Tag: Music

IT’S GOOD TO BE IN LOVE by Frou Frou conceals writing truths

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You know the singer from Frou Frou better under the name Imogen Heap, famous for the song HIDE AND SEEK.

Whatever name she sings under, this song here is not only good, but interesting for writers of all stripes, whether you write mysteries involving British grandmothers and talking cats, movies starring transforming robots from Planet Michael Bay or pop songs for Frankenstein bands put together by Simon Cowell.

Watch and listen, then we’ll dissect the lyrics and notice something useful.

Here are the lyrics, with notes in red.

IT’S GOOD TO BE IN LOVE

I don’t know where to start
Say I’m tired or throw a party
These cucumber eyes are lying the more that i smile about it
And all of my clothes feel like somebody’s old throwaways
I don’t like it

All this is interior monologue. She’s saying what she’s thinking and feeling, and while she’s seriously bummed, it’s all truthful.

It’s good to be in love
It really does suit you
Just like everything
I’m happy you’re in love
‘Cause every color goes where you do

The verses above are straight dialogue, spoken to her lost love. Every word is a HUGE PACK OF LIES.

Hollywood screenwriters say this is real dialogue, because nobody says what they truly mean, especially when they’re hurt.

How do you spot bad dialogue? Look for people saying exactly what they mean and feel.

I’m adoring you
It’s all good
You’re so beautiful
I’m black and blue all over
You’re breaking my flow
How could you know what I’m saying about it
When all of my clothes feel like somebody’s old throwaways
I don’t like it

Oh, this is beautiful. She switches right back to interior monologue, and the truth, tweaking and twisting the first verses. Well played. It’s like a good action movie or thriller novel, with alternating chapters: one from the hero’s POV, one from the villains, back and forth.

It’s good to be in love
It really does suit you
Just like everything
I’m happy you’re in love
‘Cause every color goes where you do

Back to the chorus and straight dialogue. You could argue this is what she’s saying to her lost love and what she’s trying to convince herself of, but either way, there’s tremendous tension here between the inner monologue and the spoken dialogue. Love it.

I feel so powerless
I’ve got to stop it somehow
Oh come on what can i do?
Why’s it happening
How’s it happening without me
Why’s it happening
How’s it happening that he feels it without me

More truth from inner monologue, with the stakes raised.

It’s good to be in love
It really does suit you
Just like everything
I’m happy you’re in love
‘Cause every color goes where you do

Back to the chorus. Is the tension resolved? No. Not at all. And the song is better, and perfectly balanced, because of that.

Fireworks set to music, from a drone flying INSIDE THE FIREWORKS

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So this Random Man on the Interwebs — and yes, that line is the modern version of, “A man walks into a bar .. ” — this Random Man, he put a high-def camera on a drone. Then he flew it above a fireworks show, took the drone inside exploding fireworks and set the video it to music.

Result? Magic.

 

Throne gets trippy with the first embroidered music video ever

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This video isn’t computer animated. They made the entire thing, screen by screen, with stitches on black cloth.

We’re talking about possibly the first music video created through embroidery, which I can’t even spell. And it’s by a heavy metal band.

Though I’m not a fan of all the various forms of metal (heavy metal, speed metal or even Swedish death metal), this is a unique and creative video that deserves to be seen and taken apart. Interesting. Well done, monsters of metal, whoever you are.

FANCY by Iggy happily subverts CLUELESS, start to finish

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Weeks ago, I saw this video by Australian import (and model) Iggy and was blown away.

And now this song has hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and I believe No. 2 is … a song she’s featured on.

Note: don’t get overly worried about the warning at the front of this video. I believe there’s one brief f-bomb, which you’ll probably miss unless you listen hard, and there’s no violence or nudity or whatever. It’s the tamest video I can remember getting tagged like this. Maybe the folks who rate music videos need a middle ground, a PG-13 instead of making everything G or R.

What’s really interesting is why this video works so well. Watch and we’ll talk.

Here’s the thing: the entire music video mocks the movie CLUELESS, start to finish, yet it does it so skillfully that you don’t need to have watched Alicia Silverstone’s magnum opus to get the joke. I bet 80 percent of Iggy’s fans were maybe in first grade back then and wouldn’t know Alicia Silverstone if she ran them over in a silver Mercedes.

But Iggy does it anyway, and her attention to details is glorious. Check out this recap.

Even if you never saw CLUELESS, the video rocks. You can tell she’s making fun of the character she portrays, and everything about high school, but not in a snobby hipster way. She’s having fun the whole time, and that energy comes through. Great job, Iggy – give us more.

Crazy storm + music = mind-blowing video

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Super Cells aren’t what you put into a life-sized version of Optimus Prime — you know, to make him growl lame dialogue to Shia Labooooooof in the latest Michael Bay explosion-fest.  (Yes, I know Shia isn’t in the new film, which has Optimus and Marky Mark riding on flying robot dinosaurs to save the world by blowing up a hemisphere or two.)

Super Cells are a type of storm, and when you see this video, you’ll understand why they are truly Super.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoO89cqDgJU

Also: what’s the music playing? I believe it’s an instrumental version of Shakira’s single, EMPIRE, and here you go with that music video, which may be worth dissecting later. Do the images make narrative sense by themselves, if you take away the lyrics? Hmm. Do the lyrics make sense if you strip away the video with the burning wedding dress and such? Nah. That may the the problem here. I like the song, though.

 

PLEASE USE THIS SONG wins the interwebs

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It’s no secret why many bands let giant corporations use their songs in advertising: musicians are starving artists. There will always be more talented musicians in the world than money to support them.

So musicians have a few choices. They can work a day job and do gigs on weekends, milk their One Hit Wonder for 20 years, try to make a living on tour — or sell their music for commercials, movies, theme parks, whatever pays the bills. Usually, there is no One Hit Wonder, no tour, no sales to record labels or car commercials. The struggle to pay the bills become a struggle for artistic life or death, because if you’ve got no money, you’ve got no free time to do what you love.

Hey, I sympathize. Artistic purity is great until you have to pay the bills. I think it’s almost easier to make a living writing the words, even as newspapers die off as if an asteroid came to kill the dinosaurs, than to do it plucking a guitar.

This video by Jon Lajoie, now, is crazy funny because you can smell the truth in it.

Well done, Jon and bandmates. I hope a corporation with a sense of humor actually buys the rights to use your song to sell something, anything at all, because you have won the Series of Tubes.

What YMCA by the Village People can teach us

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This is a classic song from the late ’70s, and it’s worth talking about for a few reasons.

First, the People of the Village prove that band members don’t need to dress the same, seeing how every other rock and punk band tries to stand out by putting on matching (a) black leather jackets and black guyliner, (b) spandex with long, permed blond locks, possibly paying homage to Heather Locklear or (c) ironic suits and ties worn with red Converse sneakers.

You don’t need to memorize the band members in the Village People because their outfits give you a handy shorthand. Plus it’s more interesting. Even KISS understands this and varied the crazy costumes and makeup enough so fans could dress as their favorite instead of throwing on a generic leather jacket and some mascara to be “you know, somebody from the Flaming Squirrels, maybe the  drummer.”

Variety is good, even when it comes to the hairstyles of boy bands, which should be banned by the Music Police.

Second, this song proves the power of third-party validation. That’s a fancy way of saying, “Hey, it’s great that every singer, actor and C-list celebrity talks smack about how great they are, yet their ethos is crazy weak when they do so, seeing how we look sideways at their sincerity and self-interest. What’s far more believable, and effective, is to praise somebody — or something — that doesn’t share your first and last name.”

Instead of singing a song where the Village People brag about how many boats they own, and how their singing is so great that we know there’s life on Mars because there are 17 different Village People superfan clubs in the southern hemisphere of that planet alone, they spend an entire song bragging on this unlikely place: your humble, local Y.

And they make it fun, and memorable. This video gave birth to a little YMCA dance of forming the letters people around the world know.

Why boy bands — and girl bands — will haunt us forever and ever

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Why is there an endless supply of cheesy all-boy bands?

The thing is, there always has been, and always will be. Because they are meeting a market demand for a demographic that will never, ever go away: tweenagers. Specifically, tweenage girls.

Smart music moguls know this. They also are smart enough to realize that a bunch of 16 to 20-something boys are far, far more likely to hang around playing Call of Duty for 12 hours a day instead of sweating out dance moves while planning possible world tours.

They also know that a group of good-looking singers, male or female, is inherently more attractive than a single singer. There’s science to this. There’s also the fact that a solo artist means betting against them going to rehab, firing you as their manager, deciding to become a punk rock singer or otherwise turning into the Justin Bieber monster of today and losing all his fans.

But if you’ve got choreographers, songwriters and PR people on staff, then hey, you’ve got a machine, a license to print money, and all you need are some good-looking kids with some talent. And it’s actually not smart to bet everything on what you think is your most talented quartet of boys, because tastes in music are fickle for grownups, much less tweenage girls. If you’ve got a factory capable of cranking out boy bands, the best thing to do is keep on cranking them out, because soon enough, the boys will (a) get too old for your demographic or (b) your best singer will go solo and (c) the band will die.

We saw this with the ’90s with bands. But it’s just as true today. One Direction is a reality-show band put together by Simon Cowell’s machine.

And to be honest, girl bands are the same thing, aimed at the same demographic. Think it’s tweenage boys going to Spice Girl concerts or all these Japanese girl bands? Nope. It’s tweenage girls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QfPLilEJWY

This makes perfect sense. Fans of action movies will show up at the megaplex and buy $9 popcorn whether the hero shooting zombies is a muscled tough guy or a hot-but-tough girl. Genre, not gender, determines audience.

When you get older, and hit college, you start to develop taste and would rather die than get caught listening to a NKOTB song. Instead of becoming popular by following the tweenage herd, you seek popularity by being a hipster who only listens to indie bands nobody’s heard of, bands you adore and then abandon at the first sign of success. THIS IS THE LAW.

So though I enjoy making fun of boy bands (and girl bands) as much as anyone, you have to admire how producers create and package these machines. It takes a village to raise a boy band, and to count all the profits before they implode. But by then, you’re on the next one.

SELFIE by The Chainsmokers is timely and brilliant

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Nothing is more trendy now than taking a selfie. Everybody’s doing it: teenagers, movie stars, rock stars, wannabe stars, your grandma, Ellen at the Oscars.

It’s a selfie pandemic.

This music video nails the whole selfie trend. Added bonus: the song rocks and the video is spot-on.

 

CAMERA ONE by the Josh Joplin Group

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The great thing about the Series of Tubes is this: say you hear a song on the radio, or lived back in the day when MTV played, I don’t know, music videos instead of stupid reality shows involving overtanned dipsticks and C-list reality shot “celebrities” who are only famous because they’re the son, daughter or step-daughter of a B-list celebrity.

The only way to hear that song again, or see the video, was to (a) glue yourself to the radio, night and day, (b) hit the record store and hope the clerk behind the counter can figure out the song, artist and album from you saying “You know, the video where the singer smashes a guitar on stage” or (c) camping out in front of the Glowing Tube until a coked-up VJ decides to play that video again.

For music loving people, the good old days were not so good. There was a reason hipsters lived at record stores: that’s how you found gems like CAMERA ONE by the Josh Joplin Group.

Today is a better day for anyone who loves music. I’ve had this song on my laptop forever. But is there a video? Ten seconds of messing around on youtube and bam, here it is.

Listen to the lyrics of this thing. The song is great, and the video is interesting — yet the lyrics are what stick with me, even though I’ve listened to this song forever. It doesn’t get old.