I've decided to use pre-post notes to help remember. Don't read this.

old times payed for music had stake felt feelings
nowdays don't pay don't care
does this count as cheapening?
discourages audience/creator discourse what of concerts.

reinforces itself.
them what burned revert.
them what do know how to do it right.

Second listen change things
optimism or boredom or glass ears
one turns to two turns to maybe three

relent.
because natural state isn't ungood.
want to be happy so make happy
even when not so.

I will always tell you the truth.

Edit: So Griffin, I hear you coyly say, How would you build a Twilight soundtrack?

I'm glad you asked that question, shadow-audience. Surely, like purposefully singing off-key, scoring an awful movie requires no small amount of skill. Let's begin.

But how will you manage to dredge up a haunting yet romantic, cloudy-moody-skies love theme? THIS IS HOW


Well played. But how will you convey the stifling ennui that is being in love with a vampire at age 17? Why, that's easy I'll just give you some OH GOD DAMMIT SOMEONE HAS THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE ME AND MADE A COMPILATION VIDEO curses. It still works though. Just don't....don't watch it. Tab out.


I'm impressed so far. What about that luring sound to capture the essence of dreamy bein'in'love what will capture them young girls hearts and minds, BUT YET REMAIN TINGED WITH SADNESS? Ah, easy one there, I'd just sling some Bon Iver at them Oh dear, I'm afraid the real Twilight folks did that, they're disqualified CURSES! Very well.


You're really cooking now, chum. But these are all sad bastard songs! We need something that makes the ladies rip their bodices and wish desperately to be ravished by the dread vampire Flammablehair McGrimacey Lipcurl!
Allow me to drop one of the most sex-laden songs in the goddamn world. Cut some slow motion entrances in this and you'll have to mop up theatergoers after each viewing.


We're nearly there. But what about something we can peddle at Hot Topic, something from an indie-rock-pop group with an attractive female lead singer that appeals to the girlish masses and their dragged boyfriends alike?
Easy Peasy Paramo- No. FINE. SPIN ON THIS. LOOK AT HOW APPROPRIATE.


You're fucking welcome. God, I'm great. Yeah, you might as well just put on a frilly tutu and start making Team Edward-themed AMV's on youtube. That's how gay this whole farce was. It was a musical exercise shut up shut up.


I've dissected Twilight before, and nothing I say will be as witty or insightful as the hordes of more verbose and professional comedians who are going to leap (indeed, have probably already leaped leapt?) on this film.

Which I saw, by the way.

I bought a commemorative cup so that I may remember my New Moon experience forever.
Thankfully it depicts both oh-so-sinfully-hunky male leads flanking Whatsherface so I'm not forced to choose between Team Edward Broody Moodswing McFathead or Team Jacob Big McLargeHuge da Vincfucking seriously did you see that guys muscles.

(The obvious only acceptable answer is Team Alice/Jasper. Unfortunately, there wasn't a commemorative cup with them on it. Phooey.)

In all honesty, New Moon wasn't as bad as the first one.

Note the phrasing of this sentence. This is a wonderful logical strategy.
Observe: The bombing of Nagasaki wasn't as bad as the bombing of Hiroshima.

See? New Moon was relatively great.

My opinion might be tainted, however, by my personal viewing experience - id est, hearty chortling and cheerful shots of homemade skittle vodka paired with slackjawed facepalms and outraged song recognitions.

That last bit is the important bit.

I'm sure you all remember hearing 15 Step at the end of the first Twilight and groaning in the anticipation of a million Hot Topic-feeders suddenly claiming to love The Radioheads. And that Muse "theme song" was pretty alright too.

This second one had me raging a little harder - better songs, more diverse songs, from a larger pool of marketable artists.

That's the worst bit. In amongst the two -

Actually, let's reverse for a moment.

The Twilight Soundtrack's are a source of great fascination for me, because they just must be the end result of one of the most calculating and targeted marketing campaigns of the past few years.

The first one had a pretty predictable mix, all things considered.
It's divided into two categories: Vampire Romance, and Hot-Topic Teenage Movie.

In the Teenage Movie side we had a Linkin Park song, a Paramore song, and a song by the guy from Jane's Addiction. It's all pretty basic stuff, lala we're yooooung we're seeeexy lets frolick BUT I AM ALSO MOODY.

In the Vampire Romance side we have an Iron and Wine track, a second Paramore song, and some fiddly piano shit. Chicks dig that. and like any sweeping haunting professionally scored music set against flowing backdrops of the Pacific Northwest, it serves to set the scene perfectly. Suck on that.

New Moon added a third category: Sad Bastard Music.
Oh, there were still Teenage Movie songs and Vampire Romance songs intermixed but the general theme here was one of
HOPELESS
SOUL-DEVOURING
MISERY.

Here is the kicker: The franchise is, by now, such a goddamn money pinata that they were able to throw enough hustle-bucks at respectable artists that they recorded and released original and exclusive new tracks for the New Moon soundtrack.
This presents me with an odd dilemma. Do I on principle hate this music for being tainted not only with Twilight-venom, but blatant oily commercialism as well?
Or do I rejoice that some new songs have come out of left field by artists I enjoy and leave it at that?


There was a time when I would have been so fixed in Shun-Mode that I would've happily and ignorantly lambasted this music.
It is with great pride, then, that I can instead say that I'm able to be a grown-up about this business and just pick and choose the songs that are good, regardless of what teenage-girl emotional-pornography film it was produced for.

But back to the interesting point I was making: All of the good songs on this album blaze past the Teenage Movie section (which, if you were taking notes, contains new tracks by Death Cab for Cutie and The Killers. awful)
and the Vampire/Werewolf Romance section (new songs from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club whoever the fuck they are and Grizzly Bear you know who I don't think is great? Grizzly Bear. Fuck you, Everyone Indie. They Don't Sound Good. Neither does the Arcade Fire. Blow me.

Every good song is straight up distilled Sad Bastard Music.

Case in point: Thom Fucking Yorke put a song in.


Fucking OK Go, the most jubilant and sunny indiepoprock fuckers this side of Jupiter managed to make a sad bastard song.

Anya Marina and Lykke Li, two black-whirlpool level sad-girls-with-guitars each mailed in their contributions in sable envelopes.

And to cap it all off you can tell I've written this entire fucking travesty of a post just to get to this point, can't you Bon Iver - Motherfucking Bon No-Song-I've-Written-Hasn't-Resulted-In-Someone's-Suicide Iver - decided to team up with quindiessential (See what I did there? I thought that was really clever) St. Vincent lady to deliver this most hollow-hearted, life-is-over emotion bomb of a song.




Bon Iver has just become an accepted musical trope.
You play that stupid "hope you had the time of your lives" Green Day song Pomp & Circumstance at graduations, "Play That Funky Music White Boy" Wagner's Bridal Chorus at weddings, Rapper's Delight semi-unironically at high-school reunions....

And you play Bon Iver when you want to curl up into a ball and die of sadness.

Do you know the story? Do you know how Justin Vernon broke up with his girlfriend and band simultaneously, contracted mono, and locked himself in a cabin in Wisconsin for a winter? Decided to make an album with what he had with him? He just overlapped him playing his guitar and singing wordless melodies and added whatever words worked later.
In his own words: "I...went up there because I didn’t know where else to go and I knew that I wanted to be alone and I knew that I wanted to be where it was cold."
And he emerged three months later with an album - the saddest album that has ever been made.
Yeah. Episode of House where Amber died? That was Bon Iver.
I mean it's musically good, skilled, but if you can get that far past listening to it you're doing something wrong.
When you hear Bon Iver the correct reaction is to become ashen-faced and broken hearted.
Listen to this song. Listen and if, after that little loop halfway in, you aren't thinking about every regret you'll ever have, you aren't making enough regrets.

I suppose it was appropriate, that's what the characters in the film were doing when this song was played. So, in all musical respects, it's a fine song.

Am I okay with people hearing it and going "Bon Iver? I LOVE this guy! I love ALL his music!"?

Am I okay with reading this (verbatim) youtube comment posted only an hour ago: "i agree completely. Though im a twilight fan I havent heard of Thom Yorke before , and this song had me sold!"?


Yes. I'm fine with it. How great is that. They're learning about good bands through shit movies and maybe, just maybe, some of them will go and download some other songs by these artists and get into them and wouldn't that just be a triumph for music.
Think of how much worse it could have been. Think of how much Miley Cirus and Green Day there could have been.

You know what's going to happen now? The Twilight fanbase is going to glue to the indie-subculture and start liking bullshit bands like Grizzly Bear and parroting Pitchfork mag's bullshit reviews about their album being "compositionally and sonically airtight" (actual quote). Musicians will pander and everything will be ruined forever. Again. Due to vampires.

It's that time of the month

Edit: Day one of reuniting with the Alliance. Terrified the entire time. Surrounded by people I used to hunt down/hunted me down. No idea where anything is anymore. Spent entire day riding/flying in to Horde towns and getting chased out by guards.
Grouping is fine, the 5-man's I've been in are equal to previous experiences but I have yet to shake off the overall "Flameo, Hotman!" vibe I'm beaming to all these goddamn dwarves.


I'm gearing up for a change. And it's WoW related. You know what that means.


Strap in.

You know, I like the Blood Elves. They have a fabulous story. There was such an outcry when they first got released. The Horde, previously the ugly toughguy badass-exclusive race of beast-men, greenskins and lepers, revolted at the thought of accepting these vain, selfish, reclusive megalomaniac misanthropes. Because they were pretty, we feared that all the morons who would roll Night Elves and dance naked on mailboxes would migrate over.

Well, I say "we" as a greater reference. I personally was going "Fuck yeah, Blood Elves!". I hadn't played a spellcasting class yet, and I figured what better race to pick as a hurler of the arcane than a hateful, revenge-betrayal based sub-faction of polar-Night Elf opposites who were literally addicted to magic.
Not only this, they had actually managed to capture a Naaru and harness it's powers for itself - making them capable of wielding the Light by force.
Read: HORDE-SIDE PALADINS ZOMGGGGGG

Which is what I am now.
Okay, so, I mean, later on at the end of TBC, the Blood Knights actually banded together with the Naaru (and everyone else) and released the captured entity to combat Kiljaeden. They were then granted the gifts of the Light in a more traditional manner by A'dal, in light of our valiance. Pretty slick, guys.

But....I tire of Horde. I've had Horde allegiance for the past two years, but before that I always forget I was Alliance. And of course before that I was Horde again. Shhh.

I mean, the entire theme of The Burning Crusade was that of banding together to defeat a foe that would otherwise destroy us. All sorts of uniting, uplifting speeches by external third parties with phrases like "Put aside your petty squabbles! Or we are going to fucking die!

And we did. There was a single city, Shattrath, that was diplomatic - we had an armistice in place over the whole city. Alliance and Horde relations were pretty damned neutral.
I mean, we were still on Tichondrius, so we never sunk below a certain threshold of "Hey, an Ally. Want to kill him?". But what I'm saying is that sometimes the answer was "....Eh" instead of "CAMP HIM FOREVER".

Wrath of the Lich King has a totally different story. There's an even more ominous, massive, close-to-home level threat looming (read: The. Fucking. Lich. King.), but this time it's all about those petty squabbles.
Like, there's outright hostilities established between the Allies and Horde right now, and there's also significant infighting between different parties within each faction.

.....And it's fairly legitimate, I mean, the Lost King of Stormwind has returned - Varian Wrynn, who legitimately got his life wrecked by Horde slavers.
Er, and a section of the Forsaken betrayed everyone and killed heroes of both factions.
And all sorts of mishaps and toe-steppings continue to go on as both sides fight for the advantage against the Lich King.

The last raid instance, in fact, is a tournament grounds area set up by the Argent Crusade to prepare us for real combat in Icecrown - but even it has been tainted by this new hostility. All the gear is faction-themed, so the opposite faction's weaponry and armor look totally different than yours.


What I'm trying to say is, WotLK made WoW have two separate sides again, and I've only seen one of them. I haven't done Northrend as an Alliance, I don't know about the discovery that Muradin Bronzebeard was still alive (well I mean I do because I read up on it, I devoured that shit), I haven't seen the new Harbor in Stormwind (well, I mean, I have, but only as a trifling blur as we stormed past it to kill the King), etc.
You know what I mean.

So.....(suspecting and expecting this, I believe) the Dev team came out with the Faction Change. Like a name or server change, you can alter a preexisting character. In this case, from faction....to faction.
Which means changing everything - including race.

Well, I think you know who I'd be if I had to suddenly be an Alliance paladin again.

The Draenei have one of the most convoluted backstories in the game - due in part to the fact that there was a preexisting unit called the Draenei that turned out to be a corrupted, mutated version of these "pure" Draenei lookit'sreallyfuckingcomplicatedjustrunwithit.

So. Why not. Why not get ready for the inevitable switch to Alliance for Cataclysm, when we'll really have to pick sides.
And the Horde get a new leader since Thrall has to go become the next Tirisfal Guardian OHMYGODDDD THE LORE WHAT THE LORE ARE YOU, WAIT, GARROSH BECOMES WARCHIEF WHAT OH MY GODDDD
We're going Alliance for Worgen anyway, so why not have an 80 there to help the leveling process.

Plus, I mean, the Blood Elves were pussies anyway.

some like sinewy back arching cirque du soleil looking motherfucker

Look, okay, I'll put something up here later but right now you all have to listen to me very carefully.

I need you all to look around your rooms.
Do you have any laser pointers?
Do you have any strobe lights? Black lights? Oil lights?
I'll settle for a fog machine, a string of colored christmas lights,your iTunes visualizer, you flicking your overhead light on and off with a sheet of construction paper in front of your face.

Anything, really, anything at all that you can do while you listen to this


Edit: Right.So this guy, Derek Vincent Smith.
Mastermind behind "Pretty Lights", which is him as producer/beatmaker/DJ and, when doing live shows, one other guy on a drum kit.

I had never heard of this guy until I stumbled upon it a few days ago while (hey hey surprise) reading K-Murdock's blog.

These are some of the fattest beats I've ever heard.
Now, in the beat community, the predicate of "fatness" has a specific meaning when operating on "beats".

The only abiding definition of a fat beat is one that makes you make The Face the first time you hear it.

(The Face also comes in different variations. The Dance or The Move or The Sound are all just different versions. It's the body's natural response to fat beats - a sort of primordial "god damn".
Example of The Face is perfectly demonstrated by a Mister Shawn Carter upon first hearing of the fat beat that would eventually become Dirt Off Your Shoulder.
If you've done your homework clicking my links before, you've seen this look - exactly two minutes in.


Anyway.

Aimin' At Your Head (see top) by Pretty Lights came out of fucking nowhere, blew me away, and prompted me to do my regular research.
Turns out this guy is popping up in a lot of music reviews lately.
Turns out this guy has been on tour lately, with his live drummer and giant wall of LEDs.

Turns out he's releasing all his tracks out in free downloadable EP's on his website.
That alone is pretty god damned amazing, when you think about it.

What blows me away about Pretty Lights is that it's a culmination of exactly what I've been talking about for the past months.
Each track has a solid foundation in the obscure and funky soul tracks that are a staple of good beatmaking, but you only manage to hear them if you deliberately dig.
Because on top of them, he's layered the skullpounding drive of great house music, and chopped it all up with quintessential electro brainfuzz.

It's like they took all my favorite music styles and made a little super dream baby for me to have all for myself.
Here is a remarkable example:
Pretty Lights - Finally Moving

Good song. Soul samples and grooviness abound, right? But it's a little focused, a little too lazily drifting along.

So he remixed it. Did an electrohouse remix of his own song.


OH MY GODDDDDDDD THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IT NEEDED

It's like if Deadmau5 and Justice were put in a supercollider with RJD2 and Girl Talk.

It's exactly like that. It's so fucking good. Expect this man to blow up shortly. Expect new Texts From Last Night to show up namedropping the Pretty Lights show (at which they, I dunno, gave a handjob to a guy who looked like the Pope.)

And it's pretty diverse, within it's greater Subphylum!
There are fast songs and slow songs and more conventional popular music songs and more outlandish funk samples and holy shit this horn section sample is so fresh and so clean-clean.


SO. Number 5. To finish my list. Pretty Lights.

THIS IS WHAT I DO ALL DAY

Hahahaha I don't give ten shits about nine shits if you manage to choke this down, it's 2:05 in the goddamn morning and I'm amazing

PS EDIT: THIS IS WHAT I FEEL LIKE RIGHT NOW. JUST DRUMS AND DISTORTED BASS PLAYED LIKE A GUITAR AND MAYBE SOME SCREAMING AND MAYBE SOME LIQUOR UGH UGH UGH JACK WHITE STICK THIS IN YOUR FACE AND LIKE IT


Although the Cold War was –by traditional military standards- relatively bloodless, the decades of conflict and tension had as much socio-economic,industrial, and scientific influence as any previous war. Indeed there is an arguable case, due to the mass media coverage and level of widespread consensus ideology present during the Cold War, that it helped to shape American society on a far broader level than the World Wars. Stephen Whitfield, in his essay The Culture of the Cold War, follows this massive impact of the Cold War and associated anti-communist sentiments in America – specifically,the drastic influence they had on popular culture and the people who wrote, filmed, and viewed it.

The Culture of the Cold War presents, from the very beginning, an uncompromisingly negative view of the results of the Cold War entering popular culture. The mass mentality and fear produced led to, according to Whitfield, “the suffocation of liberty and the debasement of culture itself”. Although his language is strong, the primary sources that follow this claim excuse Whitfield of hyperbole (for the most part). The examples he gives range from the subtle to the blatant, from the merely pro-capitalist tothe outspoken hatred of Communism, from literature to gameshow television – and throughout all ofthem he emphasizes the fact that these were the sentiments of the majority of America. Anti-communist action was met “with popular approval and acquiescense”. (Whitfield, 218)

While Whitfield expresses intense disappointment at the homogenization of Cold War sentiment, his true contempt is saved for the culture that came of it. At the height of the Red Scare,Communist hatred and fervent Americanism had turned the greater entertainment industry into little more than a pandering propaganda and agitation machine. Not only was the media being produced pitifully single minded, Whitfield laments, it was also just plain bad. The same themes of fearmongering and anti-communist hysteria were played out over and over again with minor changes. Posters for films carried buzzwords in bold, warning/titillating/selling the RED MENACE taking over colleges (Red Salute,225), trying to convert ordinary citizens (The Red Menace, 222), and spying on American secrets (Walk East On Beacon, 226).

Communists who made actual appearances in mass media were portrayed as scheming,devious, and inherently evil criminals with an almost comical one-sidedness, while conversely Americanism (and, by extension, capitalism) had its virtues extolled to equally comic excess. While Communists burned flags and rubbed their hands together on screen, Capitalist heroes helped viewers affirm their Americanism. To this defensive and willing embrace of capitalism, Whitfield attributes the rise of iconic symbols like the Barbie doll. “The capitalist ‘fetishism of commodities’ that Marx found so repellent had advanced to the first line of defense”. (Whitman, 221)

Whitfield brings up film after B-list film produced in the 1950’s as examples of the lengths to which anti-communism narrowed media culture. The “Red” label was applied to anything and everything possible by the HUAC and Motion Picture Alliance. Ominous lists floated from ear to ear, naming actors and writers who, for the most part, were not politically active. This concept of finger pointing and fear, even directed at the “innocent”, is expanded upon in by Mark Goodson: “The watchword in the business is ‘Don’t make waves.”(A Producer Remembers the Red Scare, 226).

Here the root of the longevity and power of anti-communist hysteria is fully exposed. If viewers thought an actor, writer, or producer was a communist, they wouldn’t watch the show – indeed, often a more forceful group (The Catholic War Veterans or the American Legion) would protest and make a lot of noise and someone would end up losing money. While the initial impetus behind the Red Scare can be traced back to a relatively small group of highly vocal instigators, this (ironically Capitalist-driven) link allowed the Red Scare’s influence to trickle down as deeply as it did. Your bosses fears became your own, until by the early 1950’s “it was safer to produce…without any political or economic themes or implications at all.” Whitman’s relentless stark portrayal of the bending of mass culture ends with as strong a condemnation as it began: “…the development of a more vital and various national culture was unrealized.” (Whitman 221, 224)


Such emphatic language can serve as a useful literary aid – it often carries a more memorable message, and can help make an essay a “better read”. However, using this technique inappropriately can make a paper substantially more opinionated and subsequently off-topic. Such is the case with Whitman’s diatribe on The Culture of the Cold War: A blisteringly disappointed narrative tone throws off an otherwise commendable historical investigation. Though entirely supported by his extensive example sources (and echoing the sentiments of all those unfairly [or, for that matter, fairly] blacklisted as Communists), Whitman’s downright derisive voice detracts from the professional level of research put in to his paper. Again, it is for the most part entirely justified – but righteous anger, even at a truly infuriating level of injustice, pandering, and idiot hysteria, is not the tool of the historian.

As well, Whitman does a fair amount of pandering himself. One must take in to account the fact that the essay as it appears in Thinking Through The Past is highly abridged, and so there are several unintended jumps from topic to topic, but even so there are multiple passages that serve no purpose other than to preach a more indignant story to the choir. The (albeit sad) story of Woody Guthrie’s affliction with Huntington’s chorea does indeed symbolize “the fragility of the left-wing popular culture that faced extinction during the Cold War”(Whitman, 223), but that’s exactly it. It’s a symbol, and a damn good metaphor, but neither of those help form a greater understanding of the history of the time.


PS Be honest you can totally tell the place in my essay where I came back after reading THIS for two hours and I was all "oh shit dang yo I gots to finish this up like real fast okay

Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil

ditE: From the other side! Let's just STUFF this blog with youtubes!
You know who sounds like a cross between Soul Position and Nujabes?
Fuckin....these guys. Their beats are real simple but I like it. Like, a lot. The Sound Providers. Let me show you them.



Everything in my entire life is better.

Because of this girl.



She's a truly deadly mix of cutettractive and skilled and musical and witty.
The fact that she's basically playing in a closet and has good editing skills also helps.


(If that weren't enough, it's her)


MIDDLE EDIT: Hey lets also watch this.

I like Chris Thile. Lots.
ONLY NOW SHE'S ALL GROWED UP THAT WAS TWO YEARS AGO



Seriously I just happily watched 13 minutes of this girl talking at the camera. She's both well spoken and properly quirky butnottoomuch. I pretty much love her.

Edit: Sparking my interest to look at the youtube circles, I remembered this guy. Turns out he finally got to go to Ireland, and he came back, and now he's like four times as good as he was because the dragons gave him power oh no wait that's Eragon this is a Spanish guy.



Man dang yo I wish I had learned a single song on my whistle

unbeingdead isn't beingalive

Don't listen to this song. I mean, unless it's the kind of thing you're in to.
But I didn't put it up there to be listened in it's 6 minute entirety.

You need to listen from 3:15 to 3:38.

Hear it?

Good



Do listen to this song.

.....Hear it?

Good.

Now we can move on to the more serious and important.

Every poet I read is my favorite poet.
Out of thewaythatis, not out of desire or trickery.
I don't have the memory or the chops to keep a revolving list of favorite poetsauthorsbands in my head at any given time.

I can barely remember who wrote what when.
I haven't read enough (read: all) poetry to hold my own in a choices-competition, a Top 5 provesyourightproveshimwrong.

When someone asked me how my first "real" winter had gone, I automatically responded that I didn't know - I didn't have any other one to compare it to.

That's rational.
My brother got real mad.
I'm still figuring out how he can be a poet.

I bet he's read more poets than I have.

So for this week, and forever since I've read him.

E.E. Cummings is my favorite poet.
I suppose it's too mainstream to build any beatstreetcred off of, but by adding this sentence pointing that out I've managed to circumvent that nicely.

People tend to call him "e. e. cummings" because he signed a poem that way and people are people.
Me calling him by his regular name is just symbolic enough to be understood by everybody, but only if they know the previous fact.
So I also have to introduce that caveat whenever I talk about E.E. Cummings.

Those two necessary injections are why I don't talk about poetry a lot, I guess.

I think if I had to make a wish I'd want my life to, in the end, have the same flavor as his poetry.

Unfortunately apparently he says, "nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time —and whenever we do it, we are not poets."

Which sort of cancels out my traditional strategy of greatnessthroughmimicry.

But anyway, Dang, man, E.E. Cummings.

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom