The entire story of the comic book acheives its effect by making the audience sympathise with its characters, all representing different viewpoints, and then setting them in opposition to one another. This deeper, psychological empathy with the characters creates excitement without the need for spectacular action sequences and horror without the need for graphic violence. Snyder, however, contrary to the "visionary" label awarded him in the trailer, utterly sabotages the story's inherent grit by stylising the imagery to the extent that the audience are aware that they're watching a representation of something other than the real world, and they know that the people they are seeing aren't "real" people. This is the aesthetic distance. The audience can't empathise with the characters unless they doing something cool in an action sequence, and even this is a fleeting, shallow sympathy, as the story contains surprisingly few of these moments.
The stylisation allows Snyder to create extremely graphic sequences of violence that far exceed the visuals of the comic book, but create nothing except a superficial shock that fades in a moment, rather than the moral terror a deep emotional connection with a disturbed sociopath causes. Ultimately, Snyder trades the lasting for the fleeting, the important for the superficial, and in the end sells the soul of the story.
After investing hours of your life in reading the comic book, growing to love and understand the diverse characters and being pulled through the complexities of the plot the ending Moore leads us to made me feel like I was losing my mind, and I wanted to scream, as Nite Owl does. Sitting in the cinema screen, I was frustrated at my own inability to empathise with the characters, and the ending does not produce the maddening horror of the comic book, but a mere exhalation. Oh.
The truth is, Zack Snyder didn't really try to make Watchmen into a movie, he just tried to make the comic book move. He's no visionary, he's just fashionable right now. If you've never read the comic book, you'll probably enjoy the movie, thnik it's pretty cool and not feel like you're missing out, but there is more. Read the comic. It's not flashy, or action-packed, but it'll make you feel like nothing else.
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planetogo's blogs, last updated : October 10, 2009
