VMA Post-Mortem

I had no intention of writing anything about tonight's Video Music Awards (aside from the squibs over at TVLatest), but the show has been over for twenty minutes and I find myself jittery, on edge, and feeling kind of angry and I have no idea why.

I think part of the problem is that my intent for watching was not coming from a positive place. Being in Detroit for the majority of the last year has left me fairly unexposed to popular music. When the radio stations play only that one Eminem song, that one Usher song, "Rolling in the Deep" and "E.T.", you're left in the boonies in terms of what other people are listening to. You used to be able to find out what those songs could be by tuning into MTV, but as the students who are arriving on-campus Tuesday will tell you, that has not been the case in their lifetimes.

I'll let that sink in before moving on.

Also, as is the case with any major event of this sort, Twitter scrolls along in the background. What I love about Twitter is getting to share in cultural moments with people who are on the same wavelength as me. Unfortunately, that wavelength includes competitive bitchery, which is in full force for the VMAs. The only moments that I think were universally enjoyed ("universally" being defined as 65% approval or better) was Adele's performance and Beyoncé's baby bump. Even the Amy Winehouse tribute (which I thought was classy given that Russell Brand was the main spokesperson) received a heavy dose of heckling from my follow list.

I guess what bothers me is that tonight's show was like watching a dream unfulfilled. When I was born my six siblings ranged in age from 5-17 and just about all of them wanted their MTV. Throughout my toddlerdom I received Chernobyl-like exposure to music presented in the video format. Now you know why I am the way I am. Anyway, I wanted to make music videos when I grew up, but when the programming model of MTV and VH1 shifted in the mid-90's there was a supply/demand issue arising. MTV2 came along and I would watch that for hours on end during my high school years. Then that programming model changed and now that dream felt all but dead.

Maybe this is a long-winded way of saying "I'm old! They don't play music on MTV anymore! GET OFF MY LAWN!" Maybe that's what's bumming me out.

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Hmmm

If I don't feel like putting on the iPod when I travel around Syracuse I usually listen to 96.5/100.3 (Movin!). I don't know how a station that so closely matches my taste in music has managed to stay in business. They play a fair amount of pop (Lady Gaga, Britney, etc.) but they also play some old and obscure stuff. Listen long enough and you can hear "U Can't Touch This" AND "2 Legit 2 Quit" -- neither of which is played with any sense of irony. Driving back from Target one night I heard "Double Dutch Bus", a song that most people would probably recognize only as a sample in Missy Elliot's "Gossip Folks".

Another track that I have heard more than once is the song by C & C Music Factory that isn't "Gonna Make You Sweat".


This one is called "Things That Make You Go Hmmm":



Wow, you know, when I set out to write this I was going to focus on how screwed up the stories are in the song. However, it has been close to 20 years(!) since I last saw this video and...wow. You have to remember, this group was HUGE...at the time. We were still on a Milli Vanilli high and counting off the hits of Paula Abdul's Forever Your Girl album. It was the gap between New Wave, Heavy Metal, Super Pop (oh yeah, they play a lot of Expose on Movin!) on one side and gangsta rap and grunge on the other. It was a simpler time, 1990.

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Mario

Childhood flashback time!



As dance crazes go, this one is pretty half-assed. Let's discuss.

After you take out all the cajoling ("Do the Mario!"), the dance is performed as follows:

Swing your arms from side to side

Take one step

And then again

It's almost a rebuttal to the Throwdown Hoedown. But go ahead, try it, I'll wait.

See? Not much going on dance-wise. However, the demonstration seems to imply that I'm missing some sort of nuance. See how Mario bobbles at the very end? Whatever I'm doing is not resulting in a loss of balance. I must be doing something wrong.

No wonder my generation is doomed to a lifetime of obesity.

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Play List: Blarney

I still don't know if I like the song "Poker Face". Theoretically I should -- Lady Gaga seems to be a hybrid of the positive attributes of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. The first few times I listened to the song it passed the American Bandstand test ("It's got a good beat and you can dance to it"). I heard the chorus once as a ringtone and it sounded like something I would enjoy, though I couldn't fully distinguish what was being said. Something along the lines of "hee-ba-hi, hee-ba-hi hee-ba-ho-bi-ba-na-de-daadaaa (huminana huminana)". It wasn't until one of the students on my staff included it on a mix CD that I was able to put all the pieces together (and rip the track for my own purposes). Yay, now I can have the song on my Shuffle and get the real translation of "hee-ba-hi".

And that's where the problem lies...


With the song playing directly into my ears, I can actually listen to the lyrics and...they're not good. Like, at all. It reminds me of the "poems" that people would write in my high school creative writing class, though to Gaga's credit her metaphors aren't as thoroughly mixed. I realize it is pop music we're talking about here and expectations are low. It's not like this song will be passed to future generations, but the lyrics are so bad that it actually detracts from the listening experience. It's hard to get my dance on when I keep on stopping to say "that's dumb".

There are plenty of instances of this bizarre phenomenon in pop music. Here are some examples:

"A Horse with No Name" ~ America

"There were plants and birds and rocks and things"
"The heat was hot"

"MacArthur Park (Abridged)" ~ Donna Summer

...yeah.

"The War Song" ~ Culture Club

"War, war is stupid / and people are stupid / and love means nothing / in some strange waters." Besides being absolutely insipid, I think this may be a protest in response to the Falkland Islands conflict.

"Video" ~ India.Arie
"Keep your Cristal and your pistol / I'd rather have a pretty piece of crystal"

These songs, with the possible exception of "MacArthur Park", are perfectly serviceable but have the occasional lyric that makes my earholes say "ouch". I have a couple of theories as to the causes of these errors, though it is hard to pinpoint what exactly happened. I can't tell if the songwriter painted him/herself into a corner and didn't want to have to undo an entire section (India.Arie maybe). Or, in America's case, they may have come up with the riff and cadence first and then tried to see what would fit in with whatever story they were trying to tell. A thesaurus might have been handy, but a lack of one didn't stop them. As for Culture Club, this just screams "filler track", though if it was released as a single that might explain why the group dissolved not too much later. Sadly, I think Lady Gaga is expecting people to not pay that much attention, which is fair since it is a great club song -- just keep it off your iPod.

Are there other songs that you have encountered where one word choice or line makes you cringe, affecting your reception of the song?

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Play List: Counterpoint

There were two internet destinations that figured prominently in my freshman year of college: Art of the Mix and Audiogalaxy. The former allowed me to share with others the carefully crafted mix tapes I devised during my high school years while the latter allowed me to build a rather extensive mp3 collection for future mixes.

Nowadays, I find mixing to be somewhat uninspired because there are fewer limitations. I didn't get a CD burner until twelfth grade, so all of mixes up to that point were actual mix tapes. Mix construction at that time required extensive planning. First you pick a theme and then select songs related to that theme. After repeatedly listening to specific tracks, you narrow down your list and create a dossier that included the length of each track. Once you narrow down your list to 12-15 tracks, you have to create a flow from one track to the next. It could be a drum beat, a choice of tempo, some connective fiber linking one song to the next. However, with a tape you are limited to either 30 or 45 minutes to a side, so you need to structure your tracks so that connections can flow without a tape flip cutting into the middle of a track or having over two minutes of silence. I probably went through a ream of paper in high school just from adding up the total minutes of a proposed list -- but it was worth it.

CD Burning adjusted those limitations. Instead you could have up to 80 minutes of continuous music expounding on a theme of your choosing. Arranging flow was also easier as shuffling tracks just involved a click and a drag instead of swapping CDs and skip-searching track numbers. Also, with services like Audiogalazy and Kazaa, if there was a song that you needed to complete your thesis it was only a short download away. There is a distinct disadvantage to the switch from tape to CD: If you want to present a point/counterpoint type mix (such as God/Devil), you don't have the flipping of a tape to facilitate that transition of thought.

Modern music technology has made this process almost impossible. A playlist, as Nick and Norah have shown us, can be infinite. Synthesizing an idea is no longer necessary because there is no technologically forced limitation. I still use my first generation iPod Shuffle on a daily basis, but 8.5 hours is way too much when conveying an idea, particularly if you want to present a dichotomy.

A playlist idea that I have been batting around revolves around the idea of Point/Counterpoint, Rebuttal/Response, A-Side/B-Side. Since my music library has exploded in the last few years, I feel like I have missed music based discussions between tracks that may not have realized they were in conversation with one another. I feel the list is incomplete, partly because my library will always be incomplete, partly because sometimes I will only make the connection if the right synapses fire at the right time. Here is my list so far:

"The Way I Are" Timbaland /
"My Love Don't Cost a Thing" Jennifer Lopez

"My Humps" Black Eyed Peas /
"Thong Song" Sisqo

"Shut Up and Drive" Rihanna /
"Little Red Corvette" Prince

"Lovestoned/I Think That She Knows" Justin Timberlake /
"Layla" Derek and the Dominos

"Southern Man" Neil Young /
"Sweet Home Alabama" Lynyrd Skynyrd

That last item would probably get cut in the final draft, since the rebuttal is explicit in the latter song, but hopefully you get the idea. As you can see it is a rather short list and not enough for even a cassette.

What songs do you think would work for a mix like this?

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