Recently, Alyssa Rosenberg praised the smooth, albeit incomprehensible, flow of a french female rapper, Diam.

I like flow fast, and full of bravado.  But most of all, I need my flow to be smooth.  You can’t hear the breath pauses in Diam’s voice.  She’s going fairly fast.  The phrases aren’t chopped up.  Just gorgeous.  I realize this is a prejudice, born out of debate (and yeah, it’s called flowing there too) where the ratings you got for your speeches declined the choppier and breathier you sounded (content counted too, of course).

I don’t enjoy commenting on rap or hip-hop because I barely listen to it, and there are people out there who know so much more about it than me, but this statement bothered me. Ignoring the obvious problems with her love of Diam’s raps given the language barrier — content counts too — I think having this view of flow in rap is a little limiting. And yes, I know that she’s only making a statement about her preferred form of flow, but even with that caveat this seems too restrictive.

That amazing BET Cypher I posted a few months back exemplified what I’m talking about here and that’s that flow is flow, smooth or rough. Mos Def kicks it off with a silky smooth free-style, just totally relaxed with the words practically melting off his tongue. I love it, but after that Black Thought comes in a goes to a whole other level, with the staccato roughness of the rhythm. You can hear the gasps in between words, he’s fighting to get the words out, his mind’s racing faster than his muscles can work. There’s an intensity to it that just elevates the already amazing words. It’s a different sort but it still flows, more than the others to my ears.

I surely have my own prejudices that lead me to enjoy the struggled staccato a little bit more than the effortless silky delivery, but I think bowing down before either style, regardless of the content and the message, is a mistake. I think you have to know where the words are coming from to understand and appreciate the flow; the breathiness, the choppiness, and everything else all contributes something to the content of the song; whether its endorsing, subverting, or otherwise affecting the content, it’s there for a reason.

I’m still neck deep in NaNoWriMo and still hoping to get the requisite 50,000 words finished in the next week and a half, but before I go on, I gotta post this amazing video, a riff on Lil Wayne’s “Let The Beat Build” by Nyle.

The thing that takes this beyond being just a great song, which it is on its own merits I think, is that the video is all one shot and the audio was recorded live. As the beat builds (har har) each new instrument gets shown on screen as it gets introduced, building it all up until you have this huge choral routine at the end. It’s just great.

Aside from that, you can really tell that the people involved are just having a lot of fun. All the little moments in there are great: when Nyle walks in front of the trombonist and almost gets hit by slide and nobody misses a beat, they’re all just having so much fun with it; the way the taller violinist bounces around to the rhythm when she’s not playing; the nods of approval when that random dancer slides into the shot at the group outro. I’ve watched this video a dozen times today, and I just keep enjoying it more each viewing.

In this increasingly connected world, I’m obviously not the first to discuss this on their puny insignificant blog and I certainly won’t be the last, but Michael Jackson is dead at 50. My eyes welled up when the initial shock washed over me. He went beyond all superlatives. And, despite his troubled life, he will be missed. Though, I suspect, never forgotten.

Last night, yet another of the final episodes of Kyle XY aired, and the show still manages to amaze me with its ability to draw realistic characters while maintaining its sci-fi arcs.

I started watching Kyle XY for a lot reasons. The first reason I had was the music: there’s an ongoing thread in the original scores for Kyle XY that, to this day, reminds me of Explosions in the Sky. And we all know that Explosions in the Sky’s music makes even the most mundane moments seem epic so the early moments of the show were greatly enhanced by the minimalist bombast of the score. I mean, there’s a scene where Kyle eats a freaking muffin in the first episode that makes it seem like he’s climbing Mount Everest.

So the music made me stay for a little while, but the thing that really made me stick around was the novelty and realism with which they handled a character with complete and utter amnesia, though it’s not really amnesia per se. The scene I linked to earlier is Kyle’s first meal. He didn’t know what food was or how to eat before that scene and his discovery of it is handled very well. In a scene shortly after this he pees his pants because he didn’t know what that strange sensation he was having meant. There are lots of little interesting trains of thought brought up through the narration in those early episodes that offer a fantastic look at what it might be like to be born fully grown. This sort of storytelling is already very much in the realm of science fiction, but the show goes beyond that by introducing Kyle’s superhuman abilities and the mystery of where he came from, why he isn’t there anymore, and why he has no bellybutton. And while those sci-fi elements are interesting, the thing that really truly makes me excited to see each new episode is the characters.

When I wrote about Kyle XY getting canceled I mostly brought up its sci-fi aspects, but the real world relationships are why the show is so good. That science fiction is a part of the tapestry of the show is surely a reason I enjoy it, but I get as much pleasure from Kyle using his super genius brain to hack into a mainframe as when he’s super nervous about his first date with Amanda.

Last night’s episode had some of the sci-fi stories to tell, but the real beauty of them was that they were there to facilitate telling stories about the characters. Kyle used his ability to visually explore memories to help Jessi, his female bellybutton-free counterpart, get some closure on the disappearance of her mother. Those scenes also brought some much needed empathy and humanity to Jessi and managed to convert me from a Jessi pseudo-hater into a full-on Jessi/Kyle shipper. And all of that happened in just one of the plots of the episode. In another thread, Josh and Andy, one of the best teenager relationships — one of the best relationships in general to be honest — on television, are forced to deal with their impending separation. And he makes all the stupid mistakes you know you shouldn’t make when you’re desperate not to lose the most important person in your life. Josh began the series as the slacker joker who never takes a moment seriously and if you started watching this show with this episode you would have been amazed at his evolution and growth.

I wish this show was continuing on. Mondays at 9, two shows come on that I watch: Heroes and Kyle XY. I think you all know my stance on Heroes by now, but I haven’t done my due diligence in expressing my love of this sweet little show. Don’t let the fact that it airs on ABC Family dissuade you: this show is worth your time. Enjoy it while it’s still here.

Making fun of Matthew Good lyrics is a time-honoured tradition for me. I used to do it on my old blog and in the occassional short story, but it’s been a while so I thought it was time again. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy (some of) Matthew Good’s music. In fact, the song I’m about to ridicule is one of my favourites by him. Here’s the start of the song, which is primarily spoken word over instrumentals.

You know, today I was asked only one question
One question all day
Do you know what that was?
“Do you want this supersized?”

Bullshit. Balderdash, even. Granted, I can come up with one or two extremely specific scenarios where that could happen but the most typical one — ordering food at McDonald’s — would have a question preceding that simply asking for your order. Lawyered! I get it, you think society is nothing but mindless corporate drones and pigs at the trough. I really do appreciate the inclusivity of your politics. I mean, I know I’m opinionated as fuck, but at least I target my disdain at specific groups which are disdainful not the entire fucking world.

Supersize guns
Supersize planes
Supersize satellites
…
How about we supersize 3rd World debt relief?

Laaame. Seriously, that’s just a stupid line. Supersize 3rd World debt relief? How ’bout you supersize your ego? Oh wait, that’s not possible. Also, I know you wrote this song when Canada was running a surplus but dude, we’ve got enough money problems as it is. Let’s put out our fire before we go water the neighbour’s lawn.

Around here our ambition throws a non-perishable item in a donation bin at Christmas
And it pats itself on the fucking back because it thinks it’s done something decent

Yes, Matt Good. Please belittle all the people in the world who try to be generous. I guess they’re not generous all the time so you might as well treat them like shit for giving even a bit of a damn. That’ll get society to be nice and apathetic, and that’s really what your music is all about isn’t it?

What always confused me about Coldplay’s newest album was that North America got Violet Hill first and Europe got Viva La Vida first, when it was clear that the latter was the superior song by virtually every metric. Does it deserve to be Song of the Year? Well, I’ve been sort of away from the music world for a while so I’m not going to pretend to have a strongly held opinion on this. But at the same time, I have to wonder if a song whose greatest strength, at least with respect to me, is that it reminds me of a fantastic promo video for NBC’s upcoming show Kings is really deserving of Song of the Year? Maybe it’s just me and my dangerously growing obsession with all things TV. Regardless, congrats to the Coldplay boys; it’s still a pretty good song.

A friend of mine recently linked to a parody music video on facebook about riding the TTC. I’ve seen lots of parodies on youtube over the years but for some reason this one made me have a sudden realization about how the internet made Weird Al Yankovic obsolete.

Back in the day, Weird Al got started by working with Dr Demento and singing short easy parodies. It was really something that any relatively talented and funny guy could do if given the opportunity by working with Dr Demento. But Weird Al is the one that did it, and with a bit of savvy he turned that into a successful career as a song parodist.

But today, Weird Al, or some modern day analog to him, would be unlikely to move beyond a youtube or myspace page with a few million views. Popularity? No doubt. Celebrity? No way. That world where a moderately talented guy with access to distribution has been replaced by one where thousands of very talented people vie for notoriety in an incredibly accessible and incredibly competitive environment. The internet has done more than made things more easily available: it has also made us all increasingly more critical. In this new world with millions rather than hundreds or thousands of content generators, we all need to judge things harshly or all our time (and then some) would be monopolized by mediocre content.

It’s this increased competition and accessibility that makes the music industry, and really all media industries, in so much trouble. Piracy has existed ever since media could be reproduced even in rudimetary forms. Piracy is not the reason sales have decreased. The problem is that competition and access have increased.

Christian Rock sucks. It does. You shouldn’t try to defend it, you should be more worried about why you listen to such shitty music¹.

It’s shitty half of the time because it’s cloying and cliche and the other half of the time because it’s deceitful. The first half is the stuff you see in one minute mini-infomercials late at night. The second half is the stuff that makes it out of the core Christian Rock culture and into mainstream rock.

Switchfoot. POD. Seventh Day Slumber. This Beautiful Republic. Christian Rock bands generally have really lame names. And if you run across the music of any of the bands that “pass” as regular rock, you’d probably like it enough to listen but not enough to love it. It becomes a part of the din of songs that get played on your local rock radio station. But, for me at least, when you find out they are a Christian Rock band, suddenly every time their songs come on you can hear nothing beyond their hidden evangelizing.

It’s not that I dislike that they infuse their music with their religious beliefs; the best music comes from your most strongly felt emotions. But those bands go about it in a deceitful way. When interviewed they claim they’re not “Christian Rock” even when they began their career in the highly accessible Christian Rock tours that can really raise the profile of up and coming bands. I understand that the label of “Christian Rock” has a dirty connotation to it, but it has that because of bands like those that deny the meanings behind their songs. Rather than admit that they’re praising God, they pretend the song is about a girl.

The less notable segment of Christian Rock isn’t much better. With their over-the-top references to Jesus and God, they go beyond simply expressing their feelings and thoughts and head into the world of evangelizing. And when your songs are little more than evangelical chants wrapped in rhythm, you not only lock yourself into the Christian base, a base which doesn’t need evangelizing in the first place, but you reduce your credibility as an artist.

I’m an atheist but that doesn’t mean I detest religion; I simply have no need or desire for it in my personal life. But many of my favourite shows and movies have religious and mystical concepts at their very heart. So don’t think I hate Christian Rock simply because it involves God. I hate it because it involves God poorly.

An example of a band which is not Christian Rock but has lyrics which discuss God and Jesus very openly (and earnestly) is Page France. I’ve listened to most of Page France’s “Hello, Dear Wind” and overall the album’s a little weak, but the tracks that I find myself returning to since the initial listen — the opening two tracks (Chariot, and Jesus) and the closing track (Feather) — all contain various levels of religious and Christian symbols. But the key is that those songs talk about Jesus and God in novel ways, and they appear to be not an active part of their music. Their songs don’t include God because they think their songs should include God, but merely because the songs they end up writing include him.

I said Christian Rock sucks, but the truth is that Christian Rock shouldn’t even exist. Like the “Pro-American” parts of America Sarah Palin talks about, Rock music isn’t something to be chopped up and spread among ideologies. Music which contains religious references isn’t Religious Music. Categorizing music is fine, in fact I Love it, but there’s a difference between an adjective and a noun. A noun is what you are, but an adjective is simply a modifier. Much like the difference between calling a gay person “a gay” and “a gay person” it seem nominal at best, but the difference is staggering in its connotations. And far too many people don’t treat “Christian Rock” as an adjective followed by a noun.

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1. With apologies to Daniel Tosh [↩]

Music today, popular music anyways, seems to rely much much more on catchy hooks and addictive beats. There’s nothing immanently wrong with music like this, but the fact is music can do better.

Verses have become afterthoughts, subsumed by choruses and pre-choruses. What’s worse is that songs often begin with the chorus now. Starting a song in media res is not daring, innovative, or Tarantino-esque. It’s simplistic song writing, relying on simple repetitive overgeneralized lyrics which water down the more complex issues dealt with in the verse. As OutKast said in “Hey Ya!” about the song’s message that Love is not magical and eternal: “Y’all don’t want to hear me, ya just want to dance.”

Our culture is far too invested in distractions. I can hardly act self-righteous about this point given the sheer quantity of television I watch. Escapism is something I do every day. But often my escapism isn’t into a shiny happy world of harmonies and melodies. It’s a gritty realistic sobering take on life in space that takes on issues our society grapples with daily. Or it’s a tale of battles between good and evil occurring in one of the darkest times in our recent history. The things I watch and listen to for entertainment inform my views of the world today. If the same is true for the people who listen to current pop music as their predominant music then future generations are fucked.

Music was most likely the first art form our species experimented with (this can be easily disputed by virtue of the ephemeral nature of sound, but at least intuitively makes sense) so its power should not be underestimated. We began with simple grunts and rhythms and as we grew more sophisticated we developed harmony and melody and with the advent of language we incorporated lyrics into the tribal drums and bone flutes. So don’t tell me lyrics don’t matter.

Lyrics do more than repeat tropes over newly generated beats. And if you have nothing of value to say with your words, then let your instruments do the talking. I have nothing against a catchy beat, and I have no fundamental issue with pop music. I simply believe that music doesn’t need to be watered down, nor should it be; it should be distilled into its harshest, most biting, most truthful. One of my favorite songs of recent history is Casey’s Song by City and Colour which contains the lyrics “With you on my mind and my heart held in your hand, screaming ‘Break me’” and that’s it. I don’t need a verse to elaborate on that, those few words along with the accompanying music tell a story better than most exposition-laden pop songs.

It may seem like those two points are contradictory but they’re not; I want terse and smartly written lyrics, but I’m not willing to put up with pop music’s current love of short verses and repetitive choruses with little substance. Pop music is popular music, not bubbly vapid superificial music.

I don’t have them. I don’t understand why anyone would. A guilty pleasure is something you supposedly dislike liking. This is some form of public self-loathing that everyone seems to revel in. Liking The Spice Girls isn’t anything to be ashamed of; it’s just another part of who you are.

This is just another example of overspecialization our society encourages. If you like mostly rock music then you are a Rock Fan. Or maybe you’re a Post-Rock Fan. Or a Neo-Post-Punk-Rock Fan. The hyphenates only grow.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of categorization, in fact my recently started project is very much about deep and robust categorization of data. I simply believe that the fundamentalism many people employ when creating these categorizations is unnecessary.

It’s because of this fundamentalism that people simply decide that to enjoy a particular type of media, you must enjoy only that type and anything else is a “guilty pleasure.” It’s another form of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy; no true fan of Punk Rock could unironically enjoy The Backstreet Boys.

There’s a problem with this kind of mentality because it leads to division. As the breadth of information our world can offer is expanded by the Internet and mass media, we become inundated by more and more types of information and we need deeper hierarchies of data to be able to think about it coherently. But this doesn’t mean we need to apply such strict boundaries on what we take in, or prefer to, to simplify ourselves for the rest of the world.

In the end, everything we are is a part of who we are. Liking high-brow humour does not exclude you from enjoying low-brow humour, nor does enjoying scripted dramatic TV shows exclude you from enjoying Reality TV (though hopefully, having intelligence excludes you from the latter).

I can understand the mentality behind telling people that certain things you enjoy are guilty pleasures because it not only tells them that you like something, but it also tells them something about the thing you like; it’s a sort of implied metadata. But this particular snippet of metadata is grossly overused in our culture, exactly because we seem to have devolved into a world exclusive esoteric niches.

As this post has hopefully exemplified, I’m not a man of extremes; having a broad swath of interests, some overlapping, some seemingly contradictory is a good thing. But guilty pleasures sound ugly to me. It degrades you for saying that you should be above this but you aren’t, it degrades your audience by establishing false pretenses with them, and ultimately it degrades the thing you like. Liking something in spite of its origins or your initial perception is not a cardinal sin, nor should it be, so don’t act like it is.

I like CDs; they’re a high fidelity standard that everyone agrees on. While SACD and DVD-Audio are higher quality and offer surround sound, most music is stereo — if only because we don’t care whether the rhythm guitarist was behind or beside us — and the increased quality is noticeable but not exceptional. They’re nice, but unnecessary. But CDs? CDs are awesome. They provide a permanent physical digital representation of music. The best part about them is their lack of copy protection. This isn’t a hippie/pirate thing, though I appreciate file sharing for the ability to get introduced to new genres and bands that radio doesn’t offer; I still buy music, but without file sharing you’re buying blind. No, the lack of copy protection and DRM is purely for historical purposes.

Many audiophiles rave about the warmth of vinyl records but because they’re analog the sound is not perfect. It sounds pretty much the same with each new listen but subtle variations can crop up. I mean, it’s not a huge deal but it matters when the same piece of vinyl has been played thousands of times and is sitting in a vault five thousand years from now, right? So CDs offer a digital alternative. There would be a bit of MacGyvering to get sound from ones and zeros, but if phonographs were lost and all the future had was the vinyl, it would be equally difficult to reverse engineer sound from those little bumps.

There’s a lot of talk about digital downloads taking over from DVDs and CDs and, in my opinion, it’s just the naivete of younger people who think that whatever new thing they grew up with is the wave of the future. People will always want that physical thing, that thing they can hold in their hands, that thing that was made by a professional, that thing that is theirs. It’s identical to all the others but it’s unique nonetheless. But I could be wrong. I still don’t see how social networking sites can replace real physical contact with friends and yet that’s just what they accomplish for many people. But I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want CDs to be obsolete.

I have over a Terabyte of hard drive storage on my main computer. In fact, I’d have more but a couple of my drives are disconnected because my power supply doesn’t have enough SATA power cables. I store lossless copies of all my CDs there in FLAC format, and I also have mp3 versions for standard consumption. I don’t usually listen to the FLAC because my mp3s were made at very high bit rates and the difference is mostly indiscernible with my sound system and my ears. The FLAC is there for archival purposes. But that’s not what hard drives are good at. Hard drives, and similar media, are good at quickly erasing and rewriting data. And they’re susceptible to magnetic phenomena, so any attempt at using them for permanent storage would be foolhardy. What if, for example, during the great pole switch, that occurs periodically on Earth, the magnetic shift disrupts all earthbound hard drives? (I’m talking out of my ass here, someone please correct me if I’m wrong…)

The key here is that CDs remain. They are much more permanent than most other forms of digital storage. And they’re something you can hold. I still maintain that the tactile feeling of holding a CD can add a lot to the enjoyment of music. Flipping through the liner notes, reading the lyrics if the band prints them there (if they have lyrics), all of that lends to the mindspace that that particular set of songs imbues within you.

One claim is that with digital downloads you’re provided the luxury of buying only the tracks you like. There are two problems with that. The first problem is that it’s not always the best songs that get play time. An example from my own life: my favourite band is Interpol; I think their debut album “Turn on the Bright Lights” is the best album I’ve ever heard. Every song is amazing and gets better with each listen. There were four singles released from that album. They are all great songs but none of them are the best song on the album. Not only that, but the best song of the bunch that were released as singles has the part that makes the song so fantastic cut out to make it shorter for the radio. The point here is that if all you listen to is what mainstream media offers to you — or even what the band has to offer on their MySpace — you might not be getting the piece that speaks to you the most. Sometimes you need to take that leap and buy an album. If it sucks, it sucks, but then there are those diamonds in the rough that change the way you feel about the world. And all you went in looking for was a catchy single.

The second problem is that offering single track purchases can deflate the purpose of the album. Despite what many of you might think, the concept album is not an extinct species. Not every musician in the world listened to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and decided they’d never do better so they shouldn’t even try. Many concept albums may even masquerade as regular albums, or vice versa as was the case with American Idiot. There’s a song, Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt, on The Mars Volta’s debut album “De-Loused in the Comatorium” which is a good song if listened to independent of the rest of the album. But when listened to as the final song of the album, it transforms into a powerful conclusion to the ongoing, albeit vague and byzantine, story. You’re not only robbing yourself of the true potential of a concept album song by hearing it out of sequence, but you’re also disrespecting the intention of the artists.

This doesn’t mean that I think, or even want, digital downloads to go away. They provide a convenient source of music, both mainstream and independent. This gives independent bands the chance to get their music out there without going through the costly process of CD manufacturing and distribution. But it is not a replacement, it is an augmentation. Ultimately, if the music of these independent bands is good enough, a CD will be produced.

Humans are a social species, and it’ll take a few millennia of slowly evolving brain chemistry to change that, so the so-called “Brick & Mortar” stores of today aren’t going anywhere; we simply like the company, even of strangers, far too much to give it up. I love the convenience of going to amazon.com and ordering exactly what I want and getting it a few days later, but sometimes I want to wander around a store looking at band names, looking at album covers. Some of my favourite album have been purchased, or downloaded and subsequently purchased, on an utter whim with something as inconsequential as the look of the album or the weirdness of the band name to convince me that the album was worth my time. I think, and hope, that, by and large, most people are like that and that won’t change any time soon.