Let's See If I'm Hearing This Right...

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: 

in silence, but imagining the sound.

- Zoltan Kodaly 

When Listening to Music and Hearing Music

Are Not the Same Thing

     I just spent the longest hour of my life with, all things considered, the worst smelling human being on the face of the earth.  No, I don’t mean this in the sort-of-nice-but-totally-douchey, “It’s funny because it’s true,” sort of way.  I mean this in the holy-shit-do-you-ever-shower-oh-forget-I-asked-because-the-answer-is-clearly-no sort of way.  I’m not kidding.  It smells like this dude washes his ass with his balls, which he washes with the dirtiest pair of gym socks he wears when the air conditioning is on the fritz.  It’s the kind of stink when you’re talking to him, and the third word out of your mouth is always, “DAMN!”  And you know he doesn’t know he smells bad.  He might even think he smells good.  He doesn’t.  He smells bad in the way that sort makes time feel like it’s slowing down, so that a quick, 30-minute task feels like it took you all goddamn night.

     Not un-ironically, Muse’s “Time is Running Out” is blasting from the stereo, and the windows are open, so everyone knows that we are – or at least I am – running out of time.  Not only am I running short on the one thing I seem to have the most of, but it’s going by soooooooooo sloooooowly.  Even the music seems like it is being played through the stereo slower than normal.

      This is what concerns me the most right now.  Scratch that.  It’s my second concern, behind what my man Cam’ron uses as a washcloth, because I don’t think his wife’s stinky vagina is working anymore.  It’s concerning because, to be quite honest, it’s totally weird.

      On my way to work a couple of days ago, amidst the worst ear infection I’ve ever had,  everything that came out of my car stereo sounded like it was being broadcast 8 clicks slower than it was recorded.  You know how when your walkman runs out of batteries, and it plays your tapes slower and slower until whoever you are listening to is singing at half the speed they normally do, and their voice is an octave or so below what it should be?  Yeah, that’s not what I’m talking about.  What I’m talking about is the music sounding completely normal, and you’re tapping your foot along, drumming on the steering wheel like you always do, but the tapping and air-drumming just, for some reason, needs to be faster.  Do you ever get that feeling?  I got it, and I quickly described it (to myself) as “The Weirdest Fucking Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me.”

     I tried as hard as I could to shake it.  Clearly, the music is fine.  If it was too slow, the pitch would change.  It’s an electronic file, so the speed can’t really change unless I do it, and I didn’t.  But, song after song, it just felt… wrong.  I tried driving slower so that my surroundings would appear to pass me at a less than normal rate, and even that didn’t work.  It might have made it worse.  What caused my brain to think this way, to interpret everything as too slow?  Was the sound actually getting to my brain slower, because my ear was so swollen that not even air could get to my brain?  Was it because I was getting over a 23 hour shift at work?  Was it because I hadn’t eaten?  I could not answer these questions, and I still can’t.  All I can answer is the question, “Was it the most surreal thing you’ve ever experienced?”

     The answer is “No, but it’s close.”

     How important is the speed of a song?  To be perfectly honest, and to put it into perspective, it wasn’t THAT much slower.  It felt slow enough that I noticed, but it didn’t change the character of any of the music.  When I got to the 7/8 section of “Era Vulgaris,” things definitely seemed slower, and the pulse of the song definitely felt different, but I obviously have no way of proving that either of those changes had taken place.  So, really, if nothing changes except how it sounds to me, in a 100% sonic way, is the tempo of the song really that important?

     First of all, yes, it is.  Second, what? 

     In my new favorite documentary Back and Forth, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters talks about how he wrote the song “Stacked Actors.”  “I had a riff idea and a melody, but I didn’t know the tempo.  So I jumped up and down, and that became the tempo of the song.”  As a person who has jumped up and down to music more than once in my life, I can tell you that jumping too fast is HARD AS SHIT, and jumping too slow is also HARD AS SHIT.  When you’re jumping to a song, it’s very easy to tell if it is the right tempo.  So, I mean, that’s just a tiny bit of thought into the tempo of one song.  The first four bars of the Them Crooked Vultures song “Elephants” are in a tempo that is different from the entire (seven-minute) rest of the song.  I have tried over and over to grasp what is going on rhythmically, but all I can tell is that it is slow for four measures, and then “faster” for the rest of the song.  When they play it live, the tempo change never misses; there absolutely has to be some sort of ratio between the tempos, or at least some sort of augmentation of the rhythm.  That kind of thing is not something that just happens.  I mean, it is at first, but if you want to repeat it, I don’t care how good you are, you have to plan it.

     But even when you plan it, it doesn’t always go exactly how you want it.  Take most instrumental music literature in the past 200 years.  Almost every score has some sort of tempo marking at the top of it, many of them very explicit.  (Moderato, for instance, is an expression marking, while “mm = 120” is a tempo marking; most scores have at least the expression indicator, and often times both.)  If you look at every chart in the JMU Pep Band (Ho) book, you’ll find that at least 80% of them have a tempo marking.  I cannot confirm this, because I have not looked in the book in a long time, but I can tell you that when we try to play a tune, and my ass can’t jump up and down (obnoxiously) to the tempo, there is something wrong, and I’m not the only one who knows it.  Seriously, the difference between 108 beats a minute and 112 beats a minute is not much, but it’s enough to make me go crazy and start yelling at folks to “quit fucking dragging.”  Don’t even get me started on when that shit speeds up *coughdrummerscough*

     The 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception, while not necessarily a great study on lucid dreaming, actually touches on a profound affect of the brain while sleeping.  The score for the film, written by Hans Zimmer, is roughly based on an actual piece of music, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which itself is used throughout the film.  I’m sure you’ve seen the videos examining this, and I’m not about to try to explain the plot of the movie to you.  But in a nutshell, as characters start to dream, then dream within those dreams, and then dream within those dreams, the music can still be heard.  But the further into dreams they go, the slower the music seems to be heard.  This actually happens.  When we dream, our brain perceives time to go by slower.  If we were to dream about dreaming, the elapsing of time for that dream within the dream would be compounded, and would that much slower to our brain.  So, when the van takes forever to fall, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is floating through an elevator shaft, and Tom Hardy is being a total badass, all we can hear is BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHM.   BRAAAAAAAAAAAHM.  BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHM.  This is potentially how me might actually hear that piece of music, if we were to listen to it, then fall asleep and dream about dreaming about dreaming about listening to it.

     Obviously, tempo can have a great, positive effect on music, or it can have a terrible effect on the same music.  Ask any person who has written marching band drill to a terrible arrangement of a terrible song.  (You could ask my friend Joe, who wrote terrible drill to “Don’t Stop Believin’” for some reason.)  There so many things to think about when writing drill, and tempo is one of them.  As much as you might want to, there is no way in hell you can spread your legs to 45” (a 4-5 step-size, as we call it) going 148 beats a minute.  You can do it at 80 or 90 and still look pretty good, but if you try it too fast you’ll just look like you have Palsy.  This is a huge thing to consider when writing drill for, say, a show opener, which is probably right around that tempo.  If you need your band to go 40 yards in 20 counts, it’s not going to happen at the tempo you need (want) it to, and the music will sound like it’s dragging.  And that’s why, every year at the Parade of Champions, there are at least four bands that I listen to, and the whole time I am bobbing my head up and down, sometimes waving my right hand in a clockwise circle towards my body, trying to speed up the tempo of the music using only my brain.  It never works.

     That shit didn’t work in my car the other day, either.  It never works. 

     Yes, sometimes music can be slowed down to great effect, but again, if it is not planned, the music – and the audience listening to it – will be affected in a very negative way.  One of the coolest things I have ever seen live is Blast!, who open their show with Ravel’s Bolero.  Bolero does not change in tempo throughout, at least it shouldn’t.  The members of Blast do a good job of keeping the tempo very, very steady.  It’s so steady, in fact, that half of the audience will want it just a tad faster, and the other half will want it just a tad slower, but they keep it right the fuck on.  But in the last few bars of the piece, they slow it down.  The volume increases dramatically, and this somehow makes the huge ritardando that the group does go almost completely unnoticed, and to a great effect.  It is most certainly something you would have to hear to understand.  If I tried to explain it here, something would almost certainly be lost in the translation, and you would probably think I’m some kind of retard.

     Funny story about that.  I played a piece called “Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Band or Orchestra,” by a dude named Paul Creston.  Now, Paul Creston’s real name is not Paul Creston.  It’s Giuseppe Somethingitalian.  In this piece, and many others just like it, the composer asks the performer to slow the music down by doing a ritard.  Paul Creston, for some reason instead, calls the performer a retard throughout.  It’s a long piece.  There are lots of retards, and seeing it over and over sort of makes you feel like one.  Sort of.  I blame it on the Italian thing. 

    

     Sometimes it is not the composer who is wrong.  Sometimes it is the performer’s interpretation of the music that is in fact incorrect.  Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony Number 5 in D minor is four movements in length, which, when done correctly, total about 45.8 minutes in length.  When done incorrectly – as is often the case – it totals about 43 minutes in length.  I will concede that in the big scheme of things, this is not that much.  But in the context of the music, where do those extra three minutes go?  They are almost always lost in the Finale, or in the first few bars of the Scherzo.  The expression marking at the beginning of the fourth movement, Finale, is Allegro non troppo, which means “quick and lively, but not too fast.”  There is no tempo marking.  As such, most conductors begin the finale far too fast, and because of that, they always end the piece far too fast, and too quickly.  The ONLY tempo marking in the entire symphony occurs at the very end of the finale.  That tempo marking is “eighth-note equals 176 [beats per minute].”  Upon the symphony’s premier performance, and for most performances that occurred after the premier, that tempo is almost universally changed to “quarter-note equals 176.”  I don’t know if you are good at math, but that second one is twice as fast as the first one. 

     So why did/does this happen, and how great is the effect?  The first reason it happened is that Dmitri Shostakovich pissed off a dude named Joseph Stalin.  I don’t know if you’re real familiar with history, but that’s bad.  Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was called “a Soviet Artists Response to Just Criticism,” and that is exactly what he needed this symphony to be.  But, ever the rebel, he wrote a finale that has a slow, brutal, almost painful ending (at 88 bpm), rather than the quick, lively, triumphant ending (at 176 bpm) that was to be expected.  Conductor Yevgeni Mravinsky, being (perhaps too) smart for his age, decided that, since he did not want Shostakovich to die, he would claim that the ONLY TEMPO MARKING IN THE ENTIRE SYMPHONY was a misprint, and the piece would be performed at the faster tempo.  Shostakovich, being (probably way) smarter than Mravinsky, did not say a word during rehearsals, and any mention of the tempo of the finale cannot be traced further back than to 1940, 3 years after the premier.

    The symphony was, almost obviously, a hit.  The ovation that occurred at the premier (Stalin was not in attendance, douchebag) was longer than the performance of the symphony.  So, yeah, it’s pretty good, even when it’s done wrong.  So how do we know the tempo is wrong?  There are two ways.  The first is that, as I’ve been talking about, when it is played fast, it just feels wrong.  It all happens too fast, the music climaxes and ends before it has any meaning.  When you hear it played slowly, you can literally (and I do mean literally) feel the pain that Shostakovich was going through in the summer of 1937.  The chords he uses hurt your ears, the constant repetition of one note brings to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the triumph, joy, and exultation are all completely false.  But through it all, through the pain and suffering, you KNOW that if it were to go by any faster, it will have all been for nothing.  The ONLY time it goes by at the faster tempo and you still feel what Shostakovich feels is when it is 1996 and Phantom Regiment is playing it in their badass, all black uniforms, and their field commander is crying.

     The other way we know is that Dmitri Shostakovich, while smart enough to never come out and say it, has more or less come out and said that the tempo is wrong.  “I think it is clear to everyone… what happens in the Fifth,” he once wrote.  “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat.  It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick, saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go off muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’… You have to be a complete and utter oaf not to hear that.”  Indeed.  (Years later, a Rumanian conductor, Sergiu Celibidache wrote a letter to Shostakovich, asking him “Is the tempo marking eighth-note equals 176 correct?”  He received a postcard with a one word response:  “Correct.”) 

     With so much thought that goes into how fast a song should reach your ears, how can I in good conscience allow myself to hear music that is too slow, and just be ok with it?  I can’t.  I tell you, that drive to work that day was one of the longest of my life.  Every song sounded slower than it should have, and not only was it annoying, it almost saddened me that I was unable to interpret the music the way the artist had intended.  Musicians have it hard enough as it is, it’ll be a sad day when their music means nothing because the person listening to it has a fucked up brain.

     Towards the end of my trip with Cam’ron, “Stockholm Syndrome” came up on the radio.  As if it was planned, when that song started, time started to go by again at a fairly reasonable pace.  Yes, he still smelled terrible, but at least the music sounded normal again.  It was almost as if, since I had been stuck with it for so long against my will that I needed to be stuck in the van, marinating in his funk.  Almost.  When we got back, and that door finally opened, I said to myself, “THIS IS THE LAST TIME!”  I like my music to sound the way it is supposed to rather than too slow, and I like my clothes to smell like laundry detergent rather than dead baby seal.  I will, therefore, not be getting into a van with The Stinkiest Person On the Planet again, any time soon, unless I really have to.

    God, I really hope I don’t have to.

 

I've Always Been Alone, A Fool Believes He's Clever

The Case For Humor in Music

"What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? 
Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? 
I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in 'serious' music."

- Dmitri Shostakovich 

     The very first sentence I wrote in the only essay I wrote attached to the only application that I completed for admission to an Institution of Higher Learning was, "I like to make people laugh."  I think, since then, I've written far more essays than I've made people laugh; I am very unoriginal, not at all clever, and (it turns out) not very likable.  Though I would not have admitted any of those things years ago when I wrote that sentence, their relevance seems quite ironic to me now.

      I was (eventually) accepted to the aforementioned University, where I (sort of) studied music.  Now I know (a little bit) more about music than I did then, but I am still the unoriginal, unclever, unoriginal, unfunny dude I was six years ago. 

     Since I know you're waiting to hear how this is all "ironically relevant," I'll go ahead and tell you: knowing just a little bit about music, and trying to be funny whilst using my musical abilities, I've become very much not unlike the "Comedic Musicians" of the Era Vulgaris.  

    I'll get to that, don't worry.

    ANYWAYS, (I'll get to that, too,) humorous music seems to me to be a rather modern achievement, and it usually falls short. Filmed in 2000, the episode of Comedy Central Presents... featuring ("comedian") Dane Cook has become one of the most popular episodes of the decade.  Nowadays, it's Bo Burnham's.  Fortunately for us sensible people, neither of these two gentleman are as funny as they would like us to believe.
     
     With no regard to how un-funny Dane Cook is, Bo Burnham is just a watered-down and less clever (though more talented) version of Stephen Lynch, who was the forerunner for guys like the equally clever and talented (though less original) Jon Lajoie, who tries too hard to be like (the awesomely funny and sometimes musical) Zach Galifianakis or the (awesomely musical and sometimes funny) Ben Folds, but can't compete with the far more talented and far more original (though less prominent) Demetri Martin or Liam Lynch, who is sort of like a shorter, and (if you can believe it) nerdier version of Weird Al Yankovic with more modern glasses and who sometimes wears a hat and is far more funny than that (fucking) Pachelbel's Rant doofus, who is not unlike Axis of Awesome (who are actually awesome,) but who has done work with Tenacious D, who likely formed as a response to the annoying Group X, which lead to groups like the (un-funny) Flight of the Concords (or are they just The Concords?) and The (less un-funny) Lonely Island (who are probably not lonely) who should really really take notes from a legitimate act like Hard N' Phirm, or even from the novelty act of Garfunkel and Oates, and not from Stand-up-comedians-who-sometimes-do-music like Mike Birbiglia (who was a douchebag to me, btw) and (ugh) Larry The Cable Guy (whom I've never met), or the comedian-turned-actor-turned-back-to-comedy-but-with-music guys like Adam Sandler and Rodney Carrington, and just try to write a funny joke that isn't old two seconds later and hasn't been heard before.

     I don't want to talk about any of those people, because they're not really that funny, at least not as musicians.

     I don't really want to talk about unintentionally funny music, either, like Metallica's St. Anger, which is an entire album recorded with one of the world's best-known (though certainly not best) drummers thinking it would be a good idea not to turn the fucking snares on his snare drum on.  But.  There's a scene in the film "Some Kind of Monster" where, during the recording of said album, James Hetfield jokes about "whipping an album 'into shape'" like they "did on Load and Re-Load."  There's also a scene in that movie where Mr. Hetfield tells the previously-mentioned drummer that he's used to "a drummer" doing "the beat part," who responds by later screaming "fuck" into his lead vocalist's face and storming out of the room.  Even some of the best have errors in judgment every now and then, and I'm sure their laughing their fuck-ups all the way to the bank.

      I am sure that the many, if not all, of the artists I've already mentioned are indeed quite hilarious if heard in person; there's no way in hell I'd pass up a ticket to see any one of them, and I'd see Stephen Lynch twice on a Sunday.  There is very little that tops a live performance of music, and even less that tops a live performance of humorous music.  At my senior recital to graduate college, I changed ties in between the three pieces that I played.  Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, except when my dad noticed it, he SHOUT-whispered it from the front row, and before I could play the first note of the last piece, I burst out laughing.  Sadly there is no recording of this.  Less sadly, this past Monday, I saw the most awesome, the most ballsy, one of the funniest things I've ever witnessed, and certainly one of the most enjoyable.

      My buddy B-Mac entered a Guy's Beauty Pageant, and his talent was to sing a song from "The Hangover," asking what tigers dream of, when they take a little tiger snooze.  He then took that same melody, and re-wrote the lyrics to say why he should be allowed into an all-female Music Service Fraternity, or, as he called it an "Awesome sister-hood."  Despite the fact that the lyrics were clever, original and personal, and despite the fact that the performance tugged at both the heart-strings and the funny-nerves, B-Mac did not win.  You want proof that life isn't fair?  Here it is.

      Sadly, oftentimes the cleverness of the music is overshadowed by the (un)cleverness of the lyrics.  Take Stephen Lynch, for example.  He's a great singer, and a super-funny guy.  But all of his songs, although they all have different messages or jokes, sound the same because he only knows six guitar chords.  Jon Lajoie, even though he can write three different songs that all sound different, they're watered down by the same message, and the lyrics get old.  We get it.  You're just a regular, every-day normal guy.  Although, to be fair, I have watched the sun go down, thinking about the world spinning 'round, high as fuck, so I can sort of relate to his song-writing.

     Kyle Gass is a fantastic, awesomely-classically-trained guitarist, but the cleverness of Tenacious D's music comes from Dave Grohl on drums, who, in all likelihood, is just fucking around; there is a time-change in the song "Master Exploder," but you won't hear it unless you are listening to only the drums.  There is a HUGE feel-change, caused by the drums in the Motion City Soundtrack version of the Doug Loves Movie theme song.  It's so "bad" that they only used that song three or four times, because no one could clap to it, even though the change really only happens in the feel of the song,  and not the meter as Doug Benson likes to (erroneously) point out.  This same sort of thing happens in the song "Little Sister," but I won't get into what a genius Josh Homme is, both musically and lyrically, or even comically.  I'll just go ahead and say that titling an album Era Vulgaris, then writing music that is so far ahead of its time that no one notices is nothing short of Advanced.  (A call-back AND an explanation to two previous references in the same sentence?!?!  I am Batman.)  I will also say that Josh Homme is my number-one man crush.

     My number-two man crush is Jason Segel, from How I Met Your Mother, but who also wrote most of the music to the movie Get Him to the Greek.  The title is annoying, and the movie only sort of is, but the music for it is not.  For example, the song, "Going Up," is only sort of about not letting The Man get you down.  It's really about not putting your tongue into a girl's hoo-ha.  But that's beside the point.  The point is the cleverness of the music.  The chorus to this song is just the line, "I'm coming up," four times.  Only on the fourth time does the melody ACTUALLY go up, thereby ironically stating going down on your girlfriend is not the most pleasant of experiences, but it is an important experience, and one that you can't really avoid, amirite, ladies?

     And, like my friend B-Mac, and someone I'll never meet, Jason Segel is capable of writing a song that both tugs at your heart, and makes you laugh at the exact same time, so much so that you almost feel like a moron.  The fourth song on the soundtrack for Get Him to the Greek sounds a little like a Poison power-ballad at first, and begins with the line, "Another night you're on my mind, I'm hypnotized but I cannot find the signs..." The music is nothing short of epic, and leads to a grand entrance of the chorus: "Will you come for my bangers, my beans and mash?"

     Now, here I am, just like my comedically-musical associates, drooling in the dark, staring at the lights; I'm convinced that only the dude who (probably) wrote "You Just Got Slapped" in about 12 seconds, spent a lot less time on this song than logic would dictate, and came up with both a more emotional and far more funny, original, clever and likable product than I ever could. 

We're The Same, My Dead End Friends and I

You Don't Make One Million Friends 
Without Making a Few Enemies.  
Or, You Know, Actual Friends.

"Music is the social act of communication among people, 

a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is."

- Malcolm Arnold 

      

     One day, my mother says to me, "No, who is this?"  I had called her in search of my sister, "Mom, it's me, have you seen Jen?" The aforementioned, "No, who is this?" was her response, verbatim.  So, a couple of days ago, when she told me, "You need to delete your Facebook account right now," I pretty much just said, "Yeah, ok."

     I created my Facebook account when it was still TheFacebook, and the first group I joined was called "Bitch Make Me a Sandwich."  (This is the period of time that is the focus of the film The Social Network, directed by David Fincher.  I love David Fincher, but that movie is going to bomb; you heard it here first.)  Facebook has changed a lot since then, and hopefully so have I.  As my musical and film tastes, my sense of humor, and the quality of my friendships have changed, Facebook has changed from a collection of original profiles (like mine) into a boring list of "pages" of things that "people" "like."  I hardly know any of my 491 friends, and I can't use Facebook to learn anything about them.  Ultimately, Facebook has turned into a database of nothing but "faces."  

     My point is that my Facebook profile is more or less completely useless.  "It's going to get you into trouble one day," my mother insists.  And that part's not even true.  The only thing that could remotely get me into trouble is my political views, which are the lyrics to a song, which makes my profile somewhat original.  If Mark Zuckerberg ever finds out, I'm screwed.

     Yet I still spend hours a day on it.   As I was writing the above paragraph, my new roommate Ben walked through the door.  Tomorrow (yesterday, by the time you read this) is his birthday.  His plan is to spend it at work, then spend the rest of the evening on Facebook.  "There's nothing else to do," I said when he told me that.  "Yeah," he said, "it's my only way to be in touch with my friends, anyways.  It's not like I can go over to their houses anymore."  

     He raises a good point, one to which I can relate.  Since moving to Roanoke, I know approximately four people: One I share a band room with, one I share a bathroom with, and two work at the high school I would (very much) like to get paid to work with.  I'm only "friends" with one of them on teh Facebook, and our friendship is, at this point in time, still limited to said 'book.  And it's not like I talk to people on Facebook.  I sure as shit ain't learnin' anything about anybody I don't already know, and I know no one is reading my profile anyways, so what's the point?  

     That's the question I keep coming back to: What's the point?  And I really don't have an answer.   

     At my new job, the administrators keep pushing this thing called PD360, with the PD being "Professional Development."  I don't quite know what it is, but I do know that it is only described as "like Facebook."  Like Facebook?  So... useless?  Clearly, social networking is a huge part of our lives now, almost as big as "reality" television, so much so that we're being asked to join yet another social network to augment and "develop" our professional lives.   But how can this sort of thing be useful to us as professionals?  Honestly, a quote from the show Community about the show Mad Men is, on one hand, wholly oxymoronic, and on the other hand, not very professional, I just used it because it makes me lol.  And we're supposed to use this to enhance our professional lives... how?  My Facebook profile doesn't even enhance my personal life, there's no way in hell it will ever enhance my professional life.

     But then again, I'm not John Mackey.  

     (Clearly.)   

     Mr. Rankin, whatever do you mean?  

     What I mean is that this motherfucker (term used endearingly, if I may) uses Facebook more than any professional musician I have ever met (which I have) or been a fan of (which I am) in my entire life.  That's not to say that it's a lot, but... Well, Chris McQueen of The Best Band You've Never Heard Of posts on the Facebook a lot for that band, at about the rate an up-and-coming rock band should post (well, not anymore), and Mr. Mackey OWNS McQueen when it comes to Facebook.  Not only that, but I'm friends with McQueen on Facebook, and I've never even met him, but I would consider him a better friend than John Mackey, who is easily one of the coolest people on the planet, from what I can tell.  This is not a strong correlation, I'll give you that.  But when you consider MQ v. JM, clearly MQ should be the winner, and JM wins by a mile.  

     But that's not the point.  The point is that there are people like Chris McQueen, whom I will likely never meet, who uses Facebook to promote his band(s), from new albums that will never be recorded to shows that I will never see, because they fucking refuse to come to Virginia, and Facebook becomes not only useful, but crucial (to an extent) to the livelihood of the band.  But people like John Mackey, who prooooooooooobably don't need the extra publicity - be it good or bad - use Facebook anyways for just that, and it totally works.  

      Consider the following, a simple post on Facebook by John Mackey:

      John Mackey Hymn to a Blue Hour -- a blog entry about revisions, and a link to the final score and demo recording (for those who hide links from their updates): http://ostimusic.com/blog/hymn-to-a-blue-hour-demo/

     That simple post yielded 8 likes, 15 responses and lord knows how many visits to that blog that day.  Consider that, then actually read it.  It's quite enjoyable, and used with permission.  (Although, since I got permission on Facebook, it might not actually count.)  It's an awesome, expert use of Facebook as a Social-Professional medium.  My favorite response is, "No, keep it hardcore."  If I had a nickel for every time THAT was said to me... ANYWAYS, it might be a sign of the times, or it might just be super interesting to me because I'm easy to please and a product of ID-10-T a lot, or it might not be interesting at all, but that particular sentence is used in league with sentences like, "Excellent idea as long as the music isn't compromised."  When you can take advice that utilizes the word "hardcore," and manage not to "compromise" any music, and still get a pretty damn good result, it means that The Facebook is either the greatest invention ever, or the worst.  Don't even get me started on YouTube.

     As I write this, I have a tab open to my Facebook homepage, which I check every three minutes or so.  Nothing Earth-shattering, important, or even interesting has happened.  I've commented on a couple of things, and I've been reminded of a couple of birthdays that I already knew about, but beyond that... it's just sort of there.

     
     One of the best parts of my Facebook news feed is my friend Nicky D.  He can only be described as "overly angry" and "totally inappropriate."  In person, this is an issue.  On Facebook, it's fucking hilarious.  There's a line on Facebook, and Nicky D doesn't seem to mind crossing it.  I tried crossing it one time.  My friend Dave and I once applied and interviewed for the same job within 24 hours of each other.  I received a text that said, "Leave your vagina in the car, and go in there swingin that big dick."  I thought it was good advice, albeit inappropriately phrased, so I posted it on my friend Dave's wall.  He promptly deleted it.

     
     And this is what confuses me.  There are people who use Facebook for real things, like ACTUAL networking, event planning, talking to people they otherwise would be unable, or following their favorite artists or celebrities.  And other people use it to tell the whole world about their complicated relationship, or to post silly links to two girls eating shit out of a solo cup, or to whine about how unfair it is that they have to go to class every day.  There seems to be no in between; Facebook is either completely useful, or completely useless.  Those of us caught in the in-between sort of go unnoticed.

     
     It sucks that what got me thinking about this was my mother asking her only son who he was when he was trying to locate his only sister.  Granted, it also sucks that I don't appear to have ANY idea what I'm talking about, but that's beside the point.

     
     Chuck Klosterman refuses to get a Twitter.  I don't think I'm too far off.

Like Lumbering Giants in a Shameful Parade

Why "YOU ROCK!" May Never Actually Be True

"Music is spiritual; the music business is not." - Claudio Monteverdi

     On a hot, dry night in June, amidst a fog of hookah smoke and booze, a group of friends burst into song.  Led by the seemingly omnipresent Ricardus, and accompanied by an unknown combination of fake guitar and synthesized drums, echoes of the words "Say it ain't soooooooo..." fill the air. Though the sounds are artificial, the feelings that they elicit are not.  
     No one is silent.  
     No one is moving.  
     No one is judging.

     No one is sober, but that's beside the point.  Or maybe it is the point.

     What began as an attempt of four guys trying to watch Game 7 of the NBA Finals has turned into an excuse to play pong, an alcohol-induced, smoke-filled, sweaty sausagefest, a rager of epic proportions.  The few that are not playing pong are in the living room, and the sounds of Rock Band never cease.  The hoses and the controllers continue to exchange hands, and all are content.

      "Oh, I love this song!  I love Weezer!" Rich exclaims, and a cloud of smoke echoes its agreement.  In a few short seconds, the entire room will be yelling the chorus at the top of their lungs.  Well, almost the whole room.  The one girl and the one guy who doesn't know the lyrics sit on opposite couches, little half smiles on their faces.  Their eyes never lock, that might be awkward, but the feeling remains.  Right now, everyone, the four guys at the pong table, the three guys playing instruments, the one guy who can't put his phone down, and the one chick who wishes she was somewhere else, right now, we all feel like rock stars. 

    
     The games Guitar Hero and Rock Band are very cleverly named; when one plays them, they feel like a guitar hero, they feel like they're in a rock band.  What the makers of these games know, and what the players will never fully realize, is that playing GH/RB has nothing to do with making music.

     I once tried to explain to my roommate how I'm "so good" at playing "those triplet things."  The first thing I explained was that they weren't triplets, they were an off-beat, two-sixteenth/one-eighth combination.  He had no idea what I was talking about.  "The lines," I said, "represent the beats.  You can tell the way that they are spaced that they're not triplets.  Plus the sixteenths aren't on the beat."  
     
     "What the Christ are you talking about?" he asked.   Five (long) years of studying music, is the only answer that I have.
      
     You see, I'm a musician.  Well, I can claim to be; I have a diploma that says so.  I COULD claim to be "pretty decent" at Guitar Hero,  but there are many out there who are far better out there than I am.  The problem is that I attempt, at every opportunity, to make a correlation between the two.  The larger problem is that there is no correlation.

     No, I don't play guitar, but I have taught my share of guitar classes/lessons.  No, I don't play bass, but I know my way around a cello.  No, I don't play drums, but I can (almost) do a paradiddle.  No, I don't sing, and no, I won't ever harmonize as well as Blood does.  None of these things take away from the fact that I can pretend to strum and hold down three fingers, or slam on an "electronic drum set," or sing along to a series of relative pitches in such away that Rock Band or Guitar Hero thinks that I know what I'm doing. 

     Should I ever make this claim to a serious Guitar Hero player, they will inevitably ask me how many times I've beaten "Through the Fire and the Flames,"and I will be forced to answer that I have never beaten it, and they will scoff in their musical superiority; they will ask what instruments I play, and I will say "All of them."  I will ask what they play, and they will say, "I don't play anything."  

     The irony of this situation is not lost on me.

     I'm not saying that all good Guitar Hero players end up being terrible musicians.  I know a guy named Andy who, one day, picked up an out of tune Banjo, and played the Dueling Banjos song from Deliverance (both parts) and maintained the correct key.  HE TRANSPOSED DUELING BANJOS BASED ON HOW THE BANJO WAS TUNED.  Then, we went home, and he absolutely obliterated "Cowboys From Hell" on Guitar Hero.  I stared in awe, and he just shrugged.  "That was fun."  Andy is also the bass player of the best Rock band you've never heard of, and sings for a bluegrass group.  He shouldn't really count, but I like telling this story.  Also, I think Andy just understands the ultimate purpose of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero: sometimes, it's not about proving you're a great musician, sometimes it's about having fun.  That's probably the only thing Rock Band and Music have in common: sometimes, they are just fun.

     Sometimes they're not.
   
     Three or four days before I began preparing for my senior recital, a girl I had dated for a (short) while, and with whom I was (for reasons unknown) madly in love, broke up with me for no reason.  This resulted in me opening my recital with a piece of music that can really only be described as "angry."  I played that fucking sonata three hours a day, seven days a week, for 5 months, but it was good to take my anger out on something non-tangible.  At the end of the day, though, I still needed something to get my mind off of her.  It usually ended up being Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, usually a mix between "La Grange," "3's & 7's," and "Cliffs of Dover."  

     But an odd thing started to happen.  I started to get better.  At both.  I came within one note of an FC of "3's & 7's," and the hardest lick of my recital (measure 9 of Scaramouche) suddenly became easier.  Something was becoming clear: while there is (definitely) no music involved in GH/RB, there is (certainly) technique.  Because of Guitar Hero, there is very little that I can do on the saxophone that involves the five fingers of my left hand.  Where music becomes involved is where it starts to get hairy.

      The only things musical about Rock Band or Guitar Hero the whammy bar on guitar, and the drum fills on drums.  Those are the only two things left up to the player.  Everything is not only pre-decided on, but deemed "wrong" if you play it incorrectly.  Hell, you lose points if you over-strum, playing extra notes.  I once received extra points - for my whole band, not just for me - for playing extra notes in a saxophone solo.  The magic of music is that every performance is different, no matter how hard you try to replicate something.  The magic of Guitar Hero or Rock Band is that it is exactly the same thing every time.  

     In Guitar Hero, if you want something different, you have to play a different song.  In music, if you want something different, you just do it differently.  In Rock Band, if you do something wrong, the game will tell you.  In music, if you do something wrong, it's probably still right.

     I once told a student of mine that the best thing about music is that, once you play a note, you don't have to worry about it anymore; once someone hears it, you can't go back and change it, it's out of your hands.  On the contrary, if you miss a note in Rock Band, all you have to do is hit start, down strum twice, hit the green button, upstrum once, hit green again, and wait for the song to start over.  Ask anyone who's played "Welcome Home" with me.  

     No matter how hard Harmonix tries, Guitar Hero and Rock Band will never be more than just video games, with an infinite number of re-do's.  Anyone who expects to get any music out of it is out of their dome.  But, no matter how hard someone like me tries, no amount of studying classical music makes me a rock and roll star.  Anyone who stands on a stage and plays Bozza's Divertissiment and feels like Slash is probably a ritard.


       
     I played 98% correct notes in "Welcome Home" not too long ago, the highest percentage of correct notes I've ever played for that song.  A year prior, I played about 96% correct notes in my senior recital.  Of which do you think I'm more proud?  If you guessed my recital, you guess absolutely correctly.  Granted, there were far more notes in my recital than in "Welcome Home," and when I played that song, and when I played that many right notes, I felt like a God damn rockstar, and I liked it.  

     Also, I was completely trashed.  But that's not the point.  Or maybe it is. 

Ignorance is Bliss Until They Take Your Bliss Away...

Learning it the Hard Way

"Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge." - Richard Wagner

     311 has been my favorite band since before I saw a boob for the first time.  Now, I know that this may come off as a surprise, but that was a long time ago.  I think I was 9 the first time I heard 311 on MTV (15 when I saw a boob, but whatevs.)  9 or 10, I don't remember.  I know it was hot as balls outside, and it was a Monday.  Why I remember that it was a Monday is beyond me, I just know that it was.  It was probably 2 or 3 in the afternoon (given that we were inside watching MTV and not outside doing some senseless, boring chore) and it may have been raining, but I doubt it. They were undoubtedly preceded (or followed by) either "Doin' It" by L.L. Cool J, or "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees. 

      The song was "Down," and it ruined my life.

      When you're that age (you know, before titties,) everything new only ever seems "awesome."  This song - rather, the video - at the time, was awesome.  Now, there is nothing that is really cool about this video (five dudes dancing around and a fat guy floating) and there is nothing fantastic about the song.  I just knew that I didn't want it to end, and when it did, I eagerly awaited the next time it would be on.  If only Ozzie knew.

      I ended up watching a lot of MTV that summer.  Fortunately, MTV still played a lot of music back then, but unfortunately, they still played a lot of bad music.  It took a while before I was able to see it again.  Actually, it took so long that "Don't Stay Home" had a video, and I immediately liked it better than "Down."  Not because it's necessarily better (which it is) but because it was different.  I didn't know it yet - and I still don't, to an extent - but deciding that "Don't Stay Home" is better than "Down" would, on one hand, seem like an easy decision.  On the other hand, it pretty much puts into perspective everything we do in life.

      I spent all summer waiting to hear one song, and when I finally heard a different one (albeit by the same artist), I completely forgot about the former, and immediately sought after the latter.  I learned the hard way that a) "Down" is a terrible song, and b) that sometimes it takes finding something better to realize that what you have is not really that great.  I failed in hearing "Down" a hundred thousand times that summer (which was my goal,) but I was successful in obtaining an album I would listen to two hundred thousand times (no easy feat), and because of a song I liked merely because it was not the same shit as everything else I was listening to.  And that band has been my unwavering favorite since.  Success out of failure, amirite?

     The crux of my conundrum is that, now when I listen to 311, I am listening to the same old shit.  (This is not to say that in 1995, 311 was so far ahead of their time that when music caught up they would seem obsolete, because this is clearly not the case.  Maybe in 1989 when they all had hair and REM was still popular, but not in the mid-90's.)  It's not been a long time, but music has changed since then, I have changed since then, and 311 still pretty much sucks.  I'm learning the hard way that I need to find a better band to know everything about.

      No matter hard I try (or don't try), I don't think anyone will replace 311 as my favorite band.  This is not altogether a bad thing, I guess.  One day, a bunch of years down the road, my kids will ask what kind of music I like, and when I tell them, they will have no idea what I'm talking about.  I'm sure of it, 311 is not timeless, and their time will one day end.  The ebb and flow of my musical tastes strongly correlate with the ebb and flow of my life.

      Right now, The Offspring's "Conspiracy of One" is blasting from my computer speakers, and I mean blasting.  I can say without hesitation that, though I may enjoy this music (emphasis on may), I cannot fathom the Offspring ever becoming my favorite band.  This is the problem: every band I ever listen to gets compared to 311.  And because I listened to 311 for so long, no one ever comes close.  Even if I actively want a band to be more enjoyable to me, they still come up short.

      I went through all the stages.  Before I discovered 311 ("Three Hundred and Eleven," as I called them for about two weeks) Nirvana was my favorite band, on account of the fact that I knew them by name and knew that one song. I started listening to Pink Floyd in my freshman year of college, but that seems like sort of a waste of time, having never watched The Wall while baked out of my mind.  This was followed by my short stint as the world's "Worst Led Zeppelin Fan."  You can't be a Zeppelin fan if the best part of "Stairway" is not the fact that "Misty Mountain Hop" comes on right after it.  I delved into Metallica for some (retarded) reason, and actually liked St. Anger; one can only guess how long that lasted.  When I became an alcoholic, I started listening to Rage, because that's what Luke always listened to.  That dude's voice always drives me crazy, though.  When I finally grew up and found out that the dudes in Muse aren't freaks, (thanks, Guitar Hero 3 for having Lars Umulet as the default avatar for "Knights of Cydonia,") I started listening to them.  I still like them a lot, but The Resistance was quite the letdown.  Nowadays it's Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures in a neck-in-neck tie with each other.

     If there was a moral to this story, I'd say it right here.  If I had a point, I'd say it plain.

     Everyone goes through stages in their life, and even something as arbitrary as musical taste is always something we look back on, sometimes fondly, other times not so much.  No matter how hard I try, even if I find a better band, 311 will always be my favorite band.  Or, at least, that's the way I will remember this stage of my life in the future.  I've seen a lot of boobs since that first time (and they've all been fantastic, thank you, ladies.)  Some I remember more fondly than others, and some have been difficult to get over.  They all have a place in my past, and, somehow, they will all be worth it in the future.

     I don''t know what the future holds, but I do know that it's going to be difficult to move on from 311, no matter how easy they might make it for me. 

It's All the Same, No Matter Where You Are

What Makes Music Good, part 3

"If a thing is worth doing at all, 
it is worth doing badly." 
Gustav Holst

     

     Studying music has ruined popular music for me.  

     I realize that this is a horribly pretentious thing to say to anyone who has not studied music, but I stand by the sentiment.  And, to be perfectly fair (and honest,) studying music has ruined all music for me, to an extent.       

     HTT, Here's The Thing:  I can write an eight page paper on a book I've never read (Frankenstein) while listening to the London Symphony Orchestra play The Planets, get an A on that biotch, and not think anything of it.  That's just how I roll.  Passive listening is easy, and everyone does it, no matter how hard they try not to.  But, if I sit down and actively listen to, say, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, two things happen: a) I don't get shit done for a week, because b) I'm depressed for a week.  I know why this happens to me, and I know why it happens to three or four other people, and I know why this will not happen to you if you do happen to have clicked on the link above.  

     What will happen is this: you will click it, it will open a new tab in your Firefox (or your Internet Explorer will open, causing your computer to crash, or your Safari will open up on your Mac, and you will still be a douchebag,) and you will listen as you read, just as I am listening as I write.  You will not listen to it, hearing every note, played by every instrument.  You will not see the incredible motions of Mravinsky's conducting, nor will you see the epic faces he makes.  You will not know when it is over, because you will have stopped listening long before the piece has come to any sort of climax. 

     Let me be clear about one thing, first.  You don't have to pretend, it's OK.  I sort of tricked you.  There are only three people on the face of the earth who know more about this Symphony than me, and one of them wrote it.  I have written a dozen (completely different) papers on it, I have written a conducting map to it, and I've conducted it into a mirror more times than you probably would like for me to admit. I don't need to actively listen to this piece to attain the affect it has on me, it just happens.  But it happens from years and years, and several thousand listens, where all I have done is listen.  That is more than I can say for any other piece of music ever written.  To say I have actively listened to every 311 song thousands of time is completely fathomable, while utterly preposterous and comical, to say the least.  

     But I could if I wanted to, and this is the reason studying music has made enjoying (most) popular music for me virtually impossible.  
     
     It's difficult to explain to someone who has never really listened to a song before.  So that's what we're going to do.  We're going to listen to a song, and I'm going to break it down for you, and I'm going to list all of the reasons it's awesome.

     Ok, ready?  Here we go.  


     "Gunman," by Them Crooked Vultures (Them Crooked Vultures.)

     0:00 - 0:03: Very interesting choice of intro, if you ask me.  It's very quick.
     0:03 - 0:10: This riff is badass.  And it's playing a trick on your ears.  It sounds like continuous guitar, but it's not, half of it is bass.  It's very deceptive.  Also, does Dave Grohl have three feet?
     0:11 - 0:11:  The tag at the end of the riff is sweet.  Stop-time is almost always awesome, but it's always better when it's over before you realize that it actually happened.
     0:12 - 0:54:  First verse.  The lyrics aren't really about anything, which is fine.  The fact that the vocal line is different from the riff - which continues without losing any intensity - makes me happy.  There's also lots of space between each line of lyrics, allowing the riff to come through to the front quite often.  Josh changes the quality of his voice towards the end, and it's awesome.  The turn-arounds (every 4 bars) done on the drums are very simple, but they add so much to the sound of the verse.
     0:54 - 1:17:  Key change and chorus.  This is in a different key, but it's a relative key, which is why you can't really tell.  (It might even just be a tonicization of the dominant, which would make it twice as difficult to notice, and ten times as awesome.)  The riff goes away, and the accompaniment becomes much more calm and broad, but the vocal line becomes more intense without getting any faster.  The drums turn into a bare-bones beat, and something tells me it's so Dave's arms don't fall off.  It's not an altogether interesting chorus, and it fits with the song, but it's still different.  And not in a bad way.
     0:17 - 1:20:  Return of the riff.  The song immediately goes back to its original intensity, and no one is any the wiser that it has changed (there's more of it in the bass.)  Is that a siren in the background?
     1:21 - 1:22:  THAT is a strange tag to the riff.  It's almost a halfway mix between the original intro and the stop time tag.  (I've tried to write out this rhythm a thousand times.  Nothing.  No idea.)  The band is, at this point, doing equal parts keeping the listener on their toes and fucking with you.
     1:22 - 1:39:  Guitar solo.  No, it wasn't a siren, it was the start of the guitar solo, not at all where you expect it to be, and not evident enough that you actually hear that it has started.  It's also not too long, not too short.  It's not one of Josh's best, but he's clearly done worse.  It fits really well both rhythmically and melodically with the riff.  
     1:39 - 1:56:  Verse 2.  Yes, the guitar solo continues, but in more of an accompanying manner.  With that exception, this verse is almost identical to the first one.
     1:57 - 2:22:  Verse 2B.  The riff and pulse stay exactly the same, but Josh changes it up by singing in a different way, and the second half of the guitar solo makes a reappearance.  The turn-arounds on the drums here are different, too, and the tag that signals the key change again is different from everything we've heard, but similar enough that you don't notice.
     2:23 - 2:56:  Chorus.  Identical to the first one, but Josh seems to be hitting those guitar impacts a little bit harder, no?  The turn-arounds (no, I can't get enough of these) are different too, yes?  Yes, they are.  They add a lot of intensity to the chorus that was not previously present.  This chorus seems to building to something...
     2:56 - 3:05:  Drum break.  Nothing special here.   
     3:05 - 3:11:  Josh enters, singing.  The style and lyrics are completely different.
     3:12 - 3:13:  This is exactly the same as the beginning of the song, but you still get the feeling it's not the same.
     3:14 - 3:21:  Verse 3.  Same music, different lyrics.
     3:21 - 3:38:  Verse 3A.  Similar to verse 2A, but different from it and any previous verses.  It's a lot more intense, Josh is almost yelling.  The riff changes a bit, too.  It's now almost completely done by the bass, with very little guitar being heard.
     3:38 - 3:46:  Verse 3B.  Completely different.  Josh and the guitar (Josh and himself?) are doing a call-and-response type of thing, and it's very interesting.  It's almost a tag, but the tonality definitely lends itself to leading somewhere.  
     3:46 - 4:32:  Chorus.  Same vocal line, different lyrics.  The guitar plays a much more integral part this time around, but you can hardly notice it.  Josh takes the vocal line up instead of down at the end, and we all know how I feel about that.  
     4:32 - 4:35:  Return of the riff.  Almost.  It sounds like it's going back to the riff, then as soon as you recognize it, it does that weird-ass tag, and then does the stop time.  THE TWO OF THEM TOGETHER = AWESOME.
     4:36 - 4:40:  Again.
     4:40 - end.   It sounds like it's going to do it again, then it just stops.  It sounds like it's an abrupt ending, but it is, in fact, the exact rhythmic opposite of how the song started.


     That was fun.  And I bet you thought you were listening to the same Verse-Chorus-Verse-Solo-Verse-Chorus song you hear every day on the radio, twice on Tuesdays.  
     
     Music like this is what makes music interesting.  The lack of it is what makes popular music so boring.

These Are The Good Old Days, I Don't Care What They Have To Say

A Song-by-song Review of 311's Uplifter.

     
     I know this is not "Why I'm an Idiot" fart 7 or whatever, but I don't care.  That post is coming, and this one needs to be done.  Today is the one-year anniversary of the release of Uplifter and in three posts-time (roughly a month, at my rate,) this post will most (likely) be remembered as "retarded," and "non-canon.*")  Information found in previous posts do still apply, however.  Deal with it.

     
     ANYWAY, this is a review of 311's NINTH studio album, Uplifter, (technically) released June 2, 2009.  I will review (sometimes at length, sometimes with one or two words) each track, followed by a short overall analysis.  This is my first attempt ever at something like this, so just bear with me.  Yes, it is playing right now, thank you for asking.  Also, I had an extra week, as it leaked the last week of May before release, and I downloaded the shit out of it.  Obv.

Here we go.

     Hey You.  Ok, so in February or so, 311 released this video, and it made me lol.  It also got me mildly excited for this song.  Then the album came out, and this song opens it.  Overall, it's catchy.  The riff is really neat, but it's lifted (no pun intended - Ed.) straight out of "Don't Tread On Me," (Don't Tread on Me.)  The first thing I notice about this song is that Chad's drums sound terrible, and that if Nick keeps singing about how great everything is, I might throw up.  There are some nice moments here, and the song is indeed quite catchy (and then Nick shouts "MUSIC!" at the tail end of it, and I skip to "It's Alright,")  and the stop-time during the last chorus is awesome.  I probably may not have opened the album with this track, but I guess it makes a decent single.

      It's Alright.  Chris gave me the best review of this song a while back: "Yeah, there is nothing tangibly good about this song."  Done.  I didn't get a chance to mention this previously, but the vocal line for the chorus is in the same rhythm as the guitars.  WTF is that?  Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. 

     Mix It Up.  This song starts out promising, sounding like it could fit on Transistor, then Nick starts singing... and never really stops.  He's really just saying the same shit over and over and over.  Kinda reminds me of my dad.  The vocal line of the chorus is similarly boring as above (starting to notice a trend here) and the song never really climaxes the way it totes could.  

    Golden Sunlight.  I.  Love.  This.  Song.  I really can only describe it as "epic," and "awesome."  The hook is gentle, as is Nick's singing, and though the song is CLEARLY directed at Nick's wife and his soon-to-be daughter, these lyrics seem legit, and not... the same old shit.  The heavy guitars that accompany the chorus make this a pretty distinctly old-school 311 song, and whatever they did to the drum kit for this song they should have kept.  When chorus 2 makes an appearance, it almost always gives me chills, as well as SA's epic breakdown in the bridge, which clearly was taken from what probably would have been a terrible song.  I am going to use this in a marching band show as my ballad.  Book it.  Great song.

     India Ink.  This is another song that got myself and fellow BBers excited.  The riff is familiarly 311, yet unique in it's own right.  Then Nick fucks it up by singing again (another trend?)  The change in the riff is cool, perhaps I would have capitalized by changing the verse a little bit, but whatevs.  The chorus defines the word "lame," and just when you are about to give up hope... is that... a sitar?  IT IS A SITAR.  "Oh, so that's why it's called 'India Ink.'"  The bridge is OK, but IT'S STILL THE SAME LYRICS.  Then it ends, and it doesn't matter.

    Daisy Cutter.  I definitely feel like I should like this song more, I don't really know why I don't.  It has an interesting opening, and the drum entrance is my second favorite musical moment of the whole album.  I guess this song just falls into the category of, "Once You've Heard the First Verse and First Chorus, You've Heard the Whole Song."  Because it's true.  And the bridge is lame.  Yeah, now I remember. 

       
   Too Much Too Fast.  Well, they got this one half right, I guess.  This song is not too fast, but it is most definitely too much.  SA does some good singing, but my guess is that Nick wrote the lyrics.  FML. 

      Never Ending Summer.  This is the song I would have opened the album with, and indeed, 311 opened every show of their summer tour with this song.  I guess?  It's a neat little anthem.  The song is totally not even worth it until miT's EPIC guitar solo during the bridge.  So good, it's a screamer unlike anything he's done in a while (Thanks, Bob Rock.)  

      Two Drops in the Ocean.  There's really no need for you to listen to this song.  

      Something Out Of Nothing.  The intro is familiar ("Freeze Time," from Soundsystem) and the riff is decidedly badass, as is SA's rapping on this song.  And, if you can hear the chorus without listening to it, it's pretty neat.  The lyrics to the chorus were CLEARLY written by Nick (please stop) but this time around it's not enough to ruin the song.  A short solo by Tim saves it.  His second solo (which follows the second verse and chorus) saves it further, and is far superior to the first one.  This song would be the nuts on Guitar Hero.  Not bad.

      Jackpot.  This riff is so weird that it's awesome.  (Woo!)  This song was obviously written to be played live.  Nick is rapping again, and not about his wife, which makes me happy.  This is overall a good song, but the chorus is borderline super-lame.  There is a lot to this song that is really really good, but the chorus comes close to ruining it all.  Again, if you can hear the chorus and not listen to it, this is a great song; there are a lot a lot of distinct 311 things in here, and it's exciting to hear that they're still capable of maturing, but still writing an old-school track.

       
    My Heart Sings.  We know, Nick.  Go solo, so I don't have to listen to it.  

  

      I Like the Way (Deluxe Edition Bonus Track).  The lyrics to this song are actually pretty fun to sing.  I don't know why this is a bonus track, it fits right in with the album: cool instrumental, lame chorus lyrics, a bridge that's just not enough... not enough to call it great, but good enough that you wouldn't call it bad.

      Get Down (Deluxe Edition Bonus Track).  Finally, a song with some depth.  You can't listen to this song and not know why it's a bonus track: it's good.  Truth be told, the first time I heard this song, about 20 seconds in, I was like, "Yeah, I don't like this song," AND SKIPPED IT.  Then, next listen through (roughly an hour later,) I let it play through, and found out that IT FUCKING ROCKS.  This song would fit on ANY of 311's first 4 albums, most likely Transistor.  The progression of the song is great, and the message isn't the same shit from the rest of the album.  And, thank God, they FINALLY made good use out of the bridge. 

      How Long Has It Been (iTunes Album Pre-Order Bonus Track).  Not long enough.  This song is not good.

    Sun Come Through (Amazon.com Bonus Track).  People give this song a hard time, but it is very clearly the best song on the album.   Everything about this song is effing awesome.  I'll just let you listen to it.  It's a great step in a great direction, and I hope much of what 311 still has to offer is in said direction.

     OVERALL ANALYSIS.  I listen to this album a lot, but I don't really know why.   

      

*The only exception being that I've abandoned the Songs in Italics and "Albums in Quotations," because I'm an idiot.  Go ahead and reverse that.  Kthx.