Music repost
Jul. 4th, 2009 02:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaIt's been one month exactly!
Blur - Miss America
My written (well, typed) Chinese has improved by leaps and bounds since I started hanging out with the Britpop kids on Douban, but there are still limits to what I'm able to express - conceptual limits, I think, rather than linguistic. (Why?) I can say something like, really digging "Miss America" at the moment; in particular, the pervasive tinkly sound in the background, like multitudes of glass windchimes moving in the summer breeze, at a distance. But I don't know how to write about the laziness of it, the sense of open space conferred by the room reverb (what headphone geeks call 'soundstage'), the startling intimacy of the vocals in contrast. I DEFINITELY have no way of saying Blur sound like Pixies, not because they make the same kind of music, but because if you imagine the native sonic palette of a band as a randomized box of crayons, then Blur and Pixies were issued maybe 7/10 of the same colours. Blur went off to sketch the entire contents of the Tate Modern, and Pixies made a lot of creepy drawings like fifth graders asked to describe their alien abduction experience in an episode of the X-Files. Think of "Song 2" as Blur's illustration of a flying saucer. I am not entirely certain it's possible to think like this in Chinese, let alone write, so when people say (justifiably) "bullshit Blur and Pixies sound nothing alike" I back away from the internet argument.
On the other hand, there is no language in which it is impossible to mock Damon Albarn's hip-hop trousers.
[Bill] Wasik noted in his book that the 13th and 15th cities that listened to KEXP Seattle online the most were Beijing and Guangzhou (Shenzhen?). That doesn't come as a surprise.
Another parallel which didn't occur to me as I was writing this was that Pixies = the last time I spent six months getting into a back catalogue band and learning their language, only for them to reform and start touring to universal acclaim. The difference being that I went to see teh Pixies. XD; Who are gigging again, incidentally, but only in Europe. BTW it's entirely possible to think like "this" in Chinese, but you have to make the mechanism explicit, as if explaining some point of logical deduction in a philosophy text.
Hamasaki Ayumi - Part Of Me (Carl Craig Instrumental Remix)
At some point I'll have to find a download of ayu-mi-x 6. Coldcut! Freeform Five! Black Strobe! The 2005 me would've been rolling on the floor. These days I'd probably end up preferring the dnb remixes. They should've tried to get hold of Burial, that would've been gorgeous.
I don't expect any of them to top this one, though, regardless of style. That's because Carl Craig seems to be the only one to have bothered to take apart the music of the original track - one of Ayu's prettiest, most dramatic ballads - to see how it worked, why it worked. How much of the twinkly chinoiserie arpeggio do you need to maintain the concept? Does it have to be a piano, or can it be a different instrument? Are the OTT guitars on the chorus necessary? The synth strings? An outline of the synth strings? What would you hear if the bass were brought up, instead of buried and perfunctory? How do you turn this into a track that sounds just as good with vocals as without, but different? Most importantly, can you add bongos?
(Full vocal mix here, pending getting hold of it myself.)
Crystal Kay - Boyfriend -Part II-
Promised summer jam #1; in fact, tied with “Ignition (Remix)” in my estimation for top summer jam of 2003. In an odd parallel, it’s also a vastly superior take on an original version, a non-single ballad released the previous year on her breakthrough album, Almost Seventeen. IIRC the single version was produced by m-flo (it was followed by “I Like It”, which was released as part of the “…loves m-flo” collab series and went Oricon Top 10). It sounds arguably less dated than “Ignition (Remix)”, although it occurs to me only now to wonder how to classify that distinctive burbling breakbeat of early-naughties m-flo’s. DnB? …Garage? I used to say m-flo were the Timbaland of Japan, but they’re probably more accurately the Basement Jaxx. If Basement Jaxx produced mainstream pop vocalists a lot.
This song is beautiful. I’m not sure how it comes off if you don’t speak Japanese, which is something I don’t often say for J-pop, because it mostly doesn’t matter. (The lyrics are included in the YTube video link above.) But part of the impact of it for me is that I buy what Crystal is singing, maybe because she was the right age (17! she had her first hit at 15!) to sell a song about a first boyfriend one’s moved on from but will always remember fondly. Taylor Swift sentiment from a half-black half-Korean Japanese R&B artist whose greatest inspiration (per Wiki) is Janet Jackson. The bridge still kills me:
Early-rise mornings, rainy nights
All those times I said “I want to see you right now”
I was a bother to you, wasn’t I?
I was a child in your eyes, wasn’t I?
I wonder - was there anything I could have given you in return?
Blur - Miss America
My written (well, typed) Chinese has improved by leaps and bounds since I started hanging out with the Britpop kids on Douban, but there are still limits to what I'm able to express - conceptual limits, I think, rather than linguistic. (Why?) I can say something like, really digging "Miss America" at the moment; in particular, the pervasive tinkly sound in the background, like multitudes of glass windchimes moving in the summer breeze, at a distance. But I don't know how to write about the laziness of it, the sense of open space conferred by the room reverb (what headphone geeks call 'soundstage'), the startling intimacy of the vocals in contrast. I DEFINITELY have no way of saying Blur sound like Pixies, not because they make the same kind of music, but because if you imagine the native sonic palette of a band as a randomized box of crayons, then Blur and Pixies were issued maybe 7/10 of the same colours. Blur went off to sketch the entire contents of the Tate Modern, and Pixies made a lot of creepy drawings like fifth graders asked to describe their alien abduction experience in an episode of the X-Files. Think of "Song 2" as Blur's illustration of a flying saucer. I am not entirely certain it's possible to think like this in Chinese, let alone write, so when people say (justifiably) "bullshit Blur and Pixies sound nothing alike" I back away from the internet argument.
On the other hand, there is no language in which it is impossible to mock Damon Albarn's hip-hop trousers.
[Bill] Wasik noted in his book that the 13th and 15th cities that listened to KEXP Seattle online the most were Beijing and Guangzhou (Shenzhen?). That doesn't come as a surprise.
Another parallel which didn't occur to me as I was writing this was that Pixies = the last time I spent six months getting into a back catalogue band and learning their language, only for them to reform and start touring to universal acclaim. The difference being that I went to see teh Pixies. XD; Who are gigging again, incidentally, but only in Europe. BTW it's entirely possible to think like "this" in Chinese, but you have to make the mechanism explicit, as if explaining some point of logical deduction in a philosophy text.
Hamasaki Ayumi - Part Of Me (Carl Craig Instrumental Remix)
At some point I'll have to find a download of ayu-mi-x 6. Coldcut! Freeform Five! Black Strobe! The 2005 me would've been rolling on the floor. These days I'd probably end up preferring the dnb remixes. They should've tried to get hold of Burial, that would've been gorgeous.
I don't expect any of them to top this one, though, regardless of style. That's because Carl Craig seems to be the only one to have bothered to take apart the music of the original track - one of Ayu's prettiest, most dramatic ballads - to see how it worked, why it worked. How much of the twinkly chinoiserie arpeggio do you need to maintain the concept? Does it have to be a piano, or can it be a different instrument? Are the OTT guitars on the chorus necessary? The synth strings? An outline of the synth strings? What would you hear if the bass were brought up, instead of buried and perfunctory? How do you turn this into a track that sounds just as good with vocals as without, but different? Most importantly, can you add bongos?
(Full vocal mix here, pending getting hold of it myself.)
Crystal Kay - Boyfriend -Part II-
Promised summer jam #1; in fact, tied with “Ignition (Remix)” in my estimation for top summer jam of 2003. In an odd parallel, it’s also a vastly superior take on an original version, a non-single ballad released the previous year on her breakthrough album, Almost Seventeen. IIRC the single version was produced by m-flo (it was followed by “I Like It”, which was released as part of the “…loves m-flo” collab series and went Oricon Top 10). It sounds arguably less dated than “Ignition (Remix)”, although it occurs to me only now to wonder how to classify that distinctive burbling breakbeat of early-naughties m-flo’s. DnB? …Garage? I used to say m-flo were the Timbaland of Japan, but they’re probably more accurately the Basement Jaxx. If Basement Jaxx produced mainstream pop vocalists a lot.
This song is beautiful. I’m not sure how it comes off if you don’t speak Japanese, which is something I don’t often say for J-pop, because it mostly doesn’t matter. (The lyrics are included in the YTube video link above.) But part of the impact of it for me is that I buy what Crystal is singing, maybe because she was the right age (17! she had her first hit at 15!) to sell a song about a first boyfriend one’s moved on from but will always remember fondly. Taylor Swift sentiment from a half-black half-Korean Japanese R&B artist whose greatest inspiration (per Wiki) is Janet Jackson. The bridge still kills me:
Early-rise mornings, rainy nights
All those times I said “I want to see you right now”
I was a bother to you, wasn’t I?
I was a child in your eyes, wasn’t I?
I wonder - was there anything I could have given you in return?
